Programme News (4) - Takahiro Fujimoto

With this assumption, I have a few comments. First, as the Boyer-Freyssenet-Lung proposal (La Lettre du Gerpisa, ndeg. 102, April 1996) correctly pointed out, the issue of globalization is the auto industry has been discussed much since the 1980s by academics, consultants, journalists, etc. Separately, there has been rich literature in international economics and management, particularly in the theories of multinational firms and foreign direct investment, on motivations, structures and functions of global operations by manufacturing firms, including the automobile.

Thus, if GERPISA is to claim that it will discuss the new aspects of globalization, it would have to spend some time surveying existing literature in the above field, clarify what is already said, and identify unexplored topics that deserves major research initiatives by GREPISA. In this way the new program would draw more attention from academic community internationally and interdisciplinarily. To sum up, I think that we would need a good paper of literature survey by some GERPISA II members to begin with.

Second, since the word "globalization" has been frequently used as almost a "buzz-word", the concept of "globalization" itself has become somewhat contaminated and vague. When this key concept is equivocal, it would inevitably create misunderstanding and unnecessary debates which could be avoided with clearer definitions. On the other hand, it would be difficult for GERPISA to impose its strict interpretation of "globalization " concept to all the researchers in and out of the programme. We should not spend too much time trying this.

One thing that it could do at this point is to make a brief paper discussing different ways of defining "globalization" and "regionalization" by different authors in academic and business community, as well as journalism. Again, we should not impose one fixed interpretation of what globalization is at this point, but we might still be able to remind its participants that this concept is equivocal, and make some suggestions on preferred definition of globalization based on the analytical purpose of GERPISA II.

Third, when GERPISA II starts to study globalization, it may be a good idea to keep in mind the difference between "planned" or "stated" global strategies and "emergent" strategies in Henry Mintzberg's term. That is, while globalization is a favorite topic for the executives so that there are many statements or discourse on the companies' global strategies by the executives, some of them may be simply a lip service that is never realized, while there may be some "emergent" global strategies that are not stated / planned / recognized by the firms in advance but are realized ex-post by a series of historical imperatives and the firms' incremental responses to a series of crises. Thus, we should not mix stated global strategies and realized ones. We need to keep track of both statement by executives and operational details in the firms' overseas activities, compare them, and analyze the consistency and the difference between the two.

For my part, my area of contribution, if this programme starts, would be mainly on the latter, the emergent global strategies that are evolving from daily operational decisions to make the foreign operations survive in response to their local crisis. My main field would be product development and manufacturing operation for Asian-Oceanian (and possibly European and North American) operations by the Japanese auto makers.

By this I do not mean that planned strategies stated by the executives are unimportant, but that there are top-down and bottom-up approaches to this topic, and that, as a specialist in operations management rather than in corporate strategy, my contribution would be mainly in the latter field.