Technics and dialectics of the information society: Japanese origins of information society theory

Technics and Dialectics of the Information Society: Japanese Origins of Information Society Theory is a historical and theoretical analysis of the development of Japanese Information Society Theory from the origins of postwar Japanese capitalism to the present day. Making use of the methods of Political Economy and Critical Theory, it examines the contradictions of Japanese capitalism within a global context, and considers how Information Society Theory constituted both a strategy used by the Japanese capitalist class to overcome barriers to accumulation in the crisis of the late 1960s – early 1970s, and an ideology of legitimation, the utopian dimension of which points beyond the theory‟s own limitations to possibilities for a renewal of socialist politics. In its concluding section the thesis briefly considers how Information Society Theory adapted to address the changing circumstances of Japan following the bubble economy of the 1980s, and how it addressed the challenge of global neoliberalism.