(3) Pathways of modernity
I. Japan as Orientalism or Japan as the pangolin society
"The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways... Their soldiers are disciplined to the hilt but are also insubordinate." [Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, page 2, 1946]
"Here come the Japanese. They are the most innovative imitators, the hardest-working hedonists, the lewdest prudes, the most courteous and cruelest and kindest of people. Rich yet wealthless, confident but confused, they have just staged one of the greatest comebacks in history." [Peter Trasker, Inside Japan, page 4-5, 1987]
NB: For those interested, the article by the British social anthropologist, Mary Douglas, that I refer to is "Animals in Lele Religious Symbolism" (Africa 26(1):46-58 [1957])
II. Modernity, modernization, and the anomaly of Japan
A. Western social theory and the special claims of Western modernity
B. What is modernity?
- the rise of individual subjectivity and a distinct realm of private affairs
- the emergence of the nation-state and an international polity of nation-states
- the rationalization of life and the emergence of bureaucratic institutions
- the prominence of commercial exchange, private enterprise, and industrial manufacturing
- the secularization of world-views, the decline of religion, and its replacement by science and scientific explanations
- the decline of the rural and the massive concentrations of populations in urban, metropolitan regions
B. Is modernity singular or plural? Has Japan been converging with or diverging from or leapfrogging the West?
III. Eli Whitney, Henry Ford, and Ray Kroc: Shaping the modern economy
A. Eli Whitney, New Haven, and the "American manufacturing system"
B. Henry Ford and mass production: huge factory complexes to produce long runs of standardized goods on a moving assembly line with uniform parts by the segmented division of labor of a large body of semi-skilled workers paid well enough to afford the products of their labor and supervised by a central bureaucracy of white-collar managers.
"For some, the concept of 'Fordism' captures all things modern about an economy: it is associated with scale, progress, science, control, technology, rationality, including the sea of disciplined workers that poured through the factory gates each working day. More than this, the concept of Fordism has been held up as a symbol of a new kind of society, indeed as a modernizing discourse: one that involves a new type of worker, a different kind of lifestyle, and specific form of state and civil society." [John Allen, "Fordism and Modern Industry," p. 281, 1996]
C. From manufacturing to service: "The McDonaldization of Society" (George Ritzer)?
To sociologist George Ritzer, McDonald's brought Fordism to the service sector, offering food with efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. Ritzer generalized McDonaldization as "the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world."
IV. Toyota's twist on Ford
Toyota-ism: "just in time" inventories, multiple product assembly lines, subsidiary chains, Quality Control circles, "lifetime employment"
{Optional for those interested: The question of who is modern and what has been and is the relationship of Westernization and modernization is still very much a controversial issue with very serious consequences. It was not resolved in the twentieth century. For a strong polemic on one side of the question, see the essay by the Harvard scholar Daniel Pipes, "You Need Beethoven to Modernize" (Middle East Quarterly, 1998)
V. Beyond modernity: post-modernity or globality?
A. What is post-modernity?
- the unified, secure, coherent interior identity of the modern subject—the post-Renaissance sovereign individual is yielding to the fluid, fragmented, transitory, sometimes contradictory and unresolved plural identities that we move into and out of
- the nation state is no longer able, analogously, to sustain itself as a dominant center of power, and is undermined from above by multinational corporations and transnational political movements and from within by new local allegiances
- a shift from "Fordist" assembly-line style mass manufacturing to flexible specialization—multiple product lines, flexible labor allocations, information technologies, fast capital
- mass consumption gives way to multiple lifestyle niches, which has fragmented class solidarities into a new landscape of consumer groups and lifestyle clusters
- the collapse of firm hierarchies of thought and "master narratives," replaced by "stylistic promiscuity favoring eclecticism and the mixing of codes: parody, pastiche, irony, playfulness, and the celebration of the surface 'depthlessness' of culture" (Mike Featherstone)
- the revival of religious fundamentalism and primordial ethnicities that we thought had disappeared under modern political conditions
- the radical shrinking of time and distance ("time-space compression" as David Harvey puts it) that fosters a global simultaneity
B. What is globality?
Roland Robertson, "Globality," Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences [online edition]: 6254-6258 [2002]
Nayan Chanda, "Globalization in the Mirror of History," a Powerpoint presentation at YaleGlobal Online, November 19, 2002
Emory University, "The Globalization Website"
C. Are Nike and Bandai taking us beyond Ford and Toyota?
Editorial: "The Post-National Economy: Goodbye Widget, Hello Nike," Far Eastern Economic Review, August 29, 1996
Editorial: "The Tyranny of Terminology: Why Companies Matter More Than Countries," Far Eastern Economic Review, September 5, 1996
William Mougaya, "Small Screen, Smaller World,"October 11, 2002, YaleGlobal Online. For a flash presentation of this article, see "The Globalization of the Television Supply Chain: Small Screen, Smaller World," also at YaleGlobal Online