Title:
Resilience of Systems: Technocracy and Information Society in Japan, 1960s–1980s
Abstract:
My dissertation reveals how information systems and digital technologies have been used to perpetuate exiting power structure since the 1960s. It argues that Japanese technocrats adopted a systems approach to solve social problems and formulate a resilient and market-oriented “neoliberal technocracy.” The systems approach, which claimed to integrate engineering and social sciences, was embraced by a coalition of engineers, economists, bureaucrats, and executives in the late 1960s as an epistemic and methodological framework for understanding social issues and realizing their utopian vision of an “information society.” This technocratic coalition rejected the notion that technology alone could address social issues, and acknowledged the problems and risks generated by automation and information systems. Nevertheless, they argued that these challenges would be resolved through the creation and updating of socio-technological systems via interdisciplinary cooperation—a strategy that increased their resilience against failures, critiques, and resistance. This resilient technocratic culture matured into a neoliberal technocracy in the early 1980s when the technocrats promoted interconnected yet decentralized commercial systems suited to the idea of a free market economy, which constituted the epistemic foundation of the neoliberal reform in Japan.
Comments