The ‘Lost Decade’ and Japanese Business Studies

Abstract

The 1990s have been branded ‘Japan's Lost Decade’ — a period of missed opportunities for Japanese policy-makers and corporate leaders. It was also a difficult time for Japanese business studies — as a field we missed significant opportunities to examine systematically the many critiques of the Japanese business system, and to develop a research agenda that would provide general insights into change processes in business systems. This paper proposes evolutionary theory as one vehicle for understanding and assessing the basic assumptions of many of the critiques of Japan's business system produced over the last decade. It suggests that the concepts of variation, selection and retention can provide fruitful guides to research topics, and proposes that the field of Japanese business studies should work to re-establish Japan's longstanding role as a ‘critical case’ in social science.