文章作者 100test 发表时间 2008:01:10 13:30:12
来源 100Test.Com百考试题网
另一种解释Other observers link high Japanese productivity to higher levels of capital investment per worker. But(转折) a historical perspective leads to a different(-) conclusion. When the two top Japanese automobile makers matched and then doubled United States productivity levels in the mid-sixties, capital investment per employee was comparable to that of United States firms. Furthermore, by the late seventies, the amount of fixed assets required to produce one vehicle was roughly equivalent in Japan and in the United States.
Since capital investment was not higher in Japan, it had to be other factors that led to higher productivity. 第三种解释A more fruitful( ) explanation may lie with Japanese production techniques. Japanese automobile producers did not simply implement conventional processes more effectively: they made critical changes in United States procedures*7A. For instance, the mass-production philosophy of United States automakers encouraged the production of huge lots of cars*6 in order to utilize fully expensive, component-specific*6B equipment and to occupy fully workers who have been trained to execute one operation efficiently*8A. Japanese automakers chose to make small-lot production feasible by introducing several departures from United States practices, including the use of flexible equipment*8A that could be altered easily to do several different production tasks and the training of workers*4 in multiple jobs*4D. Automakers could schedule the production of different components or models on single machines, thereby eliminating the need to store the buffer stocks of extra components that result when specialized equipment and workers are kept constantly active.
1. The primary purpose of the passage is to