Yusaku Takeda – Harvard Business School
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Enduring Effects of Nationalistic Ideology on Strategy Formation Process: The Case of Nippon Gakki 1938-1960
I explore how top executives’ intense exposure to nationalistic ideology affects their subsequent organizational outcomes, using a longitudinal archival case study of Nippon Gakki Ltd., a Japanese musical instrument manufacturer. An intense nationalistic ideology during WWII in Japan imprinted future top executives of Nippon Gakki, who, in the Post-WWII era, sought to expand their businesses from their core musical instrument manufacturing business to the motorcycle manufacturing business with the aim of obtaining national prosperity and prestige. Analysis reveals that nationalism influenced Nippon Gakki’s strategy formation process through three mechanisms of identity decoupling, recurrent remembering, and value elevation, which together shifted top executives’ frames and values and led them to explore a wide variety of businesses unfettered by its extant product classes, industry affiliations, and technological competency. These findings expand the scope of extant research of political ideology and organizations by conceptualizing the construal levels of frames and values as key dimensions through which ideologies are initially imprinted and enacted at a later time.