Looking back on the organization research of the last fifty years‚ it can be seen that the mainstream research has lay in that of successful Japanese management. However‚ limitations of Japanese management have seldom drawn attention from researchers. Considering relatively poor performance of Japanese management in the last ten to twenty years‚ we should emphasize research on limitations of Japanese management in the future.

This article focused on a question‚ “Have we‚ Japanese researcher of management contributed on actual management of Japanese Corporations?” Practitioners in charge of management have conducted most of researches; researchers follow. GE and GM have contributed to developing knowledge of modern management in the United State. Likewise‚ Matsushita and Toyota provided knowledge of management in Japan. While we see a close relationship among actual business‚ researchers‚ and academics in the U.S.‚ however‚ we need to build a new relationship among the three parties in Japan for proposing new strategies toward the future of Japanese corporations.

Innovation is one of the major topics of organization studies. “The Sciences of the Artificial‚” written by H. Simon‚ is suggestive as the scientific agenda for organization studies‚ but it is not the one and only agenda‚ especially from the viewpoint of the innovation researchers. This paper proposes a different agenda for the future studies of innovation and organization.

Who have written on which subjects in what ways in Soshiki Kagaku (Organizational Science)? We examine features and tendencies of Soshiki Kagaku‚ based on time-series analyses and international comparisons of authorsʼ profile‚ themes‚ and styles of the papers that have published over the last 43 years. We show that the papers that appeared in Soshiki Kagaku have addressed a wide scope of issues with limited mutual interactions‚ and we explore some implications.

Historically‚ it is one of the most difficult issues to build and maintain inter-enterprise cooperation. When a licensee has high absorptive capacity‚ technology transfer is easy‚ yet the possibility of licenseeʼs opportunism becomes high. In the petrochemical industry‚ as Japanese firms have imported many foreign technologies‚ many joint ventures have been established. This study proposes two hypotheses based on the logic of technology transfer and opportunism‚ and it statistically examines between the licenseeʼs absorptive capacity and forms of licensing agreements.

This paper proposes that the interaction between science and technology by examining how scientific tacit knowledge plays a key role in inducing technological innovation. Many scholars have considered science to be a system full of explicit knowledge. We argue‚ however‚ that science creates elements of tacit knowledge as a byproduct of explicit knowledge‚ such as academic papers and property rights. For instance‚ the elements of scientific tacit knowledge are knowhow to observe‚ measure‚ and evaluate natural or technological phenomena‚ an ability to judge whether a result of a measurement or an observation is correct or not‚ and an ability to interpret and understand them. Such scientific tacit knowledge enables engineers developing products to observe or measure the technological phenomena and interpret them.
Since they can measure and interpret them‚ they can make a lot of trials and errors‚ advancing the speed of product development. In such activities‚ there is a possibility that new innovations can be created. This type of interaction between science and technology through the elements of scientific tacit knowledge‚ therefore‚ plays a key role in inducing technological innovation.

This study examines dysfunctions of a positive response of organizations to imperatives from outside agencies. The study focuses on misconducts concerning some insurance payments in the general insurance industry. The organizations cannot help but take a myopia action to repair their legitimacy when their misconducts are exposed. At the same time‚ the study reveals that asymmetrical information between the inside of organizations and the outside of them makes differences in perceiving any causal connection. As a result‚ organizations face a dilemma that their legitimation will distort their resource allocation and produce new problems.