Part Three | Japan in the Early 21st Century: New Actors, New Institutions
New workers for a new economy
I. The current turmoil in the Japanese economy, its workplaces, and its workers: Is it cyclical or structural?
A. The Japanese economy in crisis, 1991-2013
B. How to conceptualize the macro-economic trends?
- Public talk of an “inequality society” (kakusa shakai) of “winners” and “losers”
- Academic talk of neoliberalism, precarity, and affective labor
C. What’s happening to the salaryman and the OL and their place at the center of the Japanese workplace?
Findings from the McCann et al 2006 study on the restructuring Japanese corporations
- Reduce employee numbers through layoffs, retirements, sharply reduced hiring
- Flatten the ladder of advancement
- Consolidate divisions
- Shift to performance pay (limited)
- Rely heavily on non-regular employees
- Outsource some operations
What are the effects of restructuring on organizational structure, organizational culture, and employee experiences? Is the “Japanese company system” disappearing?
D. Four new faces in the world of work
II. How does a “creative industry” work? The case of manga publishing
How can we unpack Prough’s chapter title: “Affective labor: Gender, generation, and consumption in the production of shōjo manga”?
III. Contract workers on the assembly line at Toyota
IV. From lifetime employment to temporary employment
Was this inevitable? The “rise of the permanent temp-economy” (Erin Elizabeth Hatton)
V. Temp agencies and their dispatched workers—the experience of Fu Huiyan
VI. Professional career women in present-day Japan
A. A new category of worker?
B. The cases of Kishimoto Yoshie and Fukuda Reiko (Aronsson, Chapter 7)
C. Can they find both success and satisfaction in work careers and personal lives?
VII. “Freeters” as freelancers or slackers
A. Who are the “freeters” (or “freetaa”)?
Japan Institute of Labor definition:
- Between ages of 15 and 34
- Not studying in educational institution
- Not married (in case of women)
- Working in “part-time” (paato) or “non-regular” (arubaito) job; or
- Not working but wanting part-time or non-regular job
B. Do they want this or do they have to do it?
VIII. Neoliberalism, precarity, and affect: Why is social science talking about this?
A. Modern economic history as the “progressive” growth from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing economy to a service economy
1. OR: (advanced) industrial society/capitalist economy –> post-industrial society/late capitalist economy
2. The “hollowing out” of manufacturing through outsourcing and relocation of factories to lower-wage non-union overseas countries together with (for other reasons) the rising importance of the “service” sector
3. But the “service sector” has at least four distinct components:
- retail consumer services like food (restaurants –> fast food franchises), clothing/household (department stores –> big box/malls/convenience stores)
- financial services (banks and brokers) –> the financialization/securitization of everything
- “creative industries” producing movies, TV, music, fashion, books, magazines, manga, anime –> “transmedia” (Henry Jenkins)
- knowledge industries (software development/apps, consulting, legal expertise)
B. Four elements of neoliberalism as an ideology:
- Restricting the state
- Freeing capital
- Expanding markets
- Making individuals accountable
C. Neoliberalism as history: When and how did it come in?
- The embedded liberalism of the post-WWII era
- Crises of the 1970s
- Privatization, deregulation, and securitization of the 1980s and 1990s
D. Is Japan becoming neoliberal?
- Post-WWII Japan as a “development state”: The iron triangle of LDP politicians, corporate leaders, and national bureaucrats
- Japan’s economic trajectory: rapid recovery in 1950s –> high-economic growth decades of 1960s and 1970s –> the “bubble decade” of the 1980s –> the “lost decade” of the 1990s –> another “lost decade” of the 2000s
- What comes after 3.11?
- Is Japan changing from development state to neoliberal state?
- What would that mean for companies, schools, and families—and individuals?