イシイ　リョウマ   Ryoma Ishii   石井　竜馬    所属   追手門学院大学  国際学部 国際学科    職種   教授
言語種別	英語
発行・発表の年月	2026/09/30
形態種別	論文
査読	査読あり
標題	The Historical Return to Vertical Integration: Evolution of Firm Boundaries from Adam Smith to the Chinese EV Challenge
執筆形態	単著
掲載誌名	政治経済史学
掲載区分	国内
概要	This study conducts a comparative historical analysis of approximately 250 years of industrial history—tracing from Adam Smith’s 18th-century theory of the horizontal division of labor to early 20th-century Fordist vertical integration, post-war Toyota’s Keiretsu-based quasi-hierarchies, and contemporary "digital vertical integration" observed in Tesla and Chinese electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers. In doing so, it elucidates the structural transformations of organizational boundaries and the underlying logic of historical recurrence. Recent discourses surrounding "Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs)" and the "theory of disruptive innovation" heavily depend on the historical specificity of the digital sector, backed by Moore’s Law. Generalizing these frameworks to the long-term technological trajectories of heavy manufacturing industries—which remain bound by physical laws such as thermodynamics and materials science—is fundamentally flawed. Corporate missteps, such as the Boeing safety crises, represent an industrial-historical deviation in technological philosophy that attempts to substitute software for physical integrity, thereby demonstrating the fatal risks of abstracting away physical constraints. The full vertical integration epitomized by Ford’s River Rouge complex in the 1920s achieved economies of scale but ultimately induced organizational rigidity and deskilling, losing market leadership to General Motors' product-mix strategy. Modern Chinese EV strategies leverage massive state institutional interventions and hardware modularization to recreate this continuous production model, functioning effectively as "Fordism in the digital age." However, this extreme vertical integration harbors structural vulnerabilities, including organizational inertia that hinders adaptation to next-generation technologies and the long-term degradation of physical durability. Furthermore, as organizational experiments at NUMMI and Tesla’s "production hell" (the irony of automation) have demonstrated, competitive advantage in manufacturing (monozukuri) has historically relied not on mechanical automation alone, but on shop-floor human agency and information coordination capabilities (suriawase). The value frontier in the transportation equipment industry continues to be bounded by physical limits such as specific energy and structural strength; digital technologies serve merely as leverage mechanisms to optimize systems within these constraints. Based on these historical-empirical insights, this study proposes "Ambidextrous Integration" as the historical imperative for incumbent manufacturers: Exploitation: In life- and safety-critical domains, utilization of AI and simulation to streamline craftsmanship-based coordination (suriawase), focusing strategic resources on building robust, application-specific semiconductor core systems that endure severe physical environments. Exploration: Redefining the vehicle from an isolated "mobility" product into a flexible "configuration" synchronized with macro-infrastructure, actively exploring integration with urban operating systems and telecommunication networks. Collaborating with smart infrastructure allows for the subtraction of redundant physical over-engineering, shifting closed Keiretsu networks toward an open vertical division of labor. This industrial-historical paradigm shift presents the legitimate path for Japanese manufacturing industries to transcend commoditization while leveraging historically accumulated competitive capabilities.
researchmap用URL	https://seikeishi.jp/