Japan as institutional counterfactual: Knowledge, learning and power

This chapter examines many Anglo-Saxon assumptions about the importance of objective knowledge, the scientific method and individualism which do not sit easily in a Japanese context. Within Japan's institutional framework, close community relationships amongst long-term colleagues lower the marginal cost of information transfer and enable insiders to act as a group, able to ostracize and retaliate against those who break their code. The power relations that embed Japanese organizations in their social context are dominated by Japan's pre-industrial precepts that privilege the collective over the individual. Japan's pre-industrial history and approach to industrialization emerged from more than two-centuries of relative international isolation that saw the evolution of an extraordinarily resilient steady state hierarchical administrative and social system. Whereas Europe's older universities pre-dated industrial society, Japan's university system has developed in tandem with its plan-rational transition from late-feudalism to economic and technological superpower.