Abstract: Since the early 1980s and the arrival of the first Japanese auto assembly transplants, industry executives, union officials, journalists, and researchers across the ideological spectrum have argued the merits of Japanese manufacturing and management practices, their potential contribution to U.S. competitiveness, and whether or not such practices are good or bad for workers. Sociologist Terry Besser has written a detailed case study of Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky plant which manufactures the best-selling Camry. Neither scathing nor laudatory, the book offers a middle-ground assessment of Toyota's system of production and employee relations. Besser attempts to develop a theory (more a conceptualization) which explains "how Toyota is recreating its form of management and team culture in its Georgetown plant" (p. 2). For data she employs a variety of company publications, local and national newspaper reports, secondary sources related to Toyota and Japanese management practices, personal observations as an invited guest to company functions, and 36 in-depth interviews with a cross-section of employees. Excluding the voices of workers has been a major shortcoming of industrial sociology in recent years. The first three chapters provide a foundation for the case study. The author compares and contrasts Western and Japanese management practices. She then discusses the growing scholarship on how the internal organizational features of Japanese firms contribute to company success. First, Ronald Dore's "welfare corporatism" highlights employee empowerment, job security, job enrichment, and consequent employee commitment and organizational goal achievement. Second, Parker and Slaughter's "Toyotist" school focuses on "management by stress" and worker exploitation. Third, an engineering-oriented group stresses innovative production technology, attention to detail, and continuous improvement. Finally, a hybrid system, called "lean production," combines innovations in production techniques with progressive human resources practices. From these academic debates, Besser turns her attention to Toyota of Japan. Still familycontrolled since its inception in 1937, the company is the fifth largest industrial company and the third largest auto producer in the world. Georgetown, Kentucky, about 15 miles from Lexington, is the site of Toyota Motor Manufacturing (TMM) which began producing Camry's in 1988. TMM, like other transplants, is nonunion and employs a young, well-educated, and inexperienced work force drawn largely from Kentucky. Although the president of TMM is Japanese, the presence of the Japanese has declined significantly since the plant opened. Still, each department maintains a Japanese coordinator and plantwide there is a small coterie of Japanese trainers. TMM operates with a flat hierarchy where 67 percent of plant personnel are line workers, 14 percent are team leaders, 4 percent are group leaders, and only 14 percent perform administrative duties. Workdays are controlled by a rigid schedule: "[f]rom 6:30 (a.m.) until the break most team members repeat the same job approximately every sixty seconds .... The Toyota goal is constant work (100 percent) with no breathers during the two hours and fifteen minutes between breaks" (p. 40). The pace and intensity of work is no different for managers and specialists. And unlike typical American management practices, TMM's white-collar personnel do not get any additional benefits or perquisites under its egalitarian culture.
