Joonwoo Son is an assistant professor at the Kyushu University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy Studies. His interests include sociology of social scientific knowledge, economic sociology, social history of quantification and measurement, and historical sociology. Joonwoo’s research focuses on the historical development and social use of official statistics as a means to manage the state-market, and/or the state-society relationships.
His dissertation, “Cross-Border Investment in Forms: National Income Accounting and the Making of Reliable Government in Postwar Japan,” examines how official statistics convince private actors of the government’s authority as a reliable coordinator of the economy. During the early postwar period, the liberal powers spread national income accounting – a standardized framework that developed in the 1930s to summarize the interplay of all sorts of production, distribution, and consumption activities in a given territory – as a means to align economic bureaucracy of former fascist states and postcolonial countries with an Anglo-American model of reliable government. At the core of the government model was improving a state bureaucracy’s authority to disseminate a formalized, and thus objective and impersonal representation of the national economy, which would serve as an impartial and reliable reference point for private actors to adjust their economic activities. Joonwoo's dissertation investigates how the government model, once introduced to postwar Japan, adapted and evolved in response to how Japanese private actors interpreted, evaluated, and reacted to depersonalized official statistics.
More specifically, his dissertation consists of three case studies on the history of the introduction and use of national income accounting in post-World War II Japan. The case studies reveal (1) how the formalization of official statistics based on national income accounting spread a debate that induced Japanese government officials and affiliated experts to rethink what private actors would demand for reliable statistics; (2) how the publication of formalized official statistics stimulated private actors’ critical discussion questioning the link between depersonalized statistics and reliable government; and (3) how private actors’ reactions to official statistics compelled postwar Japan’s economic bureaucracy to experiment with an alternative government model. The findings of his dissertation draw attention to Japan’s private actors who relied less on depersonalized numbers and more on numbers expressing the government’s strong will as a leader of conviction, in response to whom postwar Japan’s economic bureaucracy eventually incorporated the use of official statistics to manage and reshape private actors’ expectations of the government’s leadership. The findings suggest that the link between institutional efforts to depersonalize official statistics and a state bureaucracy’s authority as a reliable coordinator of the economy is an unstable socio-historical product, the instability of which is a constant source of experiments for innovating a state bureaucracy’s use of official statistics to coordinate the economy.
Joonwoo received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University. He was also a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow at Columbia University and Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies Fellow. Previously, Joonwoo graduated from Seoul National University with a B.A. in Sociology with Valedictorian and summa cum laude, and a M.A. in Sociology. He also served as a visiting scholar in Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at The University of Tokyo.
