Page 126 - Culture Society and Economy

Robotham-06.qxd 1/31/2005 6:24 PM Page 119

NETWORK SOCIETY THEORY

little class conflict. This body of thought was a communitarian emendation
of Weber’s famous thesis to allow for the possibility of a capitalism with a
more communitarian rationality to emerge from the religious ethics of the
East. To this extent there is a real connection between multiple modernity
and network society theory in so far as both yearn for the preservation
of some form of communitarianism.
Indeed, it was claimed that East Asia showed that such communitarian
‘economies of signs and space’ might be more effectively modern – more
rationalistic, purely from the point of view of productivity and scientific
61
and technical rationality. Monopoly capitalism was being superseded by
this new model of capitalism which, because of its proven competitive
superiority, was becoming a worldwide trend. ‘Reverse convergence’ – the
Anglo-American economy converging towards the Japanese model – was
becoming the order of the day. 62
Initially, because of the work of Dore, in particular in the pioneering
British Factory, Japanese Factory, and in other works on Japanese ‘relational
contracting’, this idea gained currency – that a really radically new pro-
duction system had emerged in Asia which resolved the age-old social
conflicts of capitalism as well as being more productive and efficient. 63
Today this idealizing of the Japanese production system may seem far-
fetched, after the collapse of the ‘Bubble Economy’ in the early 1990s and
the prolonged deflationary crisis from which Japan is only now finally
emerging. But one must remember the context in which Dore conducted
his research. This was, above all, in a context defined by the failure of the
nationalization policies of the British Labour governments of the 1960s
and the seemingly inexorably stagnation and then decline of British
manufacturing and the British economy as a whole. It was in the face of this
intractable ‘British disease’ – the anarchy of shop floor strikes, the incom-
petence and disaster at British Leyland – that Dore turned his attention to
Japan. He was astonished at the contrast in the state of affairs in Japanese
production systems even from this early date – well before it became fash-
ionable in Western business circles to make the pilgrimage to Japan. 64
The sense was that the Japanese or Italian models held out the hope
of an apparent supersession of the age-old contradictions of monopoly
capitalism. A new era which combined modernity with community was
evolving from within the womb of capitalism itself in which the rational-
istic potential of capitalism would be realized at the collective level – for
the benefit of society as a whole. It is this claim which is the source of the
appeal of multiple modernity. I would argue that multiple modernity theory
is less communitarian and more rationalistic in comparison to network
society theory. This is readily apparent if one carefully compares the work

119