Organizer: Samuel Yamashita, Pomona College
Chair: John C. Campbell, University of Michigan
Charles Weathers, Temple University, Japan
Prior to World War II, Japan's factories were plagued by deficiencies in management practice which aggravated worker unrest and undermined efforts to raise productivity. Since 1950, improvements in labor management and work design have helped manufacturers to achieve dramatic improvements in labor-management relations and productivity. Innovations in management practice result largely from interaction of public and private sectors during the first two postwar decades, and I argue that such interaction is accordingly critical in shaping contemporary industrial relations. Following the war, fear that failure to improve manufacturing productivity would doom Japan to economic dependency drove large manufacturers and state ministries alike to strive to upgrade management. Facilitating innovation and dissemination of new methods were a number of organizations which blurred the distinctions between public and private; important cases included quasi-private organizations such as the Japan Union of Scientists and Engineers and enterprises like Yahata Steel Corporation, which operated as a virtual public corporation, and was arguably the most important innovator of managerial practice in this period.
Jay Marmé, Indiana University
The State has intervened at a number of levels in the economic development of post WWII Japan's various regions. These interventions have taken the form of tax incentives, subsidy payments and low interest loans to manufacturers as well as direct public investment in government created "technopolises." The State's efforts to reduce regional income disparities through a system of incentives and investments has been judged by some researchers as unnecessary and by others as too meager to have the desired effect. This paper assesses the evidence brought forward by certain economists and regional planners and analyzes the assumptions underlying their work.
Azumi Ann Takata, University of Michigan
The modern corporation was introduced into Japan in the late 1850s as a new organizational form for business enterprises. Within approximately fifty years of its introduction, the modern corporation as an organizational form was accepted as one of a handful of legitimate ways to organize a business enterprise, and became the most common form, both in number and in capitalization, to run a business enterprise in Japan. I argue that the process by which the modern corporation became a part of the institutional fabric of the Japanese society presents an interesting contrast to its path of development in the West, and provides an important clue to the way modernization proceeded in Meiji Japan. In this paper, I briefly review the history of the introduction of the modern corporation as an organizational form into Japan, discuss the implications of early conceptualizations of the modern corporation to the process of diffusion in Japanese society, and examine the profile of companies using a statistical sample of 2,000 companies from the latter half of the Meiji period.
Unlike the modern corporation in the West, which developed primarily as a legal form to protect the property rights of corporate actors and functioned as an organizational form for public as well as private purposes, the corporation in Meiji Japan was exclusively a for-profit business organization. Interest in the corporation developed initially in international trade, but soon after the Meiji Restoration, the corporation became a central part of the government's industrialization policy. It was seen as the organizational form for key infrastructure and industrial enterprises such as railroad, banking, inter ocean shipping, and cotton spinning.
The conceptualization of the modern corporation as the organizational form for business enterprises has several important implications for the diffusion of this form throughout the Japanese society. First, because the corporation was seen as an organizational form for business organizations, it was used only in the for profit business sector. Secondly, the governmental requirement to organize key industries such as railroad and banking using corporations not only enhanced the acceptance of this organizational form for these purposes, but also stimulated an interest in organizing related industries using this form. Moreover, the corporate form of organization tended to be adopted with the technology of new industries, making this form more prevalent in newly introduced industries. Finally, by the end of the Meiji period, the corporation was so well institutionalized as the preferred form of business organization that small businesses, for which the form did not make sense economically, also adopted the form. I illustrate these arguments using data on a sample of 2,000 companies from the Meiji period.
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