Choice Review

Friedman spent two years on a Fulbright Scholarship at Tokyo University, and this is his first book. The author's thesis is that Japan's success can be explained solely by flexible manufacturing carried on in small enterprises with multi-purpose, versatile "numerical sic controlled" machines, some of them in local (incorrectly called "regional") clusters. This picture is contrasted to US experience. Unfortunately, the author's simplistic comparative figures (p. 10) on the increase in the number of manufacturing enterprises, when more properly recalculated to an incremental form of the ratio of the change in industrial production to the change in the number of firms (from 1954 to 1977), disconfirm the author's thesis. The recalculated figures show, instead, that the relative increase in the number of industrial firms in the US was almost twice as large as in Japan. In several other places the use of quantitative data is either incorrect or cavalier. The author fails to define many of his terms and uses the oft-repeated adjective "political" in an unwarranted sense. Some relevant factors--such as investment in human capital, motivation, and Confucian values--are not even mentioned. Footnoting is inadequate. The author generously attributes to himself the discovery of Japanese productive flexibility, without adequately analyzing that flexibility (cf., for instance, Richard J. Schonberger, Japanese Manufacturing Techniques CH, Oct '83, and Ronald Dore, Flexible Rigidities CH, May '87). The book is too flawed to be generally recommended, but it could be used by some graduate schools for a critical approach to a case study of the machine tool industry. B. Mieczkowski Ithaca College