American Corporate Timetabling: Its past, present and future.

This paper is concerned with corporate forms of timetabling and lime reckoning and shows some of the patterns of influence between the corporate cultures of the USA and Japan. Prior to the 1970s, US forms of corporate timetabling were defined by western firms as `best practice'. In the 1970s these approaches were embodied and embedded in computer-based timetabling. The American supply industry marketed them throughout the world. However, by the 1960s key firms in Japan in the automobile sector were using time reckoning and timetabling systems which were neither considered possible nor envisaged by western analysts and theories of management. Since the 1980s US firms in many sectors have been re-authoring their time reckoning and timetabling to incorporate elements from Japanese developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]