Works
- Organizational structures in Japanese and U.S. manufacturing, Administrative Science Quarterly 31(3), 338 to 364, 1986
- Culture, control, and commitment: a study of work organization and work attitudes in the United States and Japan, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York (xii and 291 pages), 1990
- Keiretsu, governance, and learning: case studies in change from the Japanese automotive industry, Organization Science 12(6), 683 to 701, 2001
In Organizational Structures
Known for
Comparative study of Japanese and American organization
Ideas
Japanese and American plant structures. With Hanada and McBride, Lincoln surveyed 55 American and 51 Japanese manufacturing plants and found less specialization, taller hierarchies, and greater formal centralization but less de facto centralization in the Japanese plants, and weaker effects of operations technology on structure in Japan. Caveat: Plants in two countries, read in its abstract only; Lincoln and Kalleberg (1990), on the same plants and read only in passages, report less specialization, taller hierarchies, and formal centralization with de facto decentralization in the Japanese plants.
The drift of keiretsu governance. With Ahmadjian, he found Japanese auto supply keiretsu drifting from network governance toward arm's-length contracting and hierarchy. Caveat: Three cases in one industry.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.