Jeffrey Broadbent

The Effects of ‘Social Expectation’ on the Development of Civil Society in Japan

Abstract This paper proposes a theoretical explanation for the impact of ‘social expectation’ on the growth of civil society in Japan. Why has civil society developed as it has in Japan? Contrary to the image of Japan as a ‘strong and controlling’ nation-state, we find that private citizens—the non-governmental organization (NGO) leaders, scholars on community planning, and younger liberal politicians—set the conditions towards the growth of civil society, responding to global influences during the 1990s. We argue that the successful implementation of ‘social expectation’ played a central role for creating a social flow towards non-profit organizational activities and for the passage of the Non-Profit Organization Law (NPO Law) in Japan. Social expectation is an internalized social norm for individuals and organizations, thus for society as a whole, about what people should do. It operates on two different levels—first on particular elite groups and then on the general public—driving the dramatic growth of associational activities in Japan. It is a general societal climate where peoples imagined reference groups or communities affect their behaviours. ‘Social expectation’ is a future vision leading Japan towards a citizen-based society through dynamic collaborations among activists, NPOs, and media. We suggest in incorporating a ‘social expectation’ perspective in the study Japanese civil society development.

Social capital and labor politics in Japan: Cooperation or cooptation?

Social capital, derived from voluntary cooperative relationships and memberships, is thought to enhance a groups capacity to attain a common good. Japan enjoys plentiful social capital, which affects all aspects of society, even politics. One would expect that social capital would facilitate parties to arrive at equitable labor policies and reduce overt political conflict in Japan. Has this cooperation occurred, or has labor been coopted? My study addresses this question through the analysis of networks among organizations active in labor-related policy decisions. I focus on Japan with some reference to the United States. The analysis shows that, indeed, networks of social capital weave together government, business, and labor very tightly in Japan (but only labor in the U.S.). The more tightly social capital ties labor to the state, the less it differs from the states preferred policy. Intense differences of material interests, though, as indicated by the case of a health care policy decision, weaken this integrative capacity of social capital. The Labor Ministry tries to use social capital to build consensus between labor and business, but diverging interests erode such consensus. These findings indicate that even under favorable conditions, social capital exists in tension with more instrumental interest patterns.

Science and Climate Change Policy Making: A Comparative Network Perspective

When the author was conducting field work on environmental politics in Japan (1978–1981), he and his family (wife, son 1, daughter 3) lived in a small mountain farming village in Oita Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan. In this area, terraces of rice paddies held up by hand-built stone walls stepped down the mountainsides. Hundreds of years ago, the residents had hand-chipped a tunnel through a kilometer of mountain rock to bring water from the river on the other side over to water their mountain rice paddies. The water still flows through this tunnel, and then down through channels (mizo) along the sides of rice paddies with little gates to let it in when permitted. The residents carefully shared this precious resource, with a village committee deciding when each farmer could periodically get enough water to plant the rice seedlings in the spring, and to keep them growing in the summer. In this way, the village had survived for hundreds of years (Broadbent 1998).

Conflicting Climate Change Frames in a Global Field of Media Discourse

Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference: validity of climate science, scale of ecological risk, scale of climate politics, and support for mitigation policy. These dimensions yield four clusters of cases producing a fractured global field. Positive values on the dimensions show modest association with emissions reductions. Data-mining media research is needed to determine trends in this global field.

Environmental Politics in Japan: An Integrated Structural Analysis

Political conflict poses questions about social cohesion, power, and change that culturalist and materialist theories answer very differently. Comparative sociology requires a method for the integrated and weighted use of their answers. The following case study of environmental politics in Japan develops and illustrates the use of such a method. The types of sanctions used to build influence relations, analyzed through graphs and network matrices, indicate the relative validity of different theories. In this case, a class structure determines the main direction of environmental politics, but cultural legitimations sometimes divert it to other tracks.

State As Process: The Effect of Party and Class on Citizen Participation in Japanese Local Government

Attempts to redistribute the power of the state, such as through greater citizen participation in policy decision-making, usually end in failure. Scholars attribute that failure to a variety of causes: the clumsiness or self-interestedness of bureaucracy, an elitist official culture, demand overload, or pressure from a dominant class. These explanations see the state in static terms, as possessed of certain fixed attributes. This paper examines two cases of grassroots citizen participation in Japanese local government occurring under different political conditions. Close investigation of the process of policy formation revealed that the main constraints on participation come from the local conservative political party and its supporting classes. These constraints manifested as process, not as constant structure.

Inter-disciplinary Analysis of Climate Change and Society: A Network Approach

Social network analysis (SNA) can be used to consider the interactive effects of the social and natural sciences as well as the humanities in such a conjoint way as to enable to the study of societal patterns and dynamics as unified systems of action and change. In contrast to previous attempts at this type of integration, which have remained largely abstract and theoretical and exemplified by anecdotal information, the application of SNA to this effort enables a more empirical and precise analysis of the respective effects of different factors to process and outcome. This unified SNA method can be used to examine any type of societal action, including in this case the production of and response to global climate change. Called Integrative Structurational Analysis (ISA), this method expands upon the traditional application of SNA, which confined itself to the study of relationships among human social actors (persons, groups, organizations, nations, etc.). In addition, the ISA approach incorporates advances in discourse network analysis (DNA) that includes ideas (abstract collective representations of social and natural realities charged with emotion and meaning) as well as actors in the networks. Studied as they emerge, or are channeled, and evolve over time, these patterns are measured as to how they influence outcomes of concern, such as in this case the mitigation of emissions. The on-going international research project Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks (Compon) illustrates the application of this ISA method and approach to the mitigation policy-formation processes of a set of nation-states and one region.

Introduction: East Asian Social Movements

The licensed prostitutes of Taiwan kept to themselves, out of the public eye. They worked in a ramshackle part of Taipei, in old wooden two-story pre-war buildings. They did not particularly like their work, but they were aging and it was the only trade they knew. Impoverished and social pariahs, they were still proud of their independence. Their legal status kept them from the exploiting clutches of pimps in the illegal prostitution trade. But when a proposed law threatened to make their work illegal, despite their marginal social status, they suddenly erupted into public protest. Once mobilized and launched, the movement’s goals expanded from legal rights to gaining public respect. Going further, they demanded protection for the rights of all sex workers. In Taipei, the movement hosted marches with banners and public festivals to bolster public support for sex-worker rights. These rallies drew international attention, with visits and participation by foreign sex-worker campaigners. The movement found considerable sympathy from sectors of the public and from the labor movement, itself so recently liberated from martial law.

Critical Masses: Opposition to Nuclear Power in California, 1958-1978

Using first hand testimony this text tells how the citizens of California - from the tiny town of Wasco in the Central Valley to the vast suburbs of Los Angeles - challenged the threat of nuclear power and transformed the anti-nuclear movement in the years between 1958 to 1978.

Conceptualizing culture in social movement research

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2018.1522766)Culture has had a ha...