Convergence between Western capitalism and Japan may happen but depends on American economy; if the dollar goes down then people who are trying to change the structure of Japanese economics along American lines will lose credibility; fewer and fewer (smaller and smaller proportion of) economic transactions conducted face to face diminishes the role of trust and increases the role of legal enforcement of contract; internal evolution but the dominant force is imitation, following the admired American model; inspiration of modernizers was dynamism of Silicone Valley and the enormous profits of American corporations; admired the perceived transparency of American corporations; collapse of Silicone Valley and Enron and Worldcom have undermined this belief.
In the 1980s, when Japanese firms were changing the nature of competition in international business, the work of British sociologist Ronald Dore was an invaluable resource for IB scholars seeking to understand Japanese business firms and the environment from which they were expanding. He has built on his extensive research in the field of comparative business systems to become a scholarly and skeptical analyst of some of key issues in the globalization debates of the last decade and a half. He is an outstanding scholar whose deep understanding of the empirical phenomena he studies and ability to build on it to develop theoretical contributions are highly respected not only by sociologists but also by economists, anthropologists, historians, and comparative business systems scholars. Ronald Dore’s many contributions exemplify the deep pool of scholarship on individual societies that illuminates the context of international business research.
Dore’s pioneering comparative study of employment relations and factory organization in British Factory Japanese Factory (1973) provided a solid base for understanding the patterns adopted by the Japanese in setting up production facilities abroad. His 1983 article on relational contracting in the British Journal of Sociology (“Goodwill and the spirit of market capitalism”) has had a major impact in the social science of economic relationships, including work in IB on alliances, and has been reprinted in five different volumes (including one edited by Peter Buckley in 1996). His 1986 book, Flexible Rigidities, further explored the relationships across firms and between firms and governments in a comparative context. The challenges and processes of learning across borders have been themes of his work since the 1950s, from his classic book on Land Reform in Japan (1959) through his framing of late development and the dynamics of cross-border learning in British Factory Japanese Factory to his 2000 book, Stock Market Capitalism, Welfare Capitalism: Japan and Germany versus the Anglo-Saxons. In the 1990s, he built on this work to address some of the key debates on globalization, in the 1996 volume he co-edited with Suzanne Berger on National Diversity and Global Capitalism and his 2000 book Stock Market Capitalism, Welfare Capitalism: Japan and Germany versus the Anglo-Saxons.
His academic career began in the UK, at SOAS, but has spanned borders: he has held positions at the University of British Columbia, the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, the Technical Change Centre at Sussex, the Institute for Economic growth in Delhi, Imperial College, Harvard University, and MIT.
Ronald Dore interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 31st March 2003
0:00:05 Introduction; parents; father worked for Southern Railways first as a cleaner then finally as a train driver; bright child, went to Poole Grammar School; mother was particularly keen on having a good education; while in the sixth form Japanese war began and board of education recruiting students for languages: Turkish, Persian, Chinese and Japanese; encouraged to apply; accepted and chose Turkish with second choice Chinese; on arrival at School of Oriental and African Studies, found I was on the Japanese course with thirty others; billeted with Dulwich College who arranged a few extra lessons, otherwise dedicated to learning Japanese
0:08:28 Were not taught anything formally about Japanese culture; learning to write characters was fun but acquiring fluency in grammatical structure not easy; this course did not lead to a degree; when we finished and went to the army I tripped and got a swollen knee and taken to hospital; got behind and others sent off to India in 1944; while waiting to be sent abroad brought back to S.O.A.S. to teach Japanese until demobilized in 1947; during that time took an external degree in Japanese; first student to take degree in modern Japanese studies; teachers included a newspaper correspondent married to an English woman, Frank Daniels who had taught English in Japan was Professor, and his Japanese wife; Otto van der Sprenkel marked my essays
0:13:11 Got a travelling scholarship on basis of final exam and applied for a Japanese visa; in summer 1947 went to Cambridge to catalogue libraries of Sir Ernest Mason Satow and W.G. Aston, two pioneers of Japanese studies; decided to study schools and education in Tokugawa Japan
0:15:00 Finally got to Japan beginning of 1950; from diary note first impression of Kobe harbour; went ashore 21st March, day of Spring Festival; streets decorated with Japanese flags, symptom that Japanese recovering self-confidence; to those on left the flag was a symbol of militancy; became a subject of much debate until very recently
0:18:20 Had gone to work on Tokugawa education, a thesis already started in England; also wanted to become a lecturer in Japanese institutions; Frank Daniels had designed the course which he had thought of in terms of Japanese folk-lore; 1949 took course at L.S.E from Tom Marshall in social institutions and from Norman Hotov?? in social psychology, so had some notion of sociology; in Japan registered in sociology department as a graduate student; there conceived of doing a social survey of the ward in which living; had been smuggled into Japan as cultural advisor to British Embassy, a job which later became head of British Council; lived there for six months before a student visa available; George Fraser head of mission had asked what I intended to do, can’t do a “Middletown” alone, but why not? This first put idea in mind; went to see a couple of American sociologists, Herb Passon and John Bennett; asked for hypothesis
0:23:45 Memories of Masao Maruyama; Maruyama “industry” since his death; he had tuberculosis after the war and had operation which deflated one lung; was in the army and in Hiroshima when the atom bomb dropped; destined to become professor of political science at Tokyo
0:29:40 Kawashima Takioshi, on sociology of law, very influential at that time, and Kato Shuichi, a good friend; 1960 at an American inspired conference on modernisation just after riots in Tokyo over extension of security treaty; Kawashima, Maruyama and Kato there and I argued that security treaty was a good thing as it prevented Japan from rearming; Maruyama had long term perspective and was the great left-wing leader at the time
0:34:00 Japanese behaviour during war in China; barbarous period; individual cruelty but perhaps less than China suggests; Nanking account by German head of Siemans; picture of war primarily from Tokyo war crimes trials and Chinese version exaggerated awfulness of Japanese behaviour; Russo-Japanese war less awful behaviour but in Great East Asian war wanted to destroy the Western world that had rejected them; contrast between colonial regime in Taiwan and Korea striking; Taiwanese more or less accepted Japanese dominance but resistance in Korea
0:39:35 Don’t know what people mean when they say it is impossible to understand Japanese; don’t find it more difficult to intuit what Japanese are really thinking than do in Britain, having learnt the language well and talking with Japanese over time; great diversity of people as in Britain
0:42:11 Keys to the culture impossible to give; can only advise that you soak yourself in Japan; enormous difference between Japanese as pictured by Soseki Natsume and now, much greater than in English fiction; transformations since 1950’s was one of gradual entrenchment of patterns of institutions – government, education, corporate institutions; the Thatcherite-Reagonite changes only started in the 1990’s and hasn’t got very far
0:48:08 Convergence between Western capitalism and Japan may happen but depends on American economy; if the dollar plunges then people who are trying to change the pattern of Japanese economics along American lines will lose credibility; fewer and fewer economic transactions conducted face to face diminishes the role of trust and legal enforcement of contract; internal evolution but the dominant force is imitation, following the admired American model; inspiration of modernizers was dynamism of Silicone Valley and the enormous profits of American corporations; admired the perceived transparency of American corporations; collapse of Silicone Valley and Enron and Worldcom have undermined this belief
0:53:00 Mixed model in China in which American model is dominating but there is a common underlying ethical culture; also life-time employment model in ex-State organizations in China and heavy public ownership of industry; much will depend on strategic relationship between China and U.S.A.; plausible scenario which puts China and U.S.A. in conflict in the same way as U.S.A. and Russia were; China has enormous intellectual resources; is expanding its science and technology universities; Chinese resentment that U.S.A. can fly spy planes outside Chinese territorial waters but Chinese can’t get near the U.S. coast, this imbalance produces a similar feeling to that felt in Japan by Washington and London naval treaties before the war; current aim of American policy to prevent any other rival power makes it more likely that electronic warfare will escalate; China does have the possibility with its intellectual resources of making the Pentagon think it is a serious rival; tension between U.S.A. and China will put Japan in a very difficult position; in Japan a majority of top businessmen would have no hesitation in throwing in their lot with the U.S. and continuing the present security arrangement, but there is resentment too; among the minority there is still a feeling of kinship with China
1:01:05 Of own books think the most original was ‘Diploma Disease’; theme of book is the bureaucratisation of society and mechanisms for social selection become entirely focused on educational institutions; started through going to Sri Lanka and observing that only half of the annual crop of graduates could ever get a job. They were taking the jobs previously done by A level students etc.; more scholarly work was ‘British Factory – Japanese Factory’; most readable was ‘Shinohata’
1:08:38 Memories of Ernest Gellner; had just joined L.S.E. in 1949 and went to his lectures on political philosophy; became colleagues in 1960 at the L.S.E.; enlightenment thinker is a good description of him; wrote in haste but inspirationally; best book was the one on nationalism
1:15:45 Work of David Glass influenced me at the beginning and got me interested in population studies; thought most highly of Max Weber’s work; David Reisman also very interesting, particularly ‘Lonely Crowd’ which influenced my thinking on Japanese society; Homans also insightful, and have great respect for Gary Runciman
Convergence between Western capitalism and Japan may happen but depends on American economy; if the dollar goes down then people who are trying to change the structure of Japanese economics along American lines will lose credibility; fewer and fewer (smaller and smaller proportion of) economic transactions conducted face to face diminishes the role of trust and increases the role of legal enforcement of contract; internal evolution but the dominant force is imitation, following the admired American model; inspiration of modernizers was dynamism of Silicone Valley and the enormous profits of American corporations; admired the perceived transparency of American corporations; collapse of Silicone Valley and Enron and Worldcom have undermined this belief.
In the 1980s, when Japanese firms were changing the nature of competition in international business, the work of British sociologist Ronald Dore was an invaluable resource for IB scholars seeking to understand Japanese business firms and the environment from which they were expanding. He has built on his extensive research in the field of comparative business systems to become a scholarly and skeptical analyst of some of key issues in the globalization debates of the last decade and a half. He is an outstanding scholar whose deep understanding of the empirical phenomena he studies and ability to build on it to develop theoretical contributions are highly respected not only by sociologists but also by economists, anthropologists, historians, and comparative business systems scholars. Ronald Dore’s many contributions exemplify the deep pool of scholarship on individual societies that illuminates the context of international business research.
Dore’s pioneering comparative study of employment relations and factory organization in British Factory Japanese Factory (1973) provided a solid base for understanding the patterns adopted by the Japanese in setting up production facilities abroad. His 1983 article on relational contracting in the British Journal of Sociology (“Goodwill and the spirit of market capitalism”) has had a major impact in the social science of economic relationships, including work in IB on alliances, and has been reprinted in five different volumes (including one edited by Peter Buckley in 1996). His 1986 book, Flexible Rigidities, further explored the relationships across firms and between firms and governments in a comparative context. The challenges and processes of learning across borders have been themes of his work since the 1950s, from his classic book on Land Reform in Japan (1959) through his framing of late development and the dynamics of cross-border learning in British Factory Japanese Factory to his 2000 book, Stock Market Capitalism, Welfare Capitalism: Japan and Germany versus the Anglo-Saxons. In the 1990s, he built on this work to address some of the key debates on globalization, in the 1996 volume he co-edited with Suzanne Berger on National Diversity and Global Capitalism and his 2000 book Stock Market Capitalism, Welfare Capitalism: Japan and Germany versus the Anglo-Saxons.
His academic career began in the UK, at SOAS, but has spanned borders: he has held positions at the University of British Columbia, the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, the Technical Change Centre at Sussex, the Institute for Economic growth in Delhi, Imperial College, Harvard University, and MIT.
Ronald Dore interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 31st March 2003
0:00:05 Introduction; parents; father worked for Southern Railways first as a cleaner then finally as a train driver; bright child, went to Poole Grammar School; mother was particularly keen on having a good education; while in the sixth form Japanese war began and board of education recruiting students for languages: Turkish, Persian, Chinese and Japanese; encouraged to apply; accepted and chose Turkish with second choice Chinese; on arrival at School of Oriental and African Studies, found I was on the Japanese course with thirty others; billeted with Dulwich College who arranged a few extra lessons, otherwise dedicated to learning Japanese
0:08:28 Were not taught anything formally about Japanese culture; learning to write characters was fun but acquiring fluency in grammatical structure not easy; this course did not lead to a degree; when we finished and went to the army I tripped and got a swollen knee and taken to hospital; got behind and others sent off to India in 1944; while waiting to be sent abroad brought back to S.O.A.S. to teach Japanese until demobilized in 1947; during that time took an external degree in Japanese; first student to take degree in modern Japanese studies; teachers included a newspaper correspondent married to an English woman, Frank Daniels who had taught English in Japan was Professor, and his Japanese wife; Otto van der Sprenkel marked my essays
0:13:11 Got a travelling scholarship on basis of final exam and applied for a Japanese visa; in summer 1947 went to Cambridge to catalogue libraries of Sir Ernest Mason Satow and W.G. Aston, two pioneers of Japanese studies; decided to study schools and education in Tokugawa Japan
0:15:00 Finally got to Japan beginning of 1950; from diary note first impression of Kobe harbour; went ashore 21st March, day of Spring Festival; streets decorated with Japanese flags, symptom that Japanese recovering self-confidence; to those on left the flag was a symbol of militancy; became a subject of much debate until very recently
0:18:20 Had gone to work on Tokugawa education, a thesis already started in England; also wanted to become a lecturer in Japanese institutions; Frank Daniels had designed the course which he had thought of in terms of Japanese folk-lore; 1949 took course at L.S.E from Tom Marshall in social institutions and from Norman Hotov?? in social psychology, so had some notion of sociology; in Japan registered in sociology department as a graduate student; there conceived of doing a social survey of the ward in which living; had been smuggled into Japan as cultural advisor to British Embassy, a job which later became head of British Council; lived there for six months before a student visa available; George Fraser head of mission had asked what I intended to do, can’t do a “Middletown” alone, but why not? This first put idea in mind; went to see a couple of American sociologists, Herb Passon and John Bennett; asked for hypothesis
0:23:45 Memories of Masao Maruyama; Maruyama “industry” since his death; he had tuberculosis after the war and had operation which deflated one lung; was in the army and in Hiroshima when the atom bomb dropped; destined to become professor of political science at Tokyo
0:29:40 Kawashima Takioshi, on sociology of law, very influential at that time, and Kato Shuichi, a good friend; 1960 at an American inspired conference on modernisation just after riots in Tokyo over extension of security treaty; Kawashima, Maruyama and Kato there and I argued that security treaty was a good thing as it prevented Japan from rearming; Maruyama had long term perspective and was the great left-wing leader at the time
0:34:00 Japanese behaviour during war in China; barbarous period; individual cruelty but perhaps less than China suggests; Nanking account by German head of Siemans; picture of war primarily from Tokyo war crimes trials and Chinese version exaggerated awfulness of Japanese behaviour; Russo-Japanese war less awful behaviour but in Great East Asian war wanted to destroy the Western world that had rejected them; contrast between colonial regime in Taiwan and Korea striking; Taiwanese more or less accepted Japanese dominance but resistance in Korea
0:39:35 Don’t know what people mean when they say it is impossible to understand Japanese; don’t find it more difficult to intuit what Japanese are really thinking than do in Britain, having learnt the language well and talking with Japanese over time; great diversity of people as in Britain
0:42:11 Keys to the culture impossible to give; can only advise that you soak yourself in Japan; enormous difference between Japanese as pictured by Soseki Natsume and now, much greater than in English fiction; transformations since 1950’s was one of gradual entrenchment of patterns of institutions – government, education, corporate institutions; the Thatcherite-Reagonite changes only started in the 1990’s and hasn’t got very far
0:48:08 Convergence between Western capitalism and Japan may happen but depends on American economy; if the dollar plunges then people who are trying to change the pattern of Japanese economics along American lines will lose credibility; fewer and fewer economic transactions conducted face to face diminishes the role of trust and legal enforcement of contract; internal evolution but the dominant force is imitation, following the admired American model; inspiration of modernizers was dynamism of Silicone Valley and the enormous profits of American corporations; admired the perceived transparency of American corporations; collapse of Silicone Valley and Enron and Worldcom have undermined this belief
0:53:00 Mixed model in China in which American model is dominating but there is a common underlying ethical culture; also life-time employment model in ex-State organizations in China and heavy public ownership of industry; much will depend on strategic relationship between China and U.S.A.; plausible scenario which puts China and U.S.A. in conflict in the same way as U.S.A. and Russia were; China has enormous intellectual resources; is expanding its science and technology universities; Chinese resentment that U.S.A. can fly spy planes outside Chinese territorial waters but Chinese can’t get near the U.S. coast, this imbalance produces a similar feeling to that felt in Japan by Washington and London naval treaties before the war; current aim of American policy to prevent any other rival power makes it more likely that electronic warfare will escalate; China does have the possibility with its intellectual resources of making the Pentagon think it is a serious rival; tension between U.S.A. and China will put Japan in a very difficult position; in Japan a majority of top businessmen would have no hesitation in throwing in their lot with the U.S. and continuing the present security arrangement, but there is resentment too; among the minority there is still a feeling of kinship with China
1:01:05 Of own books think the most original was ‘Diploma Disease’; theme of book is the bureaucratisation of society and mechanisms for social selection become entirely focused on educational institutions; started through going to Sri Lanka and observing that only half of the annual crop of graduates could ever get a job. They were taking the jobs previously done by A level students etc.; more scholarly work was ‘British Factory – Japanese Factory’; most readable was ‘Shinohata’
1:08:38 Memories of Ernest Gellner; had just joined L.S.E. in 1949 and went to his lectures on political philosophy; became colleagues in 1960 at the L.S.E.; enlightenment thinker is a good description of him; wrote in haste but inspirationally; best book was the one on nationalism
1:15:45 Work of David Glass influenced me at the beginning and got me interested in population studies; thought most highly of Max Weber’s work; David Reisman also very interesting, particularly ‘Lonely Crowd’ which influenced my thinking on Japanese society; Homans also insightful, and have great respect for Gary Runciman