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date: 18 June 2019

Abstract and Keywords

The purpose of this article is to discuss the postwar Japanese keiretsu. In the face of powerful forces of institutional and economic change, the groups have “withered away,” such that they no longer constitute a significant topographic feature of the Japanese economic landscape, despite having been one from the 1950s to the early 2000s. The review of the keiretsu presented here is largely retrospective. This article gives an overview of the horizontal and vertical keiretsu; how they differed from business groups in other countries; where they came from; how they were structured; their benefits and liabilities for individual firms and the Japanese economy as a whole; why they have largely died out; and whether they—the vertical groups in particular—might be revived.

Keywords: postwar Japanese keiretsu, Japanese economic landscape, business groups, firms, Japanese economy

James R. Lincoln

James R. Lincoln is Mitsubishi Professor of International Business and Finance in the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. His primary research interests include organizational design and innovation, Japanese management, and inter-organizational networks. He is the author of Culture, Control and Commitment: A Study of Work Organization and Work Attitudes in the U.S. and Japan, (with Arne L. Kalleberg), Cambridge University Press, 1990, and Japan's Network Economy: Structure, Persistence and Change, Cambridge University Press, 2004 (with Michael L. Gerlach).

Masahiro Shimotani

Masahiro Shimotani is Professor at the Faculty of Economics, Fukui Prefectural University, and Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Economics, Kyoto University, Japan. His research interest is mainly in the history and structure of business groups in Japan. Recently he has devoted himself to analyzing the holding company issues in Japan. He is the author of several books on the Japanese zaibatsu, business groups, and holding companies. He is also the co‐editor (with Takao Shiba) of Beyond the Firm: Business Groups in International and Historical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 1997).

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