Keywords

Just over a decade ago, the Japanese and Ethiopian governments embarked on an ambitious joint program of “lesson-sharing.” Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, the technocratic and autocratic Meles Zenawi, would meet regularly with experts from Japan’s leading government think-tank to understand and emulate how Japan had achieved rapid industrialization. This “high level industrial policy dialogue” would, in time, result in a number of direct interventions, the most notable of these involving the deployment of Japanese—and eventually Ethiopian—consultants to Ethiopian factories and other workplaces. The aim was to teach Ethiopian workers kaizen: the productivity methods and mindsets associated with export powerhouses like Toyota in the 1950s and 1960s. A dedicated government-funded Ethiopian Kaizen Institute (EKI) was established in 2011 for this purpose, and Japan’s official aid agency agreed for its part to finance the Japanese consultants. Before long, Ethiopia was being touted as a model for the entire continent due to the fierce commitment of its government to kaizen.

When I began researching kaizen’s journey to Ethiopia, I expected to engage primarily with theoretical concepts from political science and anthropology. As a scholar who loosely locates herself in the field of development studies, I felt that these somewhat familiar disciplines would lend academic depth to an empirical phenomenon decried by many as almost laughably facile. A common response to learning of my research topic, especially (but not only) among non-experts, was disbelief and even mild mockery. How could either party possibly think this would work? Did this not precisely demonstrate so many of the age-old problems with foreign aid: that technocrats were forever trying to meddle in local settings without taking culture and context into account?

While I understood these concerns, I wanted to dig deeper. To group all foreign interventions for economic development into one huge category, as international development cooperation’s critics often tend to do, risks homogenizing a wide variety of approaches. In the past 70 years, Ethiopia has witnessed every foreign development prescription under the sun. At the moment, projects run the gamut from the construction of a mega-dam by Chinese state-owned enterprises, the training of civil society organizations by the EU, and the provision of emergency healthcare in crisis-affected areas by the United States. Can these all really feature the same underlying dynamics, and what does the existence of this particular Japanese intervention say about the state of development cooperation today? In answering these questions, I needed to explore the social, cultural, and political desires that lay behind both the sending and receiving sides of this particular development intervention. Ethiopian kaizen, I suspected, was more than just a discrete technical fix to an economic problem.

This chapter is the story of how my disciplinary locus shifted during the course of this research, the findings of which were published in the interdisciplinary journal Global Perspectives (Fourie, 2020). More specifically, it is the story of how historical case studies, and more specifically the concept of low modernism that emerged from their exploration, came to play an indispensable role. As shall be shown, it was a small group of historians who first observed anthropologist James Scott’s influential concept of high modernism and created from this its counterpart, low modernism. Applying this “traveling concept” to the study of contemporary development cooperation allowed me not only to demonstrate historical continuities between past and present but also to further operationalize low modernism and the move toward its cautious and contingent theorization. Accompanying this personal reflection is, then, a plea for these two fields of study—history and development studies—to engage in more and deeper conceptual encounters that play off the relative strengths of each.

The Position of History in Development Studies

In order to explain how history came to inform my study into kaizen in Ethiopia—and why its inclusion was by no means a given—it is useful here to briefly explain how the boundaries around the field of development studies have emerged and been maintained.

As with other fields appended by the word “studies,” development studies is not a single discipline. In 2017, the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) reached the end of a lengthy consultation into the state of the art. Its resulting definition described development studies as

a multi- and interdisciplinary field of study that seeks to understand social, economic, political, technological, ecological, gender and cultural aspects of societal change at the local, national, regional and global levels, and the interplay between these different levels and the stakeholders involved. (Mönks et al., 2019, p. 3)

Another highly influential academic body, the Development Studies Association (DSA), locates the roots of the field in “anthropology, economics, sociology, politics and geography” but notes that “it may also combine with others such as psychology, law, management, natural science, history, agriculture or engineering” (DSA, n.d.).

In theory, then, the field should hold a substantial place for history—many branches of which, after all, concern themselves with social change. However, the above conceptualizations are extremely broad and must, therefore, be understood in conjunction with the central empirical questions with which the field has tended to concern itself. A quantitative content analysis of four major development studies journals between 2000 and 2015 found a focus on four common themes: foreign aid, poverty reduction, environmental sustainability, and “development challenges” (i.e., the perceived domestic barriers to development in low-income countries) (Madrueño & Tezanos Vázguez, 2018). More specifically still, development has often centered around attempts by “trustees” to effect progress among groups who are in some way deemed incapable of affecting this change themselves—what Gillian Hart (2001) has influentially termed “big D” development.

Despite recent attempts by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to broaden this notion to the Global North, the Global South remains the primary target of such efforts. The concepts “Global North” and “Global South,” while controversial, remain in common usage due in part to the lack of a perceived alternative. Without taking a normative stance on their suitability, this chapter retains their mainstream usage for descriptive purposes. The latter term, therefore, “denotes regions outside Europe and North America, mostly (though not all) low-income and often politically or culturally marginalized” (Dados & Connell, 2012), while the former term refers to its economic and political inverse.

If development studies can thus be said to analyze intentional interventions into the improvement of a target population’s socio-economic position, we can begin to see why the social sciences might dominate. This would not be inherently problematic were it not for two additional developments in the past few decades. Firstly, social scientists studying development interventions have increasingly been split into two tracks, each of which regards the other with suspicion. The first is a policy-oriented arm, which aims essentially to refine the policy toolbox that trustees have at their disposal, is often populated by development economists and informed by econometric methods. As Bruce Currie-Alder puts it, “the field has shifted away from descriptions of historical patterns of broad social change … toward causal explanation that links particular interventions—in policy or technology—to their outcomes at demonstrable scales or specific dimensions of human well-being” (2016, p. 6). This is in keeping with the general distrust of grand narratives that marked the behavioral turn in many social sciences from the 1970s onward. We see it also in what Charles Gore (2000) has termed the rise of “ahistorical performance assessment,” namely the tendency to judge particular countries, governments, or other units of analysis along a uniform metric regardless of their individual development trajectories. Examples of this abound in the various development indexes of bodies such as the UN and the World Bank. This move toward predictability and uniformity has led even to a substantial role for methods usually associated with the hard sciences, as witnessed in the rise of randomized controlled trials in development economics.

This solutions-oriented approach can now be said to occupy the mainstream of development studies, as several studies have found. The above-mentioned analysis by Madrueño and Tezanos Vázguez (2018) concludes that development studies is “cross-disciplinary” rather than interdisciplinary and, moreover, dominated by development economics. Similarly, Mitra et al. (2020) found a low level of citations between articles from different disciplines concerned with development; the majority that did exist took place between articles in development economics, development studies, and economics. The disciplines that the authors considered in this study were “generalist” development studies, sociology, anthropology, economics, development economics, geography, and political science. History was not included.

On the other side of the divide stand more critical analyses that, as EADI puts it, “question the very meaning of development and the politics underlying the development enterprise” (Mönks et al. 2019, 227). Here, anthropology and critical human geography predominate, although heterodox economics also contributes. Such analyses make frequent references to certain historical phenomena—particularly colonialism and Cold War geopolitical rivalry—but primarily in order to deconstruct development, which they view primarily as a discourse (for an early and seminal example, see Escobar, 1984). As such, they remain as wary of meso-level analysis as their economist counterparts, with an added distrust of materialist explanations of historical socio-economic change. Ethnography and discourse analysis are popular methods of data collection, and self-described historians seem to be thinly represented.

I am using a broad brush here, of course, and there are notable individual exceptions to these general trends. But when analyzing the (inter)disciplinary underpinnings of the field, history as a discipline has been surprisingly marginal. None of the working groups of the DSA or EADI (each has 17) focus explicitly on history. Although both have featured groups that focus on post-colonialism and decolonizing development studies, there exist well-documented tensions between postcolonial social theory and development studies (Power, 2003) that have not much been obviated since Christine Sylvester referred to them as “two giant islands of analysis and enterprise [that] stake out a large part of the world and operate within it or with respect to it as if the other had a bad smell” (1999, pp. 703–704). Not least, there are limitations to refracting the history of development interventions entirely through the lens of colonialism and North-South relations. As the field of global history has shown, decentering the North in order to also examine historical South-South and intra-South dynamics can prove extremely fruitful (see, for example, Hatzky, 2015). Previous North-North interventions may even be understudied qua “big D development”: the North today contains endless internal pockets of assimilated or partly assimilated populations once deemed undeveloped “others” by modernizing elites.

The relative neglect of historical perspectives in particularly the policy-oriented realm of development studies has at times earned it the reputation of being faddish and prone to hype (Hobbes, 2014). As an anonymous practitioner warned their aspiring successors in The Guardian, “the ecosystem of aid and development entities is in a constant state of evolution … Today’s brilliant innovation will be tomorrow’s old hat. And the practice that you so passionately evangelize this week could well be proven harmful the next” (“J”, 2016). Every field has paradigms that rise and fade from popularity. But because development policymakers and practitioners must “sell” interventions to distant parties as discrete packages that center around ever-evolving “theories of change” (modernization, import-substitution, the developmental state, structural adjustment, the green economy, and so forth), it is perhaps particularly noticeable here.

Efforts to bring kaizen to Ethiopia are prone to exactly such accusations of faddishness. And, indeed, within the few years that I have been studying the topic, political upheavals have transformed Ethiopia. An ideological re-orientation, two changes in Prime Minister, a civil war, and a pandemic (not to mention several more gradual shifts on the Japanese side) have all combined to put the future of the entire project in peril. At the time of writing, few of the goals set out by the EKI seem close to being met on time, or perhaps at all.

I would like to argue here, however, that the travails of this intervention do not mean it is not worth examining more deeply. In addition, for me it turned out to be worth studying not just from more traditionally development studies-oriented disciplines such as development economics, anthropology, or even political science but from the vantage point of history.

Where Other Disciplines Were Helpful and Where They Fell Short

In making the methodological and theoretical choices that would inform my study, I was confronted with possibilities from a range of disciplines. I drew on these to varying degrees but ultimately found the most useful contributions in the works of historians—an unexpected development.

From a development economics perspective, Ethiopian kaizen should be judged primarily on its ability to increase the productivity of target firms across entire sectors. Depending on how successful this particular intervention is deemed to be, the prescription will be either to tweak or to abandon it in other African countries. This research aim is not unimportant, but it is difficult to do in the Ethiopian context; only much more limited impact assessments have been undertaken (e.g., Getahun Tadesse, 2018). It also delivers a rather incomplete picture. Such assessments cannot tell us why kaizen is implemented, nor how it interacts with the existing worldviews of stakeholders and the institutions in which they are embedded.

Political science and critical human geography, with their interest in how ideas about development diffuse among or travel between polities, could be drafted in to answer some of these questions. Each has, in recent years, created sophisticated typologies and theories to explain (in the case of the former) and critique (in the case of the latter) these processes. Some of these theories proved valuable in my previous research into Ethiopian and Kenyan elites’ engagement with East Asian “models” of development. These elites, I found, selectively emulated those East Asian countries whose historical trajectories and cultural contexts they perceived as similar to their own (Fourie, 2014, 2015). Thus, concepts such as lesson-drawing, cross-societal emulation, policy assemblages, policy mobilities, and policy transfer provide a vocabulary through which we can talk about traveling ideas and demonstrate their prevalence. But in this case, again, I encountered limits to the usefulness of such theoretical frameworks. I was not aiming to contribute to covering laws explaining the conditions around which certain types of transfer take place. On the other hand, critical human geography, with its more constructivist and contingent approach, seemed to demand first and foremost an engagement with scale and spatiality, as well as an a priori opposition to the “political-economic construction of neoliberal globalisation” (McCann & Ward, 2013, p. 8). Without taking a position on the feasibility of such covering laws or the flaws of neoliberalism, what I aimed primarily to understand was the contribution of this particular intervention (namely kaizen in Ethiopia) to the evolution of development theory and its prescriptions for socio-economic progress.

The anthropological perspective can very fruitfully contribute to answering these questions, and, indeed, it informed many of my methodological choices. In order to understand how and why kaizen was being implemented in Ethiopia, I drew most of my data from qualitative interviewing and ethnography. I conducted participant observation in Ethiopian factories, Japanese factories, study exchanges between Japanese and Ethiopian experts, and conferences dedicated to the dissemination of kaizen throughout Africa. I also conducted critical discourse analysis of Ethiopian and Japanese documents and spoken discourses.

Anthropology’s utility went beyond the methodological. My previous research on Ethiopia had acquainted me with the influential concept of high modernism, coined by the anthropologist James Scott. High modernism, as defined by Scott, is

a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. (2008, p. 4)

It is, in Scott’s and my usage, both a mode of governmentality and an ideology of intervention in the affairs of a society or target population. It is uncompromisingly top-down, almost by definition detrimental to the populations it claims to want to “help” (the subtitle of Scott’s seminal book on high modernism is How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed) and most often carried out by the state. It completely ignores metis, “the knowledge that can come only from practical experience” (p. 6).

Although high modernism originated in Europe and went on to appear on almost every continent in the twentieth century, Ethiopia under the authoritarian Derg regime (1974–1991) serves as one of Scott’s case studies. In my previous research on Ethiopia, I, too, had discovered strong high modernist undercurrents that spanned the pre-Derg and post-Derg eras. Drawing on the works of political scientists such as Christopher Clapham (2006) and historian Bahru Zewde (2002), I soon realized the important role that top-down, ambitious projects of statebuilding played for modernizing elites both envious and (rightly) suspicious of Western imperialism.

Enter “Low Modernism” and Post-war Japan

Research articles in the social sciences typically present empirical enquiry as a logical, step-by-step process in which the research question, theoretical framework, and methodological choices proceeded smoothly from one another. In my experience, the reality is frequently far messier—although the reader would be hard-pressed to discover this from the finished journal article, book, or dissertation. In my case, the serendipitous connection between industrial productivity, high modernism, foreign development aid, and policy emulation came about through a combination of wide reading and intuition. Although I began with the suspicion that kaizen transfer represented not only the introduction of a set of workplace practices to a new setting but also a deeper change in the assumptions and prescriptions of global development agendas, what exactly this deeper change entailed was not initially clear to me. Reading widely and historically provided me with theoretical concept I had been missing, namely low modernism.

My discovery of high modernism had been so exciting to me because it chimed with a phenomenon that I and many other development scholars have long observed: that the spread of development interventions has long been intimately tied to the spread of modernity. Very often, this process has happened in an extremely top-down fashion. Witness Europe’s incursions into its various colonies, the United States’ promotion of modernization theory during the Cold War, and China’s assimilation of Tibet. Contemporary discussions around the introduction of ambitious infrastructural projects, technologically intensive farming methods, export-processing zones, programs to assimilate pastoral populations, and sophisticated surveillance technologies in the Global South echo these concerns today, particularly when they are enacted by the state and supported by international finance. At the same time, there has been a surge of interest in “bottom-up” interventions that are meant barely to resemble interventions at all, supposedly providing local stakeholders with the space and resources to exercise their own agency and realize their own self-defined goals.

The more I learned about kaizen and its use as a modality of foreign aid, the more it occurred to me that this resembled something between these two approaches. As I have summarized it:

In kaizen, a range of practical and visual features exist to encourage workers at all levels—but particularly on the shop floor—to continuously reflect on and improve their daily operations. Groups of frontline workers also meet regularly in order to suggest improvements to management, and this is claimed to increase not only their efficiency but also their job satisfaction and sense of ownership. (Fourie, 2020, p. 1)

My research on the way the methodology is taught by Japanese and Ethiopian consultants in Ethiopia demonstrated a Janus-faced quality. Without replicating here in full the argument put forth in my original article, I found kaizen and its proponents to be deeply concerned with changing the mindsets of frontline workers toward a newfound appreciation for scientific rationality, productivity, and efficiency. But this, they emphasized, was only half of the equation. Simultaneously, the existing expertise of these workers must be elicited and taken seriously; managers must learn to respect workers’ intimate, first-hand knowledge of the factory floor and reorganize power structures accordingly. It was thus only through this combination of modernity’s disciplinary and participatory logics that industrialization could take off in Ethiopia.

To many workers in Western post-industrial settings, these workplace prescriptions may seem unremarkable at best or regressive at worst. Within the strict hierarchies of most Ethiopian factories, however, they hold a more revolutionary potential. And within the landscape of current international development cooperation, they are equally notable. Few donors have recently been comfortable articulating a desire both for top-down and bottom-up development, with the dividing line usually running between emerging donors (such as China and South Korea) and traditional Western donors whose own industrial development is by now distant memory.

It is within this context, then, that the final piece of my theoretical puzzle fell into place. The question we as supervisors in several branches of the social sciences often pose to students who have found an interesting real-world puzzle or phenomenon is: “what is this a case of?” My own answer to this question was that the programme of kaizen promotion enacted by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in Ethiopia was not a case of high modernism but rather a case of low modernism.

Low modernism is not a concept used in any of the disciplines discussed in the previous section. Instead, it has been coined and developed by a handful of historians to describe certain nineteenth- and early twentieth-century programs of transnational and national modernization. Again, quoting from my original article:

Gilbert (2003) has coined the term “low modernism” to describe the efforts of agrarian economists to increase agricultural outputs in the United States in the 1920s through massive engagement of farmers and rural citizens … McVety (2008) has highlighted how the low modernist visions of American agricultural extension programs in Ethiopia in the 1950s clashed with the high modernist vision of Haile Selassie. Fischer-Tiné (2018) has demonstrated how American missionary-run rural reconstruction projects in interwar colonial South Asia sought to combine “self-help with intimate, expert counsel,” thereby creating complex, multilevel epistemic communities incorporating villagers and other subaltern populations. (Fourie, 2020, pp. 3–4)

By introducing low modernism into discussions of twenty-first-century foreign aid, I was able to contribute to a genealogy of development interventions. Japan—neither quite an emerging nor quite a traditional donor—emerged as the inheritor of those Western modernizers who once themselves had to juggle the competing demands of democratization and industrialization abroad and at home. In addition to historicizing international development theory, I was also able to theorize history. High modernism and low modernism differed in the answers they gave to two key questions (Fig. 1), I argued: (1) Who has the necessary expertise and legitimate mandate to enact the modernization of a society? And (2) how fast and how far should the process of modernization proceed? Low modernism advocates for the inclusion of non-elites as regards the first question and urges for some degree of caution as regards the second. This was a more formal operationalization than had yet been given to the concept of low modernism and has opened it up to further historical applications. The interdisciplinary cross-fertilization thus worked in both directions.

Fig. 1
A drawing of several rectangular boxes falling onto some flowers.

Low modernism shares high modernism’s faith in science, planning, and rationality but seeks to temper these with a recognition of the value of local knowledge (metis) and more iterative, gradual processes. © Fourie

Full size image

Before closing this section, it is important to note one further important role that historical studies played in my analysis. The deeper I moved into exploring kaizen and its precepts, the more I realized I could not do this justice without also exploring the history of kaizen’s emergence and development in post-war Japan. Like all social concepts, kaizen is, after all, a construct of human actors acting in path-dependent but agential ways. Here history’s contribution was not methodological or even theoretical but rather empirical: it was only by reading historians’ analyses of post-war Japan that I was able to understand how kaizen had been used both to control and to incentivize workers during this most tumultuous period of the country’s history. It may sound strange to frame my use of this collection of secondary sources (for the most important, see Gordon, 1998) as a contribution from history. After all, scholars from most fields of study are encouraged to include a historical background section to their case studies. But it is my experience that studies of development cooperation do not commonly delve into processes of historical socio-economic development in donor countries nor explore how exported “development lessons” first manifested in the countries that claim to have invented them. This is even more true of donors like Japan, which sits uneasily within the postcolonial dichotomies of critical development scholars and the post-war poverty of which is often seen as too distant for mainstream development economists.

The result of my drawing on these histories of Japan’s own historical industrial relations was not only a more fine-grained understanding of kaizen’s origin but a key conclusion: kaizen was the result of a grudging and difficult compromise between Japanese trade unions and American-backed industrialists. This suggests that low modernism can grow from a range of different national soils. Foreign intervention played a role but not the defining one. More importantly, kaizen is not a set of natural laws or an abstract theory of change designed by social scientists or management experts. Rather, it is a political settlement—an insight that Japanese donors, Ethiopian recipients, and would-be low modernizers elsewhere would do well to keep in mind. The fact that kaizen emerged in a foreign setting does not mean it cannot work in Ethiopia, but embedding it in broader discussions of domestic labor relations and power hierarchies will give it a better chance of succeeding.

Conclusion: Looking Back to Look Forward

This chapter has told the story of how I came to study the transfer of kaizen to Ethiopia, and how, in the process, I came to realize the indispensability of certain historical debates and concepts. In part, this was a function of casting the net of my literature search further into the past than I had first anticipated, to 1940s Japan. It was, however, also due to the conceptual innovation of historians. This meant that I not only had to travel to post-war Japan but also had to the American Midwest in the 1930s, southern India in the 1920s, and Ethiopia’s own early entanglements with foreign aid in the 1950s. One concept—low modernism—united these seemingly unrelated settings and, I realized, also existed unidentified in a modern setting. Kaizen is a slippery concept, and it means many things to many different people. It is only by viewing it in relation to other forms of foreign aid, other ways of stimulating industrialization, and other ways of positioning workers vis-à-vis management that its true significance as low modernist intervention becomes clear. This would not have been possible without the contribution of history.

In telling my story, I have also sought to contribute to a larger conversation around the identity and purpose of development studies as an interdisciplinary field. Here, I want to end with a modest plea toward my fellow development studies scholars. Stories matter, and history is one of the best collections of stories that we have at our disposal. Narratives are continuously being constructed and reconstructed, but we have histories for this too: histories of ideas. If development studies takes these histories seriously, we will better understand the contingent nature of our own ideologies of intervention and progress. This is the case whether we oppose or support contemporary development cooperation. Just as metis—the knowledge we can only gain through direct, intimate, and practical experience—helps to temper modernism and give it a crucial human dimension, getting our hands dirty in digging up dusty historical data and accounts can help to ground development studies. Here history’s “middle of the road” approach—somewhere between the causal certainties of development economics and the critical deconstruction of anthropology and critical geography—may actually not be a sign of weakness, but rather strengthen our field. This also has implications for teaching as well: perspectives like global history and the history of science can play an important role in broadening the traditional foci of development studies and other social science degrees.Footnote 1

I close, therefore, by explaining the metaphor of the frog from which this chapter draws its title. An idiom, sometimes attributed to Chinese and sometimes to Japanese historical sources, states that “the frog in the well knows little of the sea.” The vast ocean of historical experience has certainly enriched my understanding of contemporary development policy in ways that I could not have anticipated from the confines of the well.