Abegglen, James C. 1926-

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* Indicates that a listing has been compiled from secondary sources believed to be reliable, but has not been personally verified for this edition by the author sketched.

ABEGGLEN, James C. 1926-

PERSONAL: Born 1926; married. Education: University of Chicago, Ph.D. (anthropology and clinical psychology); Harvard University, postdoctoral study.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Author Mail, c/o Basic Books, 387 Park Ave. S., 12th Fl., New York, NY 10016.

CAREER: Management consultant and author. Boston Consulting Group, Tokyo, Japan, consultant and founding officer, 1967-83; Asia Advisory Service K.K. (private consulting firm), Tokyo, founder and chairman. Served on faculty at University of Chicago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Sophia University, Tokyo. member of board of directors, Ferragamo, Nikkei Science, and Learning Technologies; trustee, International House of Japan. Military service: U.S. Marine Corps; served in Pacific theatre with Third Marines during World War II.

WRITINGS:

(With W. Lloyd Warner) Occupational Mobility in American Business and Industry, 1928-1952, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1955, reprinted, Arno Press (New York, NY), 1979.

(With W. Lloyd Warner) Big Business Leaders in America, Harper (New York, NY), 1955.

The Japanese Factory: Aspects of Its Social Organization, Free Press (Glencoe, IL), 1958, reprinted, Arno Press (New York, NY), 1979.

(Editor) Business Strategies for Japan, Sophia University Press (Tokyo, Japan), 1970.

Management and Worker: The Japanese Solution, Kodansha (New York, NY), 1973.

(With others) U.S.-Japan Economic Relations: A Symposium on Critical Issues, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA), 1980.

The Strategy of Japanese Business, Ballinger Publishing Company (Cambridge, MA), 1984.

(With George Stalk, Jr.) Kaisha, the Japanese Corporation, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1985.

Sea Change: Pacific Asia as the New World Industrial Center, Free Press (New York, NY), 1994.

SIDELIGHTS: James C. Abegglen is the author of a number of books on business, particularly on the topic of Japanese business strategy. He has spent most of his career as a consultant in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and as a university professor both in the United States and Japan. In the mid-1990s he made the decision to become a citizen of Japan.

Abegglen served in the U.S. Marine Corps in the Pacific theatre during World War II, and was injured on Guam and Iwo Jima. His first visit to Japan occurred in 1945, when he worked with the Strategic Bombing Survey to question residents regarding their views on the government and the country's future following the war. He returned to the United States to study, eventually receiving his Ph.D. in anthropology and clinical psychology from the University of Chicago. In 1955 he returned to Japan on a Ford Foundation fellowship, which allowed him to spend two years studying the organizational differences between U.S. and Japanese businesses. He became a founding officer of the Boston Consulting Group's Tokyo branch in 1967, and later started his own company, Asia Advisory Service K.K.

In Kaisha, the Japanese Corporation Abegglen and coauthor George Salk, Jr., delve into the reasons for the success of the Japanese economy during the early 1980s. In a review for Fortune, Robert Lubar called the book "an extraordinary work steaming with fresh material and provocative ideas" and noted that the authors "evidently intend their book to serve at least partly as a guide for U.S. businessmen striving to make their firms more competitive." Lubar also observed that Abegglen and Salk "are probably as well informed about the inner working of Japan's business system as anybody capable of writing a book in English." When asked in an interview by Bradley Martin for J@pan Inc. how he thought his book held up over time, Abegglen commented that "Kaisha was done in the context of high growth. At the corporate level … the rules you follow to be successful under conditions of rapid growth are very different from those you follow in a mature economy."

Sea Change: Pacific Asia as the New World Industrial Center is a "sensible and fact-filled guide to the opportunities and risks for corporate America in doing business in East Asia," wrote Fortune reviewer Donald Zagoria. While Peter Parker in Management Today called the work "a thorough and necessary analysis," Louis Kraar remarked in Fortune on the density of the material, stating that Abegglen's "briefing on the biggest and most expansive market for American products suffers from being written like a massive download of data." While the critic found it challenging to locate attributions for some of the material cited, Kraar concluded of Abegglen's book that, "Despite these shortcomings, his tour of the East Asian economies is worth taking." Industry Week reviewer Sue Gibson commended Abegglen for his "insider's knowledge of market forces," his "keen understanding of Asian networking and cultural patterns," and his "practical view of eastern Asia's political instabilities and U.S. companies' potential difficulties establishing new footholds."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Foreign Affairs, March-April, 1994, Donald Zagoria, review of Sea Change: Pacific Asia as the New World Industrial Center, p. 170.

Fortune, February 3, 1986, Robert Lubar, review of Kaisha, the Japanese Corporation, p. 131; May 16, 1994, Louis Kraar, review of Sea Change, p. 150.

Industry Week, March 21, 1994, Sue Gibson, review of Sea Change, p. 20.

J@pan Inc., February 2001, Bradley Martin, "Interview: James C. Abegglen."

Management Today, October, 1994, Peter Parker, review of Sea Change, p. 35.