Dear friends and colleagues,



I am writing to invite you to the next meeting of the PhD Kenkyuukai, hosted by the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, from 12:30-1:45pm on July 18th (Wednesday).


Speaker: Stefan Heeb (University of Geneva / ISS)
Title: "Logics of Liberalization in Non-Liberal Capitalism: Japan's Trajectory of Socio-Economic Institutional Change"
Time: July 18 (Wed), 12:30-1:45pm
Location: Rm. 108, ISS / Shaken Main Building
http://www.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/guide/index.html


BIO

Stefan Heeb is a PhD candidate at the University of Geneva (Sociology), and currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Science / UTokyo. He holds BAs in Sociology (2008), Philosophy (2010) and Japanese and Chinese Studies (2018) from the University of Geneva, as well as an MA in Asian Studies (2010) from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, and the University of Geneva (2010).


ABSTRACT:
Liberalization of socio-economic institutions has been a common trend across industrialised capitalist democracies over the last four decades. Since the neoliberal policy turn, reform measures intended to release market mechanisms have been a signature phenomenon of our time. While liberalization is often mentioned alongside policies such as finance, product and labour market deregulation, welfare retrenchment or privatisation, along with other social and economic policies, it is not quite clear how these policies are theoretically and empirically related, and what justifies to think of liberalization as a unified phenomenon.


In this presentation, I attempt a comprehensive take on Japan's trajectory of liberalization. Drawing on a newly constructed database of policy discontinuities across socio-economic areas, I analyse Japan's institutional change in terms of directionality, between-field variation and the logics of liberalization behind policy change. I show how liberalization and deliberalization have manifested themselves over the period 1973 to 2013, arguing that liberalization in the productive system as opposed to the livelihood security system have followed distinct logics. My case study of Japan is complemented with a comparative analysis of other cases of non-liberal capitalism, in particular Germany.



Kenneth Mori McElwain
Associate Professor
Institute of Social Science
University of Tokyo
www.kennethmcelwain.com <http://www.kennethmcelwain.com/>
mcelwain@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp <mailto:mcelwain@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp>


<mailto:mcelwain@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp>