Dissertation Summary
Description
The dissertation identifies parallel contractual developments of employment relations in large manufacturing establishments in the U.S. and Japan during the first three decades of this century. In both countries, labor relations evolved from simple, short-term, and individualized relationships towards "employer paternalism," based on implicit, long-term employment contracts and company-wide employee representation. It then documents the subsequent process of bifurcation. While Japan continued down the same path during the 1930s, the U.S. witnessed the breakdown of implicit contracts induced by the Great Depression, which eventually led to the emergence of new employment relations based on explicit contracts and industry-wide unions. The dissertation shows how two institutional paths further diverged during W.W.II under distinctive sets of labor regulations based on prior institutional developments, and explains why Japan's institutional path did not converge to the American system, despite the postwar depression and drastic labor law reforms in Japan under the U.S. occupation.
The dissertation reveals the delicate role of history in the dynamic process of equilibrium selection: It was a sequence of unforeseen historical events that brought about possibilities of institutional change, while it was institutional capital derived from the past that created continuity and path dependence in institutional development.