Culture and Economy: what accounts for the success of Japanese Companies

‘What lies at the core of any economic action or system is a shared cultural understanding which provides stability and meanings to people’s actions’

Taye Negussie (PhD)

Up until the 1980s, the dominant intellectual view in the development discourse was that culture and economy were two distinct and autonomous entities having little in common. Subsequently, certain economic management models and strategies were viewed as universal formulae readily applicable across cultures and societies. One such presumably universal economic model was the ‘economic growth approach’ which was tried in many of the then Third World Countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, but succeeded only in a handful of countries.