Duality and Paradox: Trust and Duplicity in Japanese Business Practice

Abstract

This paper extracts several dualistic constructs from the anthropological literature on Japan and interprets them in terms of recent understandings of paradox in organizational behaviour. Two historical and one contemporary illustration of these dualities within the Japanese business macroculture are offered. Each is interpreted using a normative, critical and paradox approach, and the different approaches are shown to constitute competing explanations of the phenomena. The findings are discussed in terms of how the dualities affect the dynamics of Japanese business conduct and how they reproduce a macroculture among the large business conglomerates. Insights are offered into how individual firm behaviour is shaped by dualistic features of the macroculture. Implications are drawn for how the conduct of cross-cultural business relationships and government policy may be informed by paradox.

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