TY - JOUR
T1 - Humanizing Industrialization?
T2 - Japanese Productivity Methods, Ethiopian Factories, and Low Modernism in Foreign Aid
AU - Fourie, Elsje
N1 - Funding Information:
The coming of kaizen to Ethiopia was thus the result of the tensions a newly global Japan was grappling with, combined with unusually fertile conditions in the recipient country. It was due to this confluence of circumstances that a series of strategic interventions by a handful of globally connected Japanese academics grew into an Ethiopian national productivity agenda. I heard in many interviews an identical “origin” story: Meles and a development economist from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS)—a Japanese government-funded think tank—had been introduced to each other by Joseph Stiglitz at an Addis Ababa meeting of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue in 2008. GRIPS staff had brought with them a GRIPS report on JICA’s implementation of kaizen in Tunisia.5 According to a JICA staff member who was present, “Meles read the Tunisia report on the first day, and on the second day he suddenly told JICA ‘I read your document and I want Ethiopia to follow the same path.’”6 A management training program funded by the World Bank’s Japan Trust Fund and carried out by Japanese researchers had already sensitized Meles to the concept. The prime minister now requested Japanese assistance both in widespread kaizen implementation and in creating a broader bilateral Industrial Policy Dialogue between GRIPS and Ethiopia’s political leadership.7
Funding Information:
This research was funded in large part by a fellowship of the Japan Foundation and partially conducted while the author was a visiting researcher at the French Centre for Ethiopian Studies (CFIS) and the Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS). The University Fund Limburg (SWOL) and the GTD research group at Maastricht University also provided funding. The author would like to express her appreciation to these institutes, and particularly to GRIPS’ Tetsushi Sonobe for his generosity and guidance. She would also like to thank the many officials and other informants who took time out of their busy schedules to speak to her. The views expressed in this article are her own, however, and should not in any way be taken as representative of any of these bodies.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The authors.
PY - 2020/10/7
Y1 - 2020/10/7
N2 - The past decade has seen a gradual convergence between the modernizing, top-down development agendas associated with “new donors” to Africa and the human development agenda more commonly linked to traditional donors. But while instruments such as the Sustainable Development Goals now demand both industrialization and empowerment, donors still struggle to reconcile these competing expectations. This article uses a variety of qualitative data to examine one such project: the attempted transfer of Japanese management techniques (or kaizen) to workplaces across Ethiopia as part of Japanese official development assistance. Asking why and how the Japanese and Ethiopian governments pursue these aims, the article finds an intervention that is low modernist in design: its goals and logics are modernist but tempered by a respect for local knowledge and a preference for evolutionary over revolutionary change. The fact that Japan is the donor to promulgate such a paradigm is no coincidence, I find, given the historical origins of kaizen and Japan’s long-standing hybrid role in international development debates. Low modernist interventions such as Ethiopian kaizen demonstrate the utility of moving beyond dichotomies (China/West, growth/equity, efficiency/empowerment). But in both Ethiopia and the Japanese aid apparatus, powerful centrifugal forces still make low modernism a difficult balancing act to achieve.
AB - The past decade has seen a gradual convergence between the modernizing, top-down development agendas associated with “new donors” to Africa and the human development agenda more commonly linked to traditional donors. But while instruments such as the Sustainable Development Goals now demand both industrialization and empowerment, donors still struggle to reconcile these competing expectations. This article uses a variety of qualitative data to examine one such project: the attempted transfer of Japanese management techniques (or kaizen) to workplaces across Ethiopia as part of Japanese official development assistance. Asking why and how the Japanese and Ethiopian governments pursue these aims, the article finds an intervention that is low modernist in design: its goals and logics are modernist but tempered by a respect for local knowledge and a preference for evolutionary over revolutionary change. The fact that Japan is the donor to promulgate such a paradigm is no coincidence, I find, given the historical origins of kaizen and Japan’s long-standing hybrid role in international development debates. Low modernist interventions such as Ethiopian kaizen demonstrate the utility of moving beyond dichotomies (China/West, growth/equity, efficiency/empowerment). But in both Ethiopia and the Japanese aid apparatus, powerful centrifugal forces still make low modernism a difficult balancing act to achieve.
U2 - 10.1525/gp.2020.17426
DO - 10.1525/gp.2020.17426
M3 - Article
SN - 2575-7350
VL - 1
JO - Global Perspectives
JF - Global Perspectives
IS - 1
M1 - 17426
ER -