Article ID: 0190416a
This paper defines a “manufacturing site” in a broad sense, or a “monozukuri genba” in Japanese, as a place in which value-added to is flowing, including, firms' factories, development centers, shops, service facilities and so on、and explores the possibility of establishing “genba history,” or historical analysis of each individual site's birth, growth, sustainment, decline and extinction. First, we analyze basic characteristics of genba history as an academic approach, including its time and space limitation, as well as multifaceted, emergent, and interdisciplinary natures. Next, based on our understanding that genba may have a different system of objectives from that of capitalistic profit-maximizing firms, we pay special attentions to the genba-oriented firms in Japan during the post-Cold-War period (e.g., production subsidiaries or small and medium size enterprises), many of which made continuous efforts to drastically improve productivities and generate effective demands for their own survival and stable employment——a very different behavioral pattern from that of capitalistic multinational firms which tended to try to close down high-cost domestic factories and move its production capacity to low-wage countries. This historical fact implies that it may be meaningful for us to strengthen our efforts for historical analyses on genba's struggles for survival during the post-Cold-War period when this period is gradually coming to an end in the 2010s. We also discuss behavioral patterns of the genba regarding its multifacetedness, organizational dependence/independence, capability-building and demand creation. Finally, we show some short case histories of genba-oriented firms in Japan, including both Cold-war and post-Cold-War periods.
