James C. Abegglen was a university professor in management and economics, the author and co-author of ten books on Japan. He was one of the founders of the Boston Consulting Group

Boston Consulting Group

The Boston Consulting Group is a global management consulting firm with offices in 42 countries. It is recognized as one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the world. It is one of only three companies to appear in the top 15 of Fortunes "Best Companies to Work For" report for...

 (BCG) in 1963, and the first representative director of its Tokyo branch, founded in 1966. His academic interests centered on Japanese enterprises and economic systems and their priority to the Western capitalism

Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...

.

Life

He was born in Michigan

Michigan

Michigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....

. After graduation from Harvard and the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

, he served in the Third Marine Division to fight at Guadalcanal

Guadalcanal

Guadalcanal is a tropical island in the South-Western Pacific. The largest island in the Solomons, it was discovered by the Spanish expedition of Alvaro de Mendaña in 1568...

 Island and Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima, officially , is an island of the Japanese Volcano Islands chain, which lie south of the Ogasawara Islands and together with them form the Ogasawara Archipelago. The island is located south of mainland Tokyo and administered as part of Ogasawara, one of eight villages of Tokyo...

.　As World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 ended, he left in 1945 for Hiroshima

Hiroshima

is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu, the largest island of Japan. It became best known as the first city in history to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon when the United States Army Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on it at 8:15 A.M...

 as a member of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey

Strategic bombing survey

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey was a board tasked with examination and analysis of the United States' involvement in the World War II. Its primary purpose was to determine the effectiveness of Allied, and more specifically American, strategic bombing campaigns in Europe and in Asia...

 (USSBS). He visited Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 again in 1955 as a researcher of the Ford Foundation

Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation is a private foundation incorporated in Michigan and based in New York City created to fund programs that were chartered in 1936 by Edsel Ford and Henry Ford....

, to study Japanese industrial organization and personnel practices.

Abegglen lived permanently in Japan with his Japanese wife after 1982 and took Japanese nationality in 1997.

Academic career

He served successively as professor and director of the Graduate School of Comparative Culture at Sophia University

Sophia University

There are several rankings below related to Sophia University.-General Rankings:The university was ranked 61st in 2010 in the ranking Truly Strong Universities by Toyo Keizai...

, Chairperson of Asia Advisory Service K.K., and dean emeritus of Globis University

Globis University Graduate School of Management

, is a graduate business school located in Tokyo, Japan. The school offers part-time MBA programs on weekdays and weekends in both Japanese and English...

 in 2006. He taught "Management of Japanese Enterprises" at that school until his death from cancer on May 2, 2007.

Work

His book as a result of the research, The Japanese Factory published in 1958, pointed out the following features of employment and the strength of their mechanism in Japanese corporations:

• Lifetime employment: Employment extends over the whole working life of the employee
• Seniority-based wages: Compensation is determined by the number of years of employment in the company
• Periodic hiring: Employing young people fresh out of school
• In-company training: Employing workers based on personal qualities rather than job suitability, providing on-the-job training after hire
• Enterprise union: one labor union for each enterprise

Those employment practices, in strong contrast with the West, often at first startled and intrigued people in the United States, thus his book became a best-seller.

Abegglen was widely regarded as a reliable guide to Japan by Western business interests in the post-war era. Critics like Eamonn Fingleton

Eamonn Fingleton

Eamonn Fingleton is an Irish journalist and author. His books, written for a general audience, deal with global economics and globalism...

argue, however, that he "regarded his principal function as doing public relations on behalf of the Japanese establishment," that he misled Western leaders and the Western public about the openness of Japanese markets, and that he kept his change of nationality secret.

Published works

• The Japanese Factory (1958)
• Big Business in America (1955)
• Kaisha, the Japanese Corporation (1985)
• Sea Change: Pacific Asia as the New World Industrial Center (Free Press: 1994)
• 21st Century Japanese Management: New Systems, Lasting Values (Palgrave Macmillan: 2006)