創発的グローバル戦略

オーストラリア自動車産業の事例から

抄録

This article describes recent developments of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Australia (TMCA), re-interpreting its patterns of competitive activities as an emergent global strategy. By emergent global strategy, the author means a pattern of strategic activities that does not necessarily follow a manufacturer's ex-ante “grand design” for globalization. TMCA has indeed strengthened its own competitive capabilities, and expanded a multi-layer international network of resource-knowledge transfers among Toyota's overseas and domestic facilities in recent years. However, such capabilities and networks were created through the company's continuous efforts to adapt its manufacturing systems to the rapidly changing market, competition, and government policies in Australia. Specifically, Australia's policy change from import substitution (i. e., protection of local production) to trade liberalization caused a crisis for the local car producers, including TMCA, as competition against imports intensified. TMCA chose a survival strategy through further investment on local production facilities, manufacturing capability-building, and creation of an international logistics network, while other local car makers tended to either divesting or minimizing local production investment in Australia. As a result of its efforts to sustain local operations, TMCA increased its importance as a part of Toyota's overall globalization strategy. Through this empirical analysis, this article emphasizes that a manufacturing firm's globalization strategy does not always have to be based on a deliberate top-down planning-it can also be a result of the path-dependent process of system emergence, or a firm's struggle for survival. In other words, a firm's global strategy can be, not only deliberate, but also emergent.