Servitization and corporate culture

Abstract

Servitization in the manufacturing industry is progressing worldwide in response to changes in customer needs and the resulting decline in margins for physical goods. In this study, we focus on corporate culture, which is one of the institutions in the service ecosystem (Vargo and Akaka, 2012), and clarify its structure.According to Hofstede (1984), Japan has a high level of uncertainty avoidance and is male-dominated, while the opposite is true of Northern Europe (Hofstede 1984). This national character is reflected in corporate culture, and differences in innovation levels, the number of start-up companies per capita, and working styles (such as vacation and working hours) have arisen. The tendency to avoid uncertainty is a psychological obstacle to entering the service business, which is not familiar to the manufacturing industry, and at the same time, it is assumed that it will hinder the transformation of internal systems, such as performance evaluation of departments suitable for services and employee personnel evaluation systems.We will discuss how differences in corporate culture affect the development of the service industry based on the results of a quantitative survey of manufacturing industry managers in Northern Europe (Sweden) and Japan.In practice, we classify the service orientation into five stages based on previous research (Toya 2023). Each stage is as follows: Stage 0: No service orientation, Stage 1: Services provided for product sales, Stage 2: Services provided to increase margins through the establishment of long-term relationships, Stage 3: Services provided to revitalize customers' businesses, Stage 4: Services provided to innovate customers' businesses.The quantitative survey will be conducted in January 2025 in Japan and Scandinavia simultaneously, based on seven categories of Japanese manufacturing industry (metal, chemical, machinery, electrical, transportation, food & beverage, and pulp & printing), using stratified random sampling from a database. We plan to analyze the differences between large companies and small and medium-sized companies, as well as the differences between the seven categories, in addition to international comparisons.

Keywords: Servitization, corporate culture, uncertainty avoidance

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1006304