Authors
Takao Ito, Makoto Sakamoto, Satoshi Ikeda, Rajiv Mehta, Yasuo Uchida
Corresponding Author
Takao Ito
Available Online 15 December 2014.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.2991/jrnal.2014.1.3.2How to use a DOI?
Keywords
out-influence, in-degree, sales, the OIS model, Kyohokai, Yokokai, Keiretsu
Abstract
Although two major Japanese manufacturers, Toyota and Mazda, compete in the automotive market, their corporate performance, respectively, is different because the internal resources and the way they coordinate interrelationships among their network partners is known to be divergent. Both these two companies have their own collaborating organizations, Kyohokai for Toyota and Yokokai for Mazda. Kyohokai, in contrast to Yokokai, is a central-oriented organization with strong interactive cooperation among network partners. Consistent with the stream of research on the coordination of internal resources and external inter-firm relationships, the purpose of this research is to identify and contrast the best practices of Toyota to Mazda using a comparative approach. This paper reviews relevant lliterature on network organizations to focus on the differences between Kyohokai and Yokokai. Specifically, it makes a contribution by proposing a new perspective to identify the determinants of corporate performance and clarify the difference among the external inter-firm’s relationships between Kyohokai and Yokokai, thus ascertaining the rational structure of network organizations.

Copyright
© 2013, the Authors. Published by ALife Robotics Corp. Ltd.
Open Access
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).