Coping with modernity: man and company in contemporary Japan

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 theorised 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 organisation 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.