Abstract
Although an adequate stock of trees that were planted after the WWII are available for harvesting in Japan, these trees are being currently underutilized, causing some forest management problems. This underutilization of domestic timber resources is partially explained by the low productivity in logging processes. This study attempts to clarify the impact of loggers. network, which is composed of one logger and several forest owners, on forest management in Japan. We conducted surveys at Senboku city of Akita prefecture wherein we interviewed six loggers and their business contacts. We discussed the impact of their networking system and the means to establish a favorable network that will resolve the forest management problem.
Our results indicated that loggers who adopt the following strategies tend to achieve higher productivity than other loggers: (a) entering into one-shot contracts with the forest owners and thus, they do not expect to continue future transactions (so called weak-tie) and (b) those with open networks, where their clients do not know each other. On the basis of the above results and Okura (2006), we suggest that there are at least two factors that would influence the establishment of a favorable network to resolve the forest management problem: (a) how high the uncertainty might be for the forest owners where the uncertainty lies, (b) the type of performance that the loggers want to achieve.
