The evolution of service economics as part of the theory of contemporary capitalism

Abstract

The Japanese controversy about productive and unproductive labour and the service economy has focused on whether or not service labour produces value and surplus value. While I accept the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, I will argue that the purpose of service economics is to clarify the causes and effects of the service economy in contemporary capitalism. For this purpose, I adopt a methodology which considers the diversity of service industries and activities. Most Japanese researchers on the service sector have used their own definitions of ‘service’. I will show that such a methodology has serious limits for the analysis of the contemporary service economy, and I explain that recent developments in the service sector have been caused by low economic growth, and the development of the service sector has not succeeded in overcoming this stagnation.

Keywords:

• service economy
• contemporary capitalism
• ICT
• work dispatching industry
• public service

Notes

¹For the standard idea of the productivity gap, see Baumol (1967).

²‘It was J. Singelmann who, while paying due respect to Fuchs's work, systematically took up the argument that the various factions of the service sector relate to different patterns of economic behaviour and diverse social characteristic. For example, he shows that “Clark's law”, according to which tertiary employment is positively related to national per capita income, applies to some services but not (or barely) to others’ (Delaunay and Gadrey 1992, 101).

³For the developments in IT services, see Sato (2007; 2010a).

⁴‘In this new world, consumption is not a one-off transaction between the consumer and producer but is the beginning of a long-term relationship’ (Brison, Daniels and Warf 2004, 57).

⁵Strictly speaking, while labour productivity has stagnated, the ‘productivity of capital’ has more or less recovered through weak investment helping to restrain the stock of fixed assets. Stocks are a denominator of ‘capital productivity’ and rate of profit, so any restraint on the growth of stocks makes for higher ‘capital productivity’ and a higher rate of profit. See Sato (2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2011).

⁶Act for Securing the Proper Operation of Worker Dispatching Undertakings and Improved Working Conditions for Dispatched Workers.

⁷For a relation between the two types of non-material production and the capitalist mode of production, see Marx (1994, 143–4).

⁸The economic expansion in the 2000s was without any significant growth in capital stocks; see Foster and Magdoff (2009), and Sato (2010b; 2010c; 2011).