You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book sheds new light on the role of industrial districts in the industrial development of the past and present. Industrial districts, which refer to the geographical concentration of enterprises producing similar or closely related commodities in a small area, play a significant role in the development of manufacturing industries not only historically in Europe and Japan but also at present in emerging East Asian economies, such as China and Vietnam and low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The book identifies similarities in the development patterns of industrial districts in history and the present and analyzes the reasons for these similarities. More specifically, the book exam...
In this important new book, the authors explore how production was organized in the context of the economic development of modern Japan. Production organizations are taken to mean the long-term relationships which economic agents create for production, based on employment contracts or long-term transactions. This includes hierarchical organizations such as factories and corporations, but also flexible arangements such as subcontracting. Modern Japanese economic development is characterized by the co-evolution of these two types of production organizations, while American economic development in the modern period is characterized by the development of a mass production system based on large hierarchical organizations. The question is raised as to why and how a certain type of organization proliferated in a certain industry in a certain period, and what the role of that organization was in coordinating production and giving incentives to the economic agents involved. The result is a comparative institutional analysis of the organizational foundations of Japanese economic development in the modern period.
'Recent events have rendered Japan's lost decades all the more relevant to the rest of us. Rick Garside, in this wide-ranging and accessible account, explores the political economy of Japan's great stagnation with an eye toward describing how other advanced economies can avoid going down the same path.' – Barry Eichengreen, University of California, Berkeley, US 'Professor Garside's timely book transcends the national preoccupation suggested by its title. From one viewpoint this is a case study (admittedly on a grand scale) of the experience of one country in one historical period. But in analyzing the dynamic relationship between Japan's post-war economic miracle and its chronic stagnatio...
In this book David Wittner situates Japan’s Meiji Era experience of technology transfer and industrial modernization within the realm of culture, politics, and symbolism, examining how nineteenth century beliefs in civilization and enlightenment influenced the process of technological choice. Through case studies of the iron and silk industries, Wittner argues that the Meiji government’s guiding principle was not simply economic development or providing a technical model for private industry as is commonly claimed. Choice of technique was based on the ability of a technological artifact to import Western "civilization" to Japan: Meiji officials’ technological choices were firmly situat...
Expanding the historical understanding of the myriad ways in which the transfer of technology and business methods unfolded within East Asia, Strands of Modernization examines the translation of technologies among competing developing economies.