scholarly journals The Formation of a Technology-Based Fashion System, 1945–1990: The Sources of the Lost Competitiveness of Japanese Apparel Companies

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
PIERRE-YVES DONZÉ ◽  
RIKA FUJIOKA
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Apparel Industry ◽  
Fast Growth ◽  
Business History ◽  
International Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Apparel Companies ◽  
Oriented Approach

Over the past two decades, the Japanese apparel industry has lost its competitiveness after experiencing a period of fast growth from the postwar years to the early 1990s. In international literature in social sciences, most scholars offer ethnic-based explanations of fashion in Japan, stressing some specificities such as street fashion or star designers in Paris. This article, however, argues that such views are biased and cannot explain the current lack of competitiveness of the Japanese apparel industry. Using the concept of the “fashion system” and following a business history-oriented approach, we offer a new interpretation of the emergence of Western clothing and fashion in Japan during the second part of the twentieth century. This interpretation demonstrates that the characteristics of the Japanese fashion system lie in a focus on the issues of production and technology, both of which led both to an extreme segmentation of the domestic market and to weaker brands.

Measuring Chandler's Impact on European Business Studies since the 1960s

2008 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Jes Iversen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Research ◽  
Business History ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Business Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
European Business ◽  
Treaty Of Rome ◽  
The 1960S

Recently, a number of groups sponsored large international research projects that are concerned with business history. Harm G. Schröter's group investigated the European integration that followed the Treaty of Rome in 1957 in order to discover whether it had led to the appearance of a characteristically “European” corporation. Franco Amatori, Camilla Brautaset, and Youssef Cassis coordinated an analysis with the ambitious title “The Performance of European Business in the Twentieth Century.” The projects shared some common “Chandlerian” features: they were problem-oriented, comparative studies of the long-term development of large enterprises, and their goal was to propose illuminating generalizations. Such Chandler-inspired studies are likely to undergo a renaissance in the next couple of years. Still, as the term “renaissance” implies, Chandler's impact on European business studies has undergone upswings and downturns over the past four decades.

Politics, Power, and Problems: Perspectives on Writing Policy History

1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Andrew Achenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Policy History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Grant Support ◽  
The Future ◽  
Aesthetic Style ◽  
Relative Standing

Twenty-five years ago H. Stuart Hughes observed that “the study of history is entering a period of rapid change and advance such as characterized the science of physics in the first three decades of the twentieth century.” Amid such ferment, he believed, professional historians could become more “scientific” in stating their assumptions and executing their analysis without sacrificing an “aesthetic” style of discourse. Professor Hughes correctly predicted the professional excitement and intellectual controversy unleashed since the mid-1960s, but he underestimated the extent to which historians’ relative standing in the academy would be adversely affected by external and internal developments. Other social sciences attracted more students, tenure lines, and grant support; they had more success in formalizing their investigations. Many humanistic endeavors (including historical inquiries), critics charge, have concurrently become inscrutable. Historians themselves have expressed serious concern about the future of their discipline. With the Balkanization of knowledge, with a growing number of subfields and specialized journals, historical synthesis seems more and more to be an elusive goal. The current debate over how to “(re)present the past” goes far beyond disputes over approach, style, or ideology.

Mahler's Seventh Symphony

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Stoll Knecht
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Compositional History ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Analytical Approaches

Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony stands out as one of the most provocative symphonic statements of the early twentieth century. This book offers a new interpretation of the Seventh based on a detailed study of Mahler’s compositional materials, combined with a close reading of the finished work. The Seventh has often been heard as “existing in the shadow” of the Sixth Symphony or as “too reminiscent” of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Focusing on sketches previously considered as “discarded,” this study reveals unexpected connections between the Seventh and both the Sixth and Meistersinger. These connections confirm that Mahler’s compositional project was firmly grounded in a dialogue with works from the past, and that this referential aspect should be taken as an important interpretive key to the work. Providing the first thorough analysis of the sketches and drafts for the Seventh, this book sheds new light on its complex compositional history. Each movement of the symphony is considered from a double perspective, genetic and analytic, showing how sketch studies and analytical approaches can interact with each other. The compositional materials raise the question of Mahler’s reception of Richard Wagner, and thus lead us to rethink issues concerning his own cultural identity. A close reading of the score enlightens these issues by exposing new facets of Mahler’s musical humor. The Seventh moves away from the tragedy of the Sixth toward comedy and shows, in a unique way within Mahler’s output, that humor can be taken as a form of transcendence.

Toward a National Collecting Policy for Business History: The View from Baker Library

1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Bartoshesky Lathrop
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Business History ◽  
American Business ◽  
The Past ◽  
Comprehensive Coverage

In this article, the curator of manuscripts and archives at the Harvard Business School's Baker Library discusses the opportunities and difficulties confronting present-day archivists as they seek to establish rational collecting policies for their repositories. Ms. Lathrop first describes the past focus of Baker Library's collection decisions and the strengths to which those emphases have led. She then discusses some areas of less comprehensive coverage, as well as the general problems archivists face in dealing with twentieth-century materials. She points out that collecting gaps tend to be replicated among other repositories, a situation leading her to believe that a national collecting policy, developed by both historians and archivists, is necessary to ensure the widest possible documentation of the varieties of American business history.

The “Historical Turn” in the Social Sciences

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert S. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
Professional Societies ◽  
Historical Turn ◽  
The Social

The first professional societies in the United States, from the 1880s to the 1910s, understood history to be closely associated with the other social sciences. Even in the mid-twentieth century, history was still grouped with the other social sciences, along with economics, sociology, political science, and anthropology. But in the past few decades, history and anthropology in the United States (though not necessarily in other countries) have moved away from the social sciences to ally themselves with the humanities—paradoxically, just when the other social sciences are becoming more committed to historical research.

Tropos Logikos: Gustav Shpet's Philosophy of History

Slavic Review ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-358
Author(s):  
Peter Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Comprehensive View ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theory Of History ◽  
Western Historiography

Gustav G. Shpet (1879-1937) is one of those formidable Russian thinkers who, in the early years of the last century, orchestrated a revolutionary paradigm shift across a broad swath of the humanities and social sciences that is still reverberating today. But we lack a comprehensive view of the manifold heterogeneity of Shpet's intellectual endeavors. This article focuses on one prominent lacuna in our knowledge of Shpet: the theory of history that he advanced in the 1910s. In many respects Shpet's theory anticipated the "linguistic turn" that occurred in western historiography during the last quarter of the twentieth century and that is most often identified with Hayden White's name. But while White analyzes the historian's discourse in terms of tropology and narratology, for Shpet predication is the key logical mechanism that generates production of texts about the past. The divergence of these two approaches can be explained through the hidden Kantian underpinnings of White's thought that contrasts sharply with the explicit Hegelianism of Shpet's theorizing.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

Collective Memory: Between Values and Historical Knowledge

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-142
Author(s):  
VICTOR BURLACHUK
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Element ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

At the end of the twentieth century, questions of a secondary nature suddenly became topical: what do we remember and who owns the memory? Memory as one of the mental characteristics of an individual’s activity is complemented by the concept of collective memory, which requires a different method of analysis than the activity of a separate individual. In the 1970s, a situation arose that gave rise to the so-called "historical politics" or "memory politics." If philosophical studies of memory problems of the 30’s and 40’s of the twentieth century were focused mainly on the peculiarities of perception of the past in the individual and collective consciousness and did not go beyond scientific discussions, then half a century later the situation has changed dramatically. The problem of memory has found its political sound: historians and sociologists, politicians and representatives of the media have entered the discourse on memory. Modern society, including all social, ethnic and family groups, has undergone a profound change in the traditional attitude towards the past, which has been associated with changes in the structure of government. In connection with the discrediting of the Soviet Union, the rapid decline of the Communist Party and its ideology, there was a collapse of Marxism, which provided for a certain model of time and history. The end of the revolutionary idea, a powerful vector that indicated the direction of historical time into the future, inevitably led to a rapid change in perception of the past. Three models of the future, which, according to Pierre Nora, defined the face of the past (the future as a restoration of the past, the future as progress and the future as a revolution) that existed until recently, have now lost their relevance. Today, absolute uncertainty hangs over the future. The inability to predict the future poses certain challenges to the present. The end of any teleology of history imposes on the present a debt of memory. Features of the life of memory, the specifics of its state and functioning directly affect the state of identity, both personal and collective. Distortion of memory, its incorrect work, and its ideological manipulation can give rise to an identity crisis. The memorial phenomenon is a certain political resource in a situation of severe socio-political breaks and changes. In the conditions of the economic crisis and in the absence of a real and clear program for future development, the state often seeks to turn memory into the main element of national consolidation.

Aftershocks

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seva Gunitsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
International System ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sudden Rise ◽  
The World ◽  
National Borders

Over the past century, democracy spread around the world in turbulent bursts of change, sweeping across national borders in dramatic cascades of revolution and reform. This book offers a new global-oriented explanation for this wavelike spread and retreat—not only of democracy but also of its twentieth-century rivals, fascism, and communism. The book argues that waves of regime change are driven by the aftermath of cataclysmic disruptions to the international system. These hegemonic shocks, marked by the sudden rise and fall of great powers, have been essential and often-neglected drivers of domestic transformations. Though rare and fleeting, they not only repeatedly alter the global hierarchy of powerful states but also create unique and powerful opportunities for sweeping national reforms—by triggering military impositions, swiftly changing the incentives of domestic actors, or transforming the basis of political legitimacy itself. As a result, the evolution of modern regimes cannot be fully understood without examining the consequences of clashes between great powers, which repeatedly—and often unsuccessfully—sought to cajole, inspire, and intimidate other states into joining their camps.

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