As Japanese automotive and electronics firms have expanded their operations into the United States, more attention has been focused on Japanese management and manufacturing. In Hybrid Factory a team of Japanese and American scholars explores the potential for the effective transfer of Japanese management and production systems that have been credited with giving Japanese firms their competitive superiority in a much different national culture.

The study on which Hybrid Factory is based focused on Japanese manufacturing firms that, beginning in the 1970s, and increasingly in the 1980s, vigorously embarked on overseas production in the United States. The book looks in particular at which management factors that provide strength to Japanese production systems can survive the transfer to the United States, or whether the radically different social and cultural environment makes such a transfer impossible.

Hybrid Factory takes a different approach from previous books which only examined Japan's "lean production systems" unrelated to the Japanese socio-cultural background. The first book of its kind, it will be of great interest to human resources managers, business managers, and government employees involved in multinational enterprises, as well as to scholars and students of economics, international business, and management.