Search

This article examines the ideas that underpinned American psychological war (psywar) in the Pacific. While we cannot precisely measure its effects, we can trace its intellectual history with more confidence. US psywar was a combination of scientific method and myth-making. Assessments of the Imperial Japanese Army tended to be careful, discriminating, and increasingly sophisticated, if not uniformly accurate. At the level of the battle front, practitioners of the ‘mind war’ strove to overcome stereotypes and refine and complexify their view of the enemy.The further they moved from the battlefield towards assessments of Japanese military leadership, society, and high politics, the more they became myth-makers, projecting onto Japan a powerful set of preconceived ideas. These included notions of the superstitious and malleable Japanese mind, the suicidal military elite, and the innocent symbol emperor. In their analysis two models of culture evolved. Their approach to the IJA mostly presented culture as dynamic, layered, and conflicted, whereas their view of Japanese society was monolithic, bounded, and timeless. This contradictory pattern can be explained by different levels of exposure to the subject, the practice of filling ‘knowledge gaps’ with preconceptions, and by American policymaking interests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Various institutional and cultural settings have shaped spatial planning systems with comparable features; however, such systems have been adapted to specific cultural, normative and spatial conditions. In line with the growing demand for international knowledge exchange in urban and regional planning, planning cultures have recently come into sharper focus. Moreover, it has become widely acknowledged that many cities in Europe and the USA have to deal with challenges posed by long-term demographic and economic changes. This also holds true for Japan. The objective of the research presented here is to comparatively investigate changes in planning cultures in view of shrinking cities in the USA, Germany and Japan. The findings will allow us to detect interdependencies between changes in planning cultures and societal changes in the wake of shrinkage, and finally to derive hypotheses for both the future-oriented development of shrinking cities, and the development of planning cultures based on the comparison of cultural settings. In this respect the paper concludes with the hypothesis that there might be planning cultures that are not framed by geographic entities (nations, regions, cities), but rather by topics along shrinking cities. This could offer insight into a new research sphere of 'topical planning cultures'. While lasting effects and successes of policies and strategies applied in shrinking cities remain to be seen, their influence on a broader knowledge exchange, contextualisation and innovation in the sphere of planning cultures is evident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The premise of this paper is that those persons who excessively overwork can die as a result, through stress-related illness or suicide. This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the legal treatment of stress-related illness at work and, in particular, death by overwork (known as Karoshi in Japan). The legal rules governing this aspect of health and safety in the US and the UK will be considered primarily, because these are countries where this problem has not been properly recognized and, accordingly, legislators and the judiciary in both the US and the UK have largely failed to address it. Despite this, it is a fact that organizations in these countries have the worst record for requiring their workforce to work excessively and/or for long hours. Research has shown that this leads to stress-related illness and sometimes death by overwork in organizations. The failure to take legal action to deal with this problem in the US and the UK is all the more surprising and disappointing because these countries (along with Japan where it is legally recognized) have the richest economies in the world. It is now accepted that a working pattern and culture of long hours and excessive working adversely affect workers by putting at risk their physical and/or mental health, and it is important to consider how workers in this position are dealt with by employers and within the legal framework of both jurisdictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After eminent thinkers in the 1960s submitted critical views on technology, some philosophers of technology extended their macro perspectives. Since then, many historians and sociologists of technology steadily marginalized their general claims through richly empirical, constructivist case studies of concrete engineering processes. Some recent efforts have begun to bridge these two diverging orientations. This paper participates in such efforts with a case study of relationships between macro cultures and engineering processes. It shows that behind the adoption of systems engineering by engineers and managers who led the Apollo programme was a macro current of social values in the USA. Post-war American society saw the rise of highly individualistic social norms that valued mobility, meritocracy and clear-cut contractual working relationships. Such norms triumphed most conspicuously in the federal government during the 1960s. Engineers and managers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) headquarters, who tended to share such values, refined the formalized, depersonalized methods of systems engineering, which enabled them to perfect space technology. In order to show such a correlation between macro values and micro practices, this paper draws a comparison between engineering communities in different cultural settings in the USA and Japan. This paper thus explores the macro social environment that gave rise to systems engineering, which, in turn, continues to function as a skeletal structure for our technological society today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with corporate forms of timetabling and lime reckoning and shows some of the patterns of influence between the corporate cultures of the USA and Japan. Prior to the 1970s, US forms of corporate timetabling were defined by western firms as `best practice'. In the 1970s these approaches were embodied and embedded in computer-based timetabling. The American supply industry marketed them throughout the world. However, by the 1960s key firms in Japan in the automobile sector were using time reckoning and timetabling systems which were neither considered possible nor envisaged by western analysts and theories of management. Since the 1980s US firms in many sectors have been re-authoring their time reckoning and timetabling to incorporate elements from Japanese developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]