Goodwill and the Spirit of Market Capitalism

Bibliographic Data

ID20076027
AuthorsRonald Dore (0000-0001-8417-8743, corresponding author)
Year2018
Pages456-473
Publication date2018-04-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueSociology of Economic Life (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.4324/9780429494338-24
OpenAlexW2033676847
ISBN9780429494338
LanguageEN
Citations received116

Goodwill is more status-neutral, more an expression of Hobhouse's 'principle of mutuality'. 'Opportunism' may be a lesser danger in Japan because of the explicit encouragement, and actual prevalence, in the Japanese economy of what one might call moralized trading relationships of mutual goodwill. In Japanese relational contracting, by contrast, it is a particular sense of diffuse obligation to the individual trading partner, not to society, which is at issue. To put the matter in Parson's terms, relational contracting is to be understood in the universalism/particularism dimension, whereas the Durkheim point relates to the fifth dichotomy that Parsons later lost from sight: collective-orientation versus individual- orientation. If a firm's market is declining, it is less likely to respond simply by cutting costs to keep profits up, more likely to search desperately for new product lines to keep busy the workers it is committed to employing anyway. Factory flexibility agreements take the employment contract further away from the original rate-for-the-specific-job basis

Business · Capitalism · Economics · Goodwill · Market economy · Political science · Accounting · Japanese History and Culture · Law

Tools

Open DOI