The New International Division of Labour in Asian Electronics: Work Organization and Human Resources in Japan and Malaysia

Abstract

This article documents and analyses the organization of work and human resources management in ten manufacturing plants in Malaysia and three plants in Japan. Each of the plants carries out specific tasks within an emergent international division of labour surrounding two Japanese multinational producers of consumer electronics goods. Plant roles reflect their positions in commodity chains driven by the multinationals, varying in relation to product-to-product and component-to-component divisions of labour, and in relation to the location of product and process innovations. How work is organized and how workers are managed are explained by the location of each plant within this division of labour, and by the characteristics and situation of labour, the one commodity which talks back, within the local environment. There is an established and extensive literature on work organization and human resources management in Japanese manufacturing companies established in Japan and abroad. This has tended to focus on the 'transferability' of a 'Japanese system'  Our central hypothesis was that the nature of work organization and human resources development characterizing plants in different countries would depend 676 .   . essentially on the position of each production unit in cross-national commodity chains. The products being made, the markets being served, and the activities undertaken at the plant would more heavily influence production and work organization and associated human resources management and development practices than an 'ownership logic' or host country cultures. Local political and labour market characteristics, however, might have a moderating influence. This hypothesis was developed in part from Gereffi's (1996aGereffi's ( , 1996b) work on commodity chains, and the analysis was influenced by recent research on Japanese transplants in Mexico by Kenney and Florida (1994), in the UK by Elger and Smith (1998), and by Guyton (1995) in Malaysia. It was also influenced by the researchers' own previous work on Japanese manufacturing companies in the UK, Japan and North America.Being centred on the management and human resource implications of an emergent Pacific Asian division of labour, the research was dependent on the generation of plant level case studies in different locations undertaking different, but related, activities. Three of the 13 case study plants analysed in this article are located in Japan, each of them assembling televisions. Two are owned by one Japanese company, one by another (competitor) Japanese company. Both are household names, and they 'drive' the commodity chains under study. The other ten are located in Malaysia, and of these, two are television assemblers owned by the two companies studied in Japan. Another three -components plants which supply into the assemblers studied -are linked through ownership to the two Japanese companies. The remaining five plants located in Malaysia, which supply components and packaging into the assemble...

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