Coping with Modernity: Man and Company in Contemporary Japan
EAST ASIA RESEARCH REVIEW: PROCEEDINGS OF THE FIRST UK POST-GRADUATE CONFERENCE IN EAST ASIAN STUDIES, pp. 1-12, P. Matanle, British Association for Japanese Studies, 1999
13 Pages Posted: 6 Jan 2012
Date Written: January 6, 2012
Abstract
In 1973 Ronald Dore, to wide academic acclaim, published his comparative study of British and Japanese factory life, British Factory-Japanese Factory (Dore, 1973). Although Thorstein Veblen had hinted at and anticipated Dore’s thesis as early as 1915 (Cole, 1978), the argument Dore put forward was at the time a radical one. He theorized that, because of what he called the “late-development effect”, Japan had been able in some measure to leap ahead of the United Kingdom into a more advanced or more modern form of industrial organization upon which henceforth the UK would converge. A key aspect of this ability to leap ahead, Dore claimed, was the development of the so-called lifetime employment system, which, according to his theory, had come into being precisely as a result of Japan’s late development. Hitherto, western observers such as James Abegglen, who in 1958 had been the first western industrial sociologist to describe the lifetime employment system in detail to the west, had assumed that, because of its assumed roots in Japanese pre-modern culture and tradition, the system possessed rigidities and inefficiencies which would cause Japan eventually to converge on the Anglo-Saxon economies and, in particular, the United States. The implications of Dore’s work, therefore, were profound. Debates concerning the issues of modernization and convergence have as many different strands as there are scholars working within them. However four separate though related issues stand out: first, the question of what modernization and convergence constitute, second, the problem of what stages or aspects of modernity different countries have achieved, third, the issue of whether convergence is occurring and if so, fourth, upon which country others are converging. This paper is a short presentation of a qualitative empirical investigation of the work values of male white collar university graduate employees and the institutions of employment in three large Japanese corporations. As such, it is work in progress and is a summary of the research I have undertaken thus far. The arguments I present here are for the purposes of stimulating an exchange of ideas rather than an exposition of a fully formed thesis. The purpose of my research into these two complementary areas is to produce some conclusions concerning the nature and direction of Japan’s experience of modernity. In so doing I hope to be able to make a modest but original contribution to the academic disciplines of the Sociology of Work and of Japanese Studies and to contribute to the refinement of existing theories of modernity and convergence with special reference to Japan.
Keywords: modernity, sociological theory, varieties of capitalism, lifetime employment
JEL Classification: O00, O10, O53, P00, P1, P16, M5, M54, L1, J24, J4, J41, J5
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation