ABSTRACT
Roy Jacques' account is that of American managerialism. This chapter questions many Anglo-Saxon assumptions about the importance of objective knowledge, the scientific method and individualism which do not sit easily in a Japanese context. Japan's institutions - defined 'as rules of the game' (North, 1990, p. 3) - privilege group-knowledge over individual knowledge and implicit understanding over explicit rules. Within Japan's institutional framework, close community relationships amongst long-term colleagues lower the marginal cost of information transfer and enable insiders to act as a group, able to ostracize and retaliate against those who break their code. This redefinition of the interface for principal-agent conflict (Jenson and Meckling, 1976, pp. 305-360) has profound implications for the way that Japan has developed knowledge 'in the context of application' (Gibbons et al., 1994, p. 3). It also underscores the importance of collective tacit knowledge (which, tentatively, we will call Mode 3 knowledge) retained within the organization as a tool for shaping future practice. A pluralist approach to the types of knowledge that mutually enable practice is used to reinterpret the Mode 1 and Mode 2 debate in the context of Japan's institutional framework. By avoiding the idea of tacit-explicit 'knowledge conversion', one can acknowledge the specificity of Japan's institutional context and consider its implications for organizational learning elsewhere.
