I definitely don’t think that it’s an either/or, or imagine Japanese culture to be static and rigid; just in large part because I’m not sure that there actually is all that much distance or that much tension between an outfit doing Kaizen and one embracing neoliberal corpo behavior and because companies doing Kaizen is itself a recent combination of invention and absorption for local context. I’m completely unqualified to say how much of what they wrote was inspired by prewar domestic sources; but all the “Kaizen” material that people now refer to is the stuff either written by or about successful post-WWII Japanese manufacturing corporations. Barely older than neoliberalism (at least in application, rather than the aspirational stuff that people didn’t really try to pull off while there were still any actual communists around); and at least heavily inspired by some of the TWI material that came with the US occupation government.
If anything, I’d suspect a tension between “Kaizen” and “neoliberalism” to look strong in the US because (while in theory it doesn’t have to be; and can be applied elsewhere) “Kaizen” totally has its heart in manufacturing; and American neoliberalism largely concluded early, hard, and damn the consequences, that manufacturing was something you outsource because financial services is truly the most favored son of the invisible hand, so outsource that shit and let’s focus on some core competencies! Feeling Pumped!
In places where The Market has deemed it appropriate to manufacture things I’d be less sure that there would be nearly as much perceived tension. The tendency to see information from the line as actually useful definitely puts it at odds with more Taylorist theories of management; but it has been about getting results for a manufacturing operation in a market capitalist context from day one.
