Americanization and Its Limits: Reworking U.S. Technology and Management in Postwar Europe and Japan (review)

Americanization and Its Limits: Reworking U.S. Technology and Management in Postwar Europe and Japan. Edited by Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xvii+410. $74.

Rarely do collections such as this live up to their potential, all too often fulfilling only our limited expectations. There may be one or two insightful, or even brilliant, essays, but usually such books are merely an assortment of more-or-less independent essays, lacking coherence and a sense of purpose.

Americanization and Its Limits could not provide a more stark contrast to this commonplace state of affairs. Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel have clearly taken a strong hand in shaping contributions from a strong stable of authors from a number of countries. The result is a multifaceted book, but one with a set of themes and arguments running throughout. The main subject, Americanization, is one that has come into vogue since the mid-1990s as scholars revisit the Marshall Plan and the various programs associated with it, as well as the emergence of the American-dominated postwar order more generally. Previously, most commentators emphasized the widespread adoption of American "best practice" in technology and management as responsible for astonishing levels of international economic growth and alleged "convergence" between 1945 and the late 1960s and beyond. Some stressed resistance to American influence as well. The consensus, however, was that there was a one-way traffic in organizational, cultural, and technological ideas as other countries sought to emulate American levels of production, productivity, and, perhaps most important, consumption.

Still, there were those who insisted on examining the reception of American influences by the receiving countries, which sometimes resulted in a creative recasting of those ideas. And the number of scholars taking this view has grown in recent years. In this sense, the main message of Americanization and Its Limits is not entirely new. But there are three novel, and very welcome, aspects to this book. First, there is the breadth of coverage. Not only do the usual suspects, Britain and West Germany, figure largely, but also France, Italy, Sweden, and, most intriguingly, Japan. Second, each individual study probes deeply, not just into American influences and ideas but also into the existing institutions and practices of the receiving country and the "reworking" of American ideas and machines into a creative synthesis. Resistance, in the view of many of the authors, is part of the story behind the emergent synthesis. To a large degree the ideas and technology were embraced enthusiastically, not least by the losers in the World War. But they had to be reformulated and reinterpreted to be useful to the receiving country. The status of each contributor as an expert in the history of the nation being considered helps account for this depth of coverage, but their specialist knowledge is disciplined and contextualized through explicit and frequent reference to the central themes. Third, the concentration on technology and production systems as well as management and organizational practice provides a marked contrast to most other studies of the topic.

There are ways in which the book might have been improved. Only three of the essays feature a sustained comparative framework: Zeitlin's introduction, a useful overview of the literature on Americanization and of the book's key themes and individual contributions; Steven Tolliday's masterful examination of mass production methods and their reception in Britain, France, and Germany; and Herrigel's look at the recasting of the steel industries in West Germany and Japan in the course of the American occupation. While the other contributions are uniformly strong in their own right, and while each makes reference to others as appropriate, more explicit and sustained comparisons would have been helpful. Regrettably, the studies also focus on Europe to a much greater degree than on Japan, an imbalance only partially offset...