The distinctive incorporation of sociological neoinstitutionalism into Japanese sociology and its theoretical insights for the discipline

Although sociological neoinstitutionalist thought has made indelible imprints across the social sciences in Japan, its incorporation into Japanese sociology at large has been relatively limited, and its broader applications to analyses of global social phenomena using World Society Theory are even less prominent. To empirically gauge the emergence, growth, content evolution, and production/consumption patterns of this scholarship, sociological neoinstitutionalist works published across the 1977–2021 period by authors affiliated with Japanese institutions were manually coded for content, marquee publications/authors cited, primary author's final degree discipline, and publication's outlet field. The article briefly introduces core ideas in sociological neoinstitutionalism and World Society Theory before delving into the survey details and results, an explanation for the literature's distinctive pattern of incorporation into Japanese sociology, and concluding thoughts on its theoretical implications for Japanese sociology and beyond. The study finds that this scholarship has been produced and consumed primarily throughout—in declining order—business-related fields, education, and sociology. As its incorporation diversified in the mid-1990s, bifurcation occurred between a growing share of “middle-of-the-road” sociological neoinstitutionalist scholarship that embraced the range of ideas that broke from the “old” institutionalisms, and a small and declining share that pushed the phenomenological and social constructionist thrust of the theory to its limits and/or acknowledged the perspective's global-comparative applicability. These patterns seem to track the concomitant theoretical, substantive, and methodological inclinations within the discipline in Japan. Sociological neoinstitutionalist thought holds promise for a range of research areas interested in exploring domestic and global determinants of social change.