The curse of the #1 carmaker: Toyota’s crisis

Using as many perspectives as possible to understand large-scale industrial crises can be a daunting task. This paper aims to demonstrate a reasonably complex yet systemic, analytical and critical approach to analyzing what causes crises.

The authors use a multi-perspective methodology within which each perspective uses a substantially different ontology and epistemology, offering a deeper understanding of the causes of large-scale crises. The methodology utilizes extant theory and findings, archival data from English and Japanese sources, including narratives of focal people such as Toyota President Akio Toyoda.

The analysis suggests that what caused Toyota’s crisis was not just Toyota’s failure to solve its technical problems. It was Toyota’s collective myopia, interactively complex new technologies and misunderstanding of corporate citizenship.

The authors argue that crises are complex situations best understood from multiple perspectives and that easily observable aspects of crises are often not the most significant causes of crises. In most cases, causes of crises are hidden and taken-for-granted assumptions of managers. Thus, managers must view crises critically from multiple yet distinct viewpoints.

The authors use Alpaslan and Mitroff’s multi-disciplinary methodology to outline several critical perspectives on Toyota’s messy recall crisis.