Hyperrationality: Historical antecedents and contemporary outcomes within Japanese manufacturing

After World War II, the Japanese began to rebuild industrially by importing American formally rational technologies and fusing them with indigenous ones. Most importantly, they integrated formal rationality with practical, theoretical, and substantive rationalities to produce a “hyperrational” system. The synergy between these four types of rationality produced a level of rationality exceeding that found in formally rational American industry. It is argued that the growth in Japanese manufacturing can be traced to hyperrationality. In this paper, the existence of hyper‐rationality, its implications for the Japanese manufacturing sector, and possible avenues for future sociological research are demonstrated.