Paper's abstract

Jonathan Zeitlin, Americanization And Its Limits : Reworking US Technology and Management in Postwar Europe and Japan
This paper develops a new and conceptually distinctive analysis of Americanization in European and Japanese industry after the Second World War, based on a comparative research project involving an international group of scholars. The project highlights the autonomous and creative role of local actors in selectively adapting US technology and management methods to suit local conditions and, strikingly, in creating new hybrid forms that combined indigenous and foreign practices in unforeseen but often remarkably competitive ways. The paper itself is divided into two main sections. The first section re-examines the historiography of postwar Americanization, highlighting the theoretical assumptions underlying contending perspectives in order to bring out the distinctive features of the conceptual approach developed in this project. Only by substantially modifying or discarding altogether a series of widely-held assumptions about the nature and transferability of productive models, it argues, can the pervasive evidence of selective adaptation and innovative modification of US techniques and methods uncovered by the studies in our project be convincingly accommodated. The second section considers the implications of the project's interpretation of postwar Americanization for current debates on the transfer and diffusion of foreign productive models across national borders, underlining the historical grounds for skepticism about the likelihood and desirability of international convergence around any single best practice‚ model of economic and technological efficiency, whether Japanese or Anglo-American.

Key Words : technology, reception, reception
t. 45, 2001 : p. 246-267