Works
- 持株会社の時代: 日本の企業結合, 有斐閣 (Yuhikaku), Tokyo, 2006
- Japanese holding companies: past and present, Japanese Research in Business History 29, 11 to 28, 2012
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The history of Japanese holding companies and corporate groups.
Ideas
The company system as a pseudo-holding company. Japan's ban on pure holding companies led firms, starting with Sony in 1994, to create the company system, internal units treated as subsidiaries inside one legal entity. Some firms kept it after the ban was lifted in 1997, which Shimotani says is probably because they found advantages in it that pure holding companies lack, evident in the different degrees of decentralization the company system, the division system, and the pure holding company produce. Caveat: A narrative history; the comparison of degrees of decentralization is in his Japanese books, which were not read.
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.