Imitation and innovation : the transfer of Western organizational patterns to Meiji Japan

Japan in the Meiji period, 1868–1912, experienced the most remarkable social transformation in modern history. In less than half a century, the Japanese adopted from the advanced Western nations a phenomenally wide range of new institutions, manufacturing methods, and communications technologies in a successful effort to convert their country into a modern nation. Eleanor Westney investigates in fascinating detail both the influence of traditional Japanese culture on the evolution of organizational patterns and processes and the transforming impact of the new organizations on the culture.Focusing on three case histories—the police, the postal system, and the mass-circulation newspaper—Westney demonstrates how decisions were implemented, thus revealing a great deal not only about Japan but also about the ways organizations simultaneously shape and are shaped by their social contexts. Her analysis challenges many assumptions about the pattern of Japanese development and offers useful insights into the character of contemporary Japan.Most industrializing societies have at some time in their history attempted to imitate the organizations of other societies, but until now there has been very little systematic scrutiny of what is actually imitated and what adjustments and innovations occur. This book is a signal contribution to the literature on the transfer of social technologies across cultures. It will be of high interest to historians, sociologists, organization theorists, and specialists in Japanese institutions and comparative development. White. A later colloquium on the comparative study of control systems, sponsored by the Taniguchi Foundation and organized by Umesao Tadao and Matsubara Masatake, provided some valuable comments from a number of Japanese and international scholars, including Harumi Befu, Fujii Joji, Hamashita Takeshi, Hata Nobuyuki, Kurt Radke, Suzuki Tadashi, and Yano Torn. I owe an enormous debt to the many Japanese scholars and researchers who have compiled the voluminous histories of the organizations whose development I trace in this book. Few societies provide sociologists with such an embarrassment of riches, from the thirty-volume compendium of materials on the history of the postaltelecommunications system of Japan to the scholarly articles on the transport system of the post in the early Meiji period in one particular prefecture. Thanks are due to Michael Aronson of Harvard University Press for his patience and encouragement through seemingly endless rewritings. I am grateful to my sister, Jean Westney, for entering two very long chapters into the computer one hot August. Finally, I want to thank my parents for their unfailing love and encouragement. They have been waiting for this book for a long time. Acknowledgments Contents Tables and Figures Introduction 1. The Processes of Cross-Societal Emulation 2. The Police 3. The Postal System 4. The Newspaper Conclusion Notes Index