Amid the claims and counterclaims surrounding the subject of large firm restructuring, Japan is a particularly interesting case. Japanese firms are renowned across the world for the high levels of quality and competitiveness of their products. The country has received great praise as a developmental model for other societies to follow given its enormously impressive recovery post-1945. During the high-growth phase from the 1950s to around 1990, Japan and its flagship firms such as Toyota and Sony were highly regarded, with Japan famously predicted to overtake the USA itself as the world's largest economy (Vogel 1980). Concepts such as ‘Japan Inc’, ‘coordinated capitalism’, ‘stakeholder’ capitalism, along with lean manufacturing, total quality management and kaizen rose to prominence in the West. Many of these ideas were, to a greater or lesser extent, emulated by Anglo-Saxon firms attempting to improve their own competitiveness in response (Best 2001; Milkman 1997; Starkey and McKinlay 1994), and they were widely imported into foreign environments in Japanese overseas transplants (Adler 1992; Danford 1998; Delbridge 1998; Kenney and Florida 1993; Morris et al. 1993). Analysts frequently claimed that the Japanese variety of capitalism was superior in many ways to the liberal and high-risk American and British versions (Abegglen 1958; Dore 1987; Hutton 1995).