Nissan U.K.: A worker's paradox?

Abstract

Europe's lean manufacturing model muy be u benchmark for its compefitors, but it should not be one in its treatment of employees, m he major Japanese 1 automobile companies have now established a successful beachhead in Europe, located in the United Kingdom. As they have in North America, these Japanese transplants are exemplifying high levels of technology transfer, combined with learning and adaptation that results in globally competitive new hybrid manueacturing organizations. These new organizations combine, in highly creative ways, subsystems of the Fordist and lean systems, with diverse national and European innovations. In many ways, the Japanese lean system unfroze the traditional Fordist manufacturing paradigm, resulting in not one dominant lean system but mzlny creative and continuously evolving hybrid spinoffs as diverse as the geographic sources from which they emerge. Nissan Motor Manufacturing (IJK) Limited, or NMUK, is one exemplar of these emerging new hybrid systems, demonstrating high levels of organizational learning and adaptation as well as sociotechnical problems and paradoxes. Europe’s automobile industry in the early 1990s was no better prepared for the Japanese transplants than was Detroit‘s Big Three in the early 1980s. However. because of the Japanese learning experience with their transplants’ lean system in North America, they are more readily adapting and developing new Japanese-European hybrids, which are already setting new quality and productivity standards. Still, the quality of work life shows little improvement. As is now widely recognized, the term “lean production system” was coined by the MIT study team in their landmark book, 73eM~~hirze 7’bat Changed 72~ World (1990). A more recent study by Martin Kenney and Richard Florida (1993) documents the remarkable breadth of the Japanese lean system’s transfer and adaptation within North America and its major role in the continuing global industrial diffusion and transformation. Unlike the MIT study, however, Kenney and Florida provide a more balanced view of both the system’s strengths as an innovative, mediated organization and the considerable social and technical tensions and contradictions experienced by the North American transplants. Like the American research findings, the early studies of the lean system hybrids developing in the U.K. tend to be highly divergent in many of their findings. In his 1987 book me Road to Nissan. Peter Wickens, NMUK’s director of personnel and information systems, presents an understandably corporate view of the company’s practices. Conversely, Garrdhan and Stewart (1992) focus on NMUK’s less favorable labor and community relations practices and experiences. The purpose of this article is to provide a more balanced analysis of the emergence of the Japanese lean system as a hybrid in the United Kingdom along with the paradoxes it raises. We will analyze the case of Nissan in the 1J.K. as an example of technology transfer and organizational adaptation and learning, as well as the comparative stakeholder outcomes.