The purpose of this article is to outline the real state and the future of industrial sociology in Japan. Industrial sociology was introduced from U.S. after the World War II and has achieved rapid development. However, at the present time it seems to me rather stagnant in its research, and we have marked a turning point in its development. I sure that the industrial sociology in Japan has had some weak points and they are basically caused by the triple backwardness of it. Therefore, to overcome the backwardness is the most important problems for us to solve.
The first backwardness is that of industrial sociology itself in applied sociologies in Japan. As mentioned above, its history is shorter and the accumulation of achievements in the field are less than the other advanced field such as rural sociology and sociology of family. The second backwardness is that of sociology itself in social sciences in Japan. All of social sciences, including sociology, were introduced from the West in the early Meiji era, then sociology had not any backwardness at the outset. But after that in the process of their development sociology has been behind the other social sciences, especially economics, law and political science. Such kind of backwardness has given sociologist a kind of inferiority complex and let them to engaged in marginal fields where the advanced sciences did not study. The third backwardness is that of Japanese social sciences as a whole comparing to those of western advanced countries. Japanese social sciences have been developed through the introduction of the western social theories and created few original theories.
Considering such backwardness, we should try to find out the new direction of industrial sociology. We must positively accumulate the data of research on it. We must enlarge its field of study to all kinds of industrial phenomena together with the other sciences. We must endeavor to create original theories on the basis of social facts in Japan. Moreover, I would like to propose following two issues. The one is that since industrial sociology is one of applied sociologies, it should attach importance to social research again. These researches should be directly connected with life in society. The other is that as the word “industrial” is rather vague, industrial sociology needs to be divided into three fields according to its research fields, that is, managerial sociology, labor sociology (or sociology of labor) and industrial relations.
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