Dear colleagues:

I have been following the battle over cultural arguments and Fukushima with some interest. I do not know enough about the details to make a judgment call on what culture had to do with the catastrophe, nor do I know why the English foreword brings up culture while the Japanese does not.

But it seems to me that there is a certain tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater in just declaring cultural explanations to be "crap."

There is a whole, huge, scientific (!) literature on culture (commonly defined as the social construction of
reality) and its impact on issues such as management (which is arguably an important part of the Fukushima mess). If you search for names such as Hofstede, Schwartz, or House on Google Scholar and follow the citations, you will see thousands of works linking cultural traits to specific outcomes. Obviously, these pieces can be debated, but that is true for all social science works, and in many cases, the empirical work on these matters draws a tighter connection between cause and effect than we see in political science.

There is also plenty of theory on culture, institutions, and outcomes in some parts of economics (e.g., Douglas North) and sociology (e.g., Berger & Luckman, Fligstein, Redding, Whitley). For North, for instance, culture becomes part of "intentionality"
behind the evolution of institutions. Indeed, in the context of Fukushima, one might well ask why the institutions and organizations evolved in the way they did and whether something like a "Japanese" social construction of reality had something to do with it.
(And again, I do not know the answer. But the question is legitimate.)

As I said, one can debate these arguments and findings, for all kinds of reason. But we should be careful not to dismiss them out of hand just because culture has been a taboo for most of political science (leave alone most of modern economics).

All the best,

Michael

--
Prof. Michael A. Witt, Ph.D.
INSEAD, 1 Ayer Rajah Avenue, Singapore 138676, Singapore
http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/faculty/personal/
mwitt/research/index.cfm

General Editor, Asian Business & Management

Recent and Forthcoming Books:
- Changing Japanese Capitalism, Cambridge U. Press
- The Future of Chinese Capitalism, Oxford U. Press
- Major Works in Asian Business & Management, SAGE
- The Oxford Handbook of Asian Business Systems, Oxford U. Press

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