Notes from Toyota-land: An American Engineer in Japan Book

Send an intelligent, spirited and slightly bolshie young American into a research and design department in the Japanese manufacturing heartland just as the firm faces its biggest crisis in twenty years. Give him a keenly observant eye, unbounded curiosity about what makes his fellow human beings tick, and a passion for recording his observations, and you have all the ingredients for a fascinating and senstive ethnography of a system growing harsher by the day as it strives to meet American standards of profitability.-Ronald Dore, Research Associate, London School of Economics

"Darius Mehri offers something quite unique: an engineer's inside view of the Toyota Production System, based on an extended work experience in the engineering office of the company's homeland keiretsu. Given the special prominence of the Toyota Production System in debates over the appropriate template for restructuring the auto industry in particular and manufacturing in general, Mehri's book will interest practitioners. Mehri also has a great deal of insight into Japan's contemporary culture and politics."-Steve Babson, Wayne State University Labor Studies Center