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This study indicates that the agricultural production of Japan from 1873 to 1922 was higher than official records indicate, and that this higher rate of Japanese production was partially responsible for the swift economic growth of Japan. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Students of management are nearly unanimous (as are managers themselves) in believing that the contemporary business corporation is in a period of dizzying change. This book represents the first time that leading experts in sociology, law, economics, and management studies have been assembled in one volume to explain the varying ways in which contemporary businesses are transforming themselves to respond to globalization, new technologies, workforce transformation, and legal change. Together their essays, whose focal point is an emerging network form of organization, bring order to the chaotic tumble of diagnoses, labels, and descriptions used to make sense of this changing world. Following an introduction by the editor, the first three chapters--by Walter Powell, David Stark, and Eleanor Westney--report systematically on change in corporate structure, strategy, and governance in the United States and Western Europe, East Asia, and the former socialist world. They separate fact from fiction and established trend from extravagant extrapolation. This is followed by commentary on them: Reinier Kraakman affirms the durability of the corporate form; David Bryce and Jitendra Singh assess organizational change from an evolutionary perspective; Robert Gibbons considers the logic of relational contracting in firms; and Charles Tilly probes the deeper historical context in which firms operate. The result is a revealing portrait of the challenges that managers face at the dawn of the twenty-first century and of how the diverse responses to those challenges are changing the nature of business enterprise throughout the world.

Japan's stunning metamorphosis from an isolated feudal regime to a major industrial power over the course of the nineteeth and early twentieth centuries has long fascinated and vexed historians. In this study, David L. Howell looks beyond the institutional and technological changes that followed Japan's reopening to the West to probe the indigenous origins of Japanese capitalism.

InWaste, Eiko Maruko Siniawer innovatively explores the many ways in which the Japanese have thought about waste-in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources-from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present. She shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of everyday life, reflecting the priorities and aspirations of the historical moment, and revealing people's ever-changing concerns and hopes. Over the course of the long postwar, Japanese society understood waste variously as backward and retrogressive, an impediment to progress, a pervasive outgrowth of mass consumption, incontrovertible proof of societal excess, the embodiment of resources squandered, and a hazard to the environment. Siniawer also shows how an encouragement of waste consciousness served as a civilizing and modernizing imperative, a moral good, an instrument for advancement, a path to self-satisfaction, an environmental commitment, an expression of identity, and more. From the late 1950s onward, a defining element of Japan's postwar experience emerged: the tension between the desire for the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension complicated the persistent search for what might be called well-being, a good life, or a life well lived. Waste is an elegant history of how people lived-how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday.

Countries commencing industrialization with relatively low levels of agricultural productivity, hence low wages, enjoy advantages that can also prove host to daunting challenges. The chief advantage is a relatively elastic supply of labor for manufacturing; the chief challenge is how to free up farm labor for factory employment through the raising of labor productivity in farming. Key to raising agricultural labor productivity is providing incentives to increase effort levels including hours worked — access to markets being crucial — and improving the quality of labor as measured by health indicators and educational attainment. The willingness of elites to promote improvements in infrastructure — physical infrastructure in the form of roads and railroads and hydroelectric systems; human capital enhancing infrastructure augmenting the educational attainment and health of populations in rural areas; and financial infrastructure — and to invest directly in factories is crucial to the process by which labor is transferred from farming to manufacturing activities. During the period 1850 to 1935 elites in China tended to resist the requisite changes while elites in Japan did not. This legacy played a crucial role in shaping the nature of post-1950 economic development in the two countries.

This text offers an accessible guide to the ways in which our growing knowledge of development in early-modern and modernising Japan can throw light on the paths that industrialisation was eventually to take across the globe.

The publication in 2000 of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence presented a seminal challenge to the prevailing, largely Eurocentric, view of the path taken by global economic development from the early-modern period onwards. Its argument that the conditions for economic growth in advanced regions of China and other parts of Asia were not significantly different from those of their counterparts in Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution stimulated a debate that has brought global history to life, while initiating a considerable reassessment of, in particular, Chinese economic history. However, it has yet to exert much influence over those who study the only country outside ‘the West’ that did achieve significant industrialisation before the Second World War, that is, Japan.

By throwing light on economic thought in the period of the Japanese Enlightenment, this book will make clear what led to the institutionalization of business and economic education, the birth of the pioneer business enterprise and of serious economic journalism and the reasons behind the success of Japanese economic development.

Following the opening of Japan's ports in 1859, Nagasaki rapidly became one of Japan's leading industrial centres, which included shipbuilding. It has been largely overshadowed by interest in the Meiji settlements of Kobe and Yokohama. Fully illustrated, the value of the work is reinforced by additional key data to be found in the appendices.

Despite recent upheavals, Japan remains one of the dominant economic powers at the end of the twentieth century. Yet the Japanese economy is one of the most misunderstood phenomena in the modern world. Aimed at graduate courses on Japan, this book will be indispensable both for students and instructors alike. Lucid explanations and comprehensive and rigorous analysis make it a natural choice for any interested in comprehending the rise of the Japanese economy. - ;Despite recent upheavals, Japan remains one of the dominant economic powers. Yet the Japanese economy is one of the most misunderstood phenomena in the modern world. Conventionally, Japan is presented as the exception to mainstream economic theory: an exception to the standard models of modern economics. This book demolishes that notion, bringing the full analytical power of economic thought to all aspects of the most dramatic economic success story in recent times. David Flath concentrates on four main themes: Japan's economic growth and development; Japan's integration with the world economy; Government policies and their effects; Economic institutions and practices. By applying common economic tools such as the Solow growth model, Modigliani's life-cycle model of saving, Becker's theory of investment, Samuelson's theory of revealed preference, Coase's exposition of the problem of social cost, and the modern theory of industrial organization, this book shows that the mainstream principles of economics apply in Japan as successfully as they do elsewhere. Revised and updated to take account of recent developments in Japanese banking and macroeconomics, this book is an indispensable resource for students and instructors alike. Lucid explanations and comprehensive and rigorous analysis make it natural choice for anyone interested in comprehending the rise of the Japanese economy. -.