Japan's economy has long been described as network-centric. A web of stable, reciprocated relations among banks, firms, and ministries, is thought to play an important role in Japan's ability to navigate smoothly around economic shocks. Now those networks are widely blamed for Japan's faltering competitiveness. This book applies structural sociology to a study of how the form and functioning of this network economy has evolved from the prewar era to the late 90s. It asks whether, in the face of deregulation, globalization, and financial disintermediation, Japan's corporate networks - the keiretsu groupings particularly - have 'withered away', losing their cohesion and their historical function of supporting member firms in hard times. Using detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis, this book's conclusion is a qualified 'yes'. Relationships remain central to the Japanese way of business, but are much more subordinated to the competitive strategy of the enterprise than the network economy of the past.

Offering a deeper understanding of today’s internet media and the management theory behind it Platforms are everywhere. From social media to chat, streaming, credit cards, and even bookstores, it seems like almost everything can be described as a platform. In The Platform Economy, Marc Steinberg argues that the “platformization” of capitalism has transformed everything, and it is imperative that we have a historically precise, robust understanding of this widespread concept. Taking Japan as the key site for global platformization, Steinberg delves into that nation’s unique technological and managerial trajectory, in the process systematically examining every facet of the elusive word platform. Among the untold stories revealed here is that of the 1999 iPhone precursor, the i-mode: the world’s first widespread mobile internet platform, which became a blueprint for Apple and Google’s later dominance of the mobile market. Steinberg also charts the rise of social gaming giants GREE and Mobage, chat tools KakaoTalk, WeChat, and LINE, and video streaming site Niconico Video, as well as the development of platform theory in Japan, as part of a wider transformation of managerial theory to account for platforms as mediators of cultural life. Analyzing platforms’ immense impact on contemporary media such as video streaming, music, and gaming, The Platform Economy fills in neglected parts of the platform story. In narrating the rise and fall of Japanese platforms, and the enduring legacy of Japanese platform theory, this book sheds light on contemporary tech titans like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Netflix, and their platform-mediated transformation of contemporary life—it is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand what capitalism is today and where it is headed.

In this book Takanori Ida introduces the current status of the Japanese broadband services and the recent developments in competition policy and in doing so has developed an econometric model to analyse access demand.

Network economics is a new, rapidly developing field. In this volume theoretical and empirical contributions are collected, each deals with different aspects of the network economy. The book assesses networks as a complement to pure market relations and studies innovation networks and strategic alliances among innovative corporations. Product differentiation and specialization in reciprocal networks are emphasised as a strategy of sustainable development. The book presents econometric methods of barrier and network analysis, including communication and trade patterns.

This book examines the causes of the Japanese deflationary economy, characterized as a structural deflation, and discusses how to alleviate the prolonged slowdown in order to restore Japan to a trajectory of high economic growth, with a special focus on the function of income distribution.

This book contains the revised and updated versions of twelve papers which were presented at the 17th joint seminar of the faculties of economics of the Universities of Nagoya and Freiburg. The seminar took place in 1997 in Nagoya and marked the 25th anniversary of the cooperation between both faculties. The subjects of the book concentrate on long-term economic and business issues common to Japan and Germany on the turn of our century.Firstly, both countries experience continuing and interrelated problems in the labor market, budget deficits, demographic changes and the future of the social security system. Secondly, globalization, technical progress and shift of social values lead to structural changes of the economy and its institutions, particularly to deregulations and network economies. As a consequence, new ways of cooperation between firms, customers and suppliers will be established. Thirdly, the network economy changes also the inner structure and management of the companies in both countries including new organizational patterns such as the holding company or the virtual enterprise, the tight cooperation of small and medium-sized companies, human resource management and compensation.Although the broad issues in both countries - as in other mature economies - are essentially the same, the details under the surface are different and therefore ask for different solutions. The identification of these similarities and differences by theoretical and empirical methods constituted a key objective of the seminar, as well as of previous seminars.