Reprogramming Japan: The High Tech Crisis under Communitarian Capitalism (Cornell Studies in Political Economy) - Hardcover

Anchordoguy, Marie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801441870 ISBN 13: 9780801441875

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2005

Synopsis

How have state policies influenced the development of Japan's telecommunications, computer hardware, computer software, and semiconductor industries and their stagnation since the 1990s? Marie Anchordoguy's book examines how the performance of these industries and the economy as a whole are affected by the socially embedded nature of Japan's capitalist system, which she calls "communitarian capitalism."

Reprogramming Japan shows how the institutions and policies that emerged during and after World War II to maintain communitarian norms, such as the lifetime employment system, seniority-based wages, enterprise unions, a centralized credit-based financial system, industrial groups, the main bank corporate governance system, and industrial policies, helped promote high tech industries. When conditions shifted in the 1980s and 1990s, these institutions and policies did not suit the new environment, in which technological change was rapid and unpredictable and foreign products could no longer be legally reverse-engineered. Despite economic stagnation, leaders were slow to change because of deep social commitments. Once the crisis became acute, the bureaucracy and corporate leaders started to contest and modify key institutions and practices. Rather than change at different times according to their specific economic interests, Japanese firms and the state have made similar slow, incremental changes.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"Marie Anchordoguy’s clear and informative book should attract a wide variety of readers from political science, sociology, Japanese studies, and business. The central concept of communitarian capitalism, with its emphasis on risk avoidance and circumscribed competition, strikes me as a useful corrective to excessively functionalist versions of the ‘capitalist developmental state’ argument."—Gregory W. Noble, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo

About the Author:

Marie Anchordoguy is Professor of Japan Studies at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Computers, Inc.: Japan's Challenge to IBM.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0801441870
• ISBN 13: 9780801441875
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280