The aim of this paper is to clarify the critical points at issue of "Normative Management". The concept "Normative Management" is advocated by Prof. Dr. Knut Bleicher (University St. Gallen). This concept, it is attempted to systematize the functions of corporate executives ("Unternehmungsfuhrung" in Germany). "Normative Management" is placed at the highest level in Bleicher's concept of "Integrated Management" and its primary task is to establish the justification for existence of the corporation to bring its development to fruition. "Normative Management" is composed of four factors, namely Corporate Philosophy (Unternehmungsphilosophie), Business Policy (Unternehmungspolitik), Decision-Making and Supervising Structure (Unternehmungsverfassung), and Corporate Culture (Unternehmungskultur). Corporate Philosophy explains the meaning for existence of the corporation in the society and determines the course of development of the corporation. Business Policy is placed on Corporate Philosophy, and its core issue is to set missions as goals that guide effective use of resources and potentials of the corporation. When setting such missions, it is important to take account of economic and social aspects. The social aspects include the relationship between a corporation and its stakeholders, and ecological problems etc. Decision-Making and Supervising Structure is a formal rule system for executing Business Policy. For example, it regulates top management organization, the style of alliance between other corporation, and management-holding structure. Lastly, Corporate Culture is to direct behavioral assumptions of members for corporate development. Compared with "Unternehmungsverfassung" as a formal rule system, "Unternehmungskultur" acts as an informal rule system (an unwritten rule). In a complex and dynamic environment, corporate executives must realize corporate development through managing appropriately these four factors. This issue strongly relates to the current problems of "Corporate Governance", "Corporate Social Responsibility", and "Business Ethics". This paper suggests that "Normative Management" provides useful approach to cope with these issues.

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This study addressed cooperation upon the ethical code among professionals in professional organization. Professionals were collections of individuals who came together to draw on common resources and support services but otherwise wanted to be left alone. However, the need for cooperation arose from the market place, and also the cooperation had to be upon the ethical code. In order to resolve it, the theoretical foundation was drawn from the social capital theory to apply for the professional organization research. Then, "top management's model behavior," "compact office environment," "ethical climate (the law & professional code)," and "fair appraisal practice" were expected to be the determinants of interpersonal "trust" and "cooperation" among the professionals. As the results, using data collected from 152 consultants of the 8 management consulting firms in Japan, (1) the multiple regression analysis supported that "top management's model behavior," "compact office environment," "ethical climate (the law & professional code)," "fair appraisal practice," and "trust" were the determinants of "cooperation" among the consultants. Also, (2) SEM (structural equation modeling) revealed that "top management's model behavior" was significantly related to "ethical climate (the law & professional code)." Then, "ethical climate (the law & professional code)" and "compact office environment" were significantly related to the extent of cognition of "fair appraisal practice," which in turn had a significant effect on interpersonal "trust" and "cooperation" among the consultants.

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Core competence has been proposed by C. K. Prahalad and G. Hamel in 1989, and has been recognized as effective resource-based management strategy in not only the academic world but also the business world. However, there are few related studies that analyze actual activity of companies, examine relevance to the business results, and verify its utility even though there are many persons considering the core competence to be effective management strategy. This study examines how the core competence is effective in current business management by analyzing a relation between the core competence and actual business results of about 35 large chemical companies in Japan ranking in the top one-hundred international companies that are very competitive with each other. At first, six factors were selected from their activity that seemed to greatly affect the management results and were used to extract their core competence, and "core competence strengths" were numerically defined. The relation between their core competence strengths and their management results were then analyzed statistically. As a result, more than half of the companies are recognized in having effective core competence for their business. And many of them took about 10 years to build the core competence and obtain the management results. This period of time is almost the same as that advocated by C.K. Prahalad and G. Hamel in their papers in which they said that the management results resulting from the core competence would be obtained in 5 to 10 years, in some cases, 15 to 20 years. Furthermore, the correlation between the core competence strength and growth on sales and between the core competence strength and recurring profits during the studied period are confirmed at a 5% level of significance.

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This paper analyzes the effects of a successor's organizational socialization in a relation-ship between CEO succession and strategic change. In former research, the factor whether a new CEO is promoted in a current company or is invited outside of the company has been treated as one of the CEO characteristics, moderating the relationship between CEO succession and strategic change. However, the empirical results are not consistent. The inconsistent results could be derived from an insufficient construct validity of the factor. Drawing on the distinction of an insider or outsider, researchers strive to explain the qualitative difference of the successor's knowledge and values. However, through measuring the factor by a dichotomous variable, the researchers have not fully considered the degree to which a successor absorbs the knowledge and values of a certain company. Considering the former research, organizational socialization, the process by which an individual comes to appreciate the values, abilities, expected behavior, and social knowledge essential for assuming an organizational role and for participating in as an organizational member, could function as a more explanatory construct. To examine its effect, 164 small businesses in Japan, half of which experienced CEO succession in 2000 and the rest did not, are selected as a sample. Empirical results are as follow: First, CEO succession promotes strategic change. Second, the degree of a successor's organizational socialization to the current company negatively influences the relationship. Third, the degree of the successor's organizational socialization to the other companies positively affects the relationship. Finally, the stronger organizational socialization to the other companies compared with that to the current company, the stronger the relationship will be. The dichotomous variable measuring the distinction of an insider or outsider, frequently used in the existing literature, is not statistically significant. The result implies that a successor's organizational socialization could be more explanatory than the distinction of an insider or outsider is.

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The purpose of this paper is to analyze how Japanese corporate governance reform and ownership structure affect firm value. In this paper, I present several hypotheses concerning Japanese boards of directors and firm value: (1) companies, which adopt US-style corporate governance system such as a executive corporate officer system and a committee-style corporate governance system, are higher valued than companies which don't adopt it; (2) board size (the number of board members) has a negative association with firm value, as measured by Tobin's Q; (3) proportion of outside directors has a positive association with firm value; (4) proportion of affiliated outside directors (persons who are likely to have business relationships with the company), who are sometimes called 'gray' directors, has a negative association with firm value; and (5) proportion of board members, who make day-to-day operational decisions and work as executive officer, has a negative association with firm value. I estimate ordinary least squares regressions to test these hypotheses, using a cross-sectional data composed of companies listed on the first section of Tokyo Stock Exchange. Although a part of regression coefficient estimates isn't statistically significant, empirical results almost support them. In addition, the result reveals that companies, which adopt US-style corporate governance system, have more outside directors and smaller board size than companies that don't adopt it. These results suggest that companies, which reform their corporate governance actively, are higher valued. Recently unloading of cross-shareholdings has been getting brisk while ownership of shares by foreign shareholders has been going up. I also examine how cross-shareholdings and foreign ownership affect Japanese firm value. I find from the empirical evidence that cross-shareholdings affect firm value negatively, and that there is a positive association between percentage ownership of shares by foreign shareholders and firm value.

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Generally, the motivation for collaboration between industry and academia (Industry-university collaboration or IUC) is thought to be because companies want to harness external knowledge resources effectively, while universities hope to obtain external research funds and other resources. Although these are important, both for the growth of the company as well as to meet the educational needs of the university, there is almost no research regarding management methods that can result in successful collaborations. Two barriers have arisen in the development of IUC. The first barrier is the asymmetry of information. This can be overcome through mutual understanding. The results of several studies suggest that companies would benefit from the utilization of databases containing academic papers and other university-based research. However, most companies are not able to effectively assess the information available on these databases. Another barrier is the psychological barrier. Companies with research facilities that employ researchers with graduate school experience may not suffer from this barrier. On the other hand, labor intensive and smaller companies may experience high psychological barriers. To address these problems, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports has established liaison offices in most national universities. However, in many cases, the full-time staff of these liaison offices are not well informed as to the scope of their office's collaboration efforts and therefore have a poor grasp of actual conditions. The persons surveyed were all researchers in three national universities in a particular region of Japan. They were asked how much they remembered regarding the earliest collaboration project they participated in and who they went through to set the project up. The replies obtained were sufficient for statistical analysis. Although the economic environments in which these universities are located are similar, the number of IUC projects differed greatly. University A had the least number of teaching and research staff, but had most number of collaborations of the three. The results for University A were as follows: brought together by a common acquaintance (24%), through an academic or research association (20%), acquaintances from school days (17%), approached the company on his/her own (16%), through a public research body (10%), other means (8%), and through the university liaison office only 5%. On the other hand, most of the researchers surveyed in University C, which had the fewest IUC collaborations, went through the liaison office, followed by University B and then University A. Furthermore, companies with research capabilities of their own used academic databases to investigate whether a university or researcher is a suitable candidate for joint research. They then made the initial contact directly or through a private connection. On the other hand, companies with weaker research capabilities were more likely to contact a university liaison office. Considering the above, it can be said that the time has come to reexamine the very purposes of the liaison offices.

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In this paper, in order to answer the question: "In an industry where the imitation by other competitors is easy, how a differentiation between companies has been created and maintained?", we provide a new framework based on Dynamic Capability-Based View of the Firm and Action System Theory. One company's success always invites imitation by other companies, and competitive differences among companies tend to decrease over time (Williams, 1994). Especially in industries where there is severe competition, even core resources or competencies that are hard to imitate are likely to leak to other companies (Teece, Pisano and Shuen, 1997). The resulting minimization of differences between competitors works toward reducing a company's competitive advantage (Noda, 2001; Noda and Collis, 2001). In fact in the online securities industry, it is very easy to imitate another company's successful strategy, because the products and services of competing companies are shown on their web sites in real-time, and because many of the leading companies publicly disclose performance results. Nevertheless, Matsui Securities was successful in establishing a predominant position in the initial stages of the online securities industry. Therefore, the question arises as to why this was possible. According to the detailed case-based analysis, in the early stages of the online securities industry in Japan, the combined factors of expectation based on the precedent in United States, backed up by the IT Bubble economy together with "media hype," created a "dominant perception" that "the customer base of the industry would dramatically increase." Based on this presumption, companies other than Matsui Securities continued to participate in endless and morass price competitions. These companies had sufficient understanding of Matsui Securities' strategies, as well as Matsui Securities' performance. However, at least for two years, they underestimated Matsui Securities as "a niche company" and did not seek to follow Matsui Securities' strategies. For these reasons, Matsui Securities could enjoy overwhelming performance, and establish a solid position in the initial stages of the industry without being imitated by others.

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The purpose of this study is to identify the mechanisms behind advantages and conditions for successful implementation of assembly cells from the viewpoint of the theory of division of labor. In this study, the implementation of assembly cells is considered as a change in the way the division of labor takes place; that is, from a functional division of labor to a parallel division of labor. Drawing on this idea, hypotheses were extracted with respect to its mechanisms behind advantages and conditions capable of tolerating disadvantages in assembly cells. By applying these hypotheses, case studies of eight manufacturing companies in Japan were conducted. As a result of case studies, seven different types of mechanisms behind advantages were identified: 1) facilitating coordination with other functions and processes; 2) accelerating learning because of the ease of understanding whole process of work; 3) reducing the loss of the division of functions and processes; 4) reducing the adjustment required to respond to uncertain market conditions; 5) reducing the adjustment required to respond to uncertain conditions within organizations; 6) attaining increased competition through the parallel division of work; and 7) reducing the diversity within the parallel groups involved. Case studies also identified seven different types of conditions capable of tolerating disadvantages: 1) tolerating the deterioration of specialized worker skills; 2) tolerating the wasteful use of resources until the workers reach a certain level of proficiency; 3) tolerating the interruption of work when switching to another function or process; 4) tolerating the restrained development of function-specific tools and equipment; 5) tolerating the restrained use of low-cost labor that is appropriate to the level of proficiency; 6) tolerating the redundancy of resources; and 7) tolerating an increased adjustment of resources shared with the preceding and subsequent processes.

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