Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 10, 1999

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting

A German-Japanese-U.S. Manufacturing System for the 21st Century

Cross-national mergers are flourishing as companies find opportunities to utilize the strengths of the best that each nation has to offer. The recent DaimlerChrysler merger foreshadows how transatlantic mergers may change 21st century relationships between nations and corporations We analyze the cross-national collaborative effort to assemble the prize winning M-Class SUV in Alabama with a Japanese lean production system, U.S. workers, and an American - German management team that foreshadowed the DC alliance. Furthermore, we delineate some of the issues that confront DaimlerChrysler as it adapts the new Mercedes Benz United States International (MBUSI) production system to an Austrian Chrysler plant to respond to European demand for the M-Class Implications far global culture are raised. The authors acknowledge the Anderson Schools of Management (ASM) Foundation Board and the Department of Organizational Studies at ASM that provided partial financial support of this study. We express our appreciation to managers at MBUSI in Alabama for their invaluable comments and hospitality. We thank our colleague Geoff Bannister for his work in an earlier phase of this research project.