Sanford M. Jacoby, The Embedded Corporation: Corporate Governance and Employment Relations in Japan and the United States.(Book review)

Sanford M. Jacoby, The Embedded Corporation: Corporate Governance and Employment Relations in Japan and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2004)

IN RECENT DECADES, swelling capital flows and trade have rendered advanced capitalist countries increasingly interdependent. But does globalization mean convergence of previously diverse national systems of corporate governance and employment relations? This book offers a nuanced answer, based on a well-executed comparative case study of corporate business in Japan and the United States. Along the way, we get an historical narrative on the changing shape and form of capitalism in the most recent three decades of neo-liberalization and financialization. Although Jacoby accepts that there has been a net shift from plan (or organization) to market in corporate employment and governance arrangements, the case analyses reveal a great deal of diversity within each country at the level of specific firms, and a temporal unevenness grounded in the fact that no one business system is inherently superior to another. As part of the competitive process, businesses continually scan across changing national contexts for …