Professor and Director, Institute for Technology, Enterprise and Competitiveness at Doshisha Management School, Kyoto. Dean and Professor of Sociology, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, University of Tokyo.

• Part I. The End of the Community Firm?: 1. Company as community; 2. The classic model: benchmark for change; 3. Change and continuity; 4. Company professionals and creative work; 5. Corporate governance and managers' ideologies; 6. Consolidated management and quasi internal labour markets; 7. Summing up; Part II. Hitachi: 'Here, the Future': 8. Hitachi: a dancing giant; 9. A victim of its own success?; 10. Organization reform; 11. Recasting the employment relationship; 12. The impact on industrial relations; 13. Evaluation; Part III. The Reformed Model: 14. New model in the making?; Appendix; References.

"After so many facile generalizations about Japan's so-called 'lost decade', it is good to have such a clear and comprehensive analysis of what has actually been happening to Japanese corporations. Inagami and Whitaker provide both a practice of general trends in employment, organization and finance, and fascinating detail of the style and rate of change in one of Japan's great companies. No one will ever again be able to talk airily about 'the Japanese community firm' without reading their meticulous and subtle analysis of the ways in which Japanese firms were, and the extent to which they remain, communities of employees." Professor Ronald Dore, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and Political Science