Toward a Conceptual Framework for Understanding Institutional Change in Japanese Capitalism: Structural Transformations and Organizational Diversity

Abstract

This paper reviews several macro-level concepts describing institutional change in advanced capitalism: financialization, dualization and transnationalization. The review shows that these perspectives may complement one another, but also suffer from a common limitation — namely, the failure to conceptualize and explain the relationship between institutional change and the diversity of organizational forms. Each of these key concepts describes the fact that institutions may have different kinds of effects for different kinds of firms. But this diversity of organizational structures, strategies and practices remains several understudied. This gap in the literature also limits our understanding of how firms are important drivers of institutional change. The paper concludes with a central message: namely that the study organizational diversity and its implications for strategic responses to institutional pressure is an important agenda for the comparative capitalism literature. This paper is developed in conjunction with the INCAS project “Understanding institutional change in Asia: A comparative perspective with Europe” (INCAS). In reviewing the relevant literatures, the further focus of this paper is to review the empirical literature related to East Asia, especially Japan.