What’s in a Name? Linguistic Labels in the Adoption of a Lean Production System

• In Event: 118 - Section on Economic Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 21. Theorizing Production

Abstract

Does the vocabulary of Toyota’s lean production system (“LPS”) affect its adoption in a non-Japanese context? New institutionalism argues that a management system is easier to transfer when it is theorized into an abstract model of cause-effect relationships among its components. Yet, abstract categories of management are expressed using a natural language that has its own everyday meanings and connotations. To explore what happens when a large Russian retail bank introduces LPS using the original Japanese labels versus Russian ones, we developed an abstract model of LPS as a cause-effect relationship between problems and solutions, and designed a survey questionnaire to assess the acceptance of this model by the bank’s employees. Samples of the employees at two of the bank’s branches were randomly assigned to one of two versions of the questionnaire: one using the original Japanese labels transliterated with the Cyrillic alphabet or one that had all the original Japanese labels translated into the Russian language. Our analysis showed that the bank’s employees were more likely to assess the relevance of LPS consistently with our abstract model when the system’s components were labeled in Russian rather than transliterated Japanese. The Russian labels helped employees establish the causal link from problems to solutions and reduced their resistance to accepting lean production’s problems as relevant. Beyond the issue of language, our approach offers a novel way to theorize and evaluate empirically the transferability of management systems across organizations.

Authors

• Valery Yakubovich, ESSEC

• An Yi, ESSEC