A Sociology of Work in Japan – Ross Mouer and Hirosuke Kawanishi
Inside the Japanese Company – Fiona Graham
A Japanese Company in Crisis: Ideology, Strategy and Narrative – Fiona Graham

Date01 December 2006
Published date01 December 2006
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2006.00524_1.x
British Journal of Industrial Relations
44:4 December 2006 0007– 1080 pp. 801– 818
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UKBJIRBritish Journal of Industrial Relations0007-1080Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006December 2006444801818Book
Reviews
Book ReviewsBritish Journal of Industrial Relations
BOOK REVIEWS
Japanese Employment Relations After the Bubble
A Sociology of Work in Japan
by Ross Mouer and Hirosuke Kawanishi. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2005, xx
+
303 pp., ISBN 0 521 65120 4, £40.00.
Inside the Japanese Company
by Fiona Graham. Routledge Curzon, London and New
Yo rk, 2003, vii
+
246 pp., ISBN 0 4153 1033 4, £29.99, paper.
A Japanese Company in Crisis: Ideology, Strategy and Narrative
by Fiona Graham.
Routledge Curzon, London, 2005, 263 pp., ISBN 0 4153 4685 1, £70.00.
All three books seek to contribute to a reassessment of the character of work and
employment relations in Japan since the bursting of the bubble and through the
prolonged recent recession of the Japanese economy. They also share a particular
concern to contextualize and critique the persistently influential celebratory literature,
which emphasized the central importance of uniquely Japanese cultural attributes in
explaining the economic miracle of the postwar years. At the same time, the different
authors offer very different routes to achieving these objectives with contrasting
attractions and limitations.
The two books by Fiona Graham represent substantially overlapping case studies
of the evolving orientations of managers from one large insurance company as it faced
crises, restructuring and bankruptcy. In particular, her focus on one cohort of man-
agers — the group that she had first joined as a graduate recruit and then revisited in
the late 1980s as a novice researcher and again at the end of the 1990s as a documen-
tary film maker — underpins a sense of development over a substantial period. As
such, her books provide valuable insights into the shifting opportunities and pressures
facing such managers, and how they made sense of these experiences. Furthermore,
Graham includes some managers who at different stages left for other employment,
so she also provides glimpses of the fate of such managers and their comparisons of
life inside and outside the company. In the first of her books, her account of induction
and training in the insurance company also raises interesting questions about the
distinctiveness of the social organization of sales and consumption in Japan, a theme
that deserves further development in any rounded account of contemporary work and
employment relations in that country.
Graham’s central theme, especially in her second volume, is that of the uneven
erosion of the commitment of these salary men to an overarching corporate ideology,
which — consistent with the broader celebratory literature — dwells on the nexus of
strong work commitment, responsiveness to corporate priorities, job security and
career progression. Pay cuts, blocked promotions, growing difficulties in meeting
802
British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006.
targets and pressure to leave all make it more difficult to sustain an alignment between
personal priorities and the public espousal of this corporate culture. Graham empha-
sizes that these processes have a differential impact across the cohort and through
time. A few retain prospects for advancement despite the restructuring; some find
fortuitously that earlier moves have equipped them with specialist brokerage or IT
skills that afford them some protection (within the company, within subsidiaries or
on the wider labour market); but others find themselves exposed and vulnerable as
generalist sales-managers or even (in one memorable case) find themselves demoted
as they take the personal blame for others’ mistakes. In general, however, she argues
that the gap between corporate rhetoric and personal views and commitments
becomes increasingly difficult to bridge, although only those who had left the com-
pany articulated this split so clearly and publicly.
Graham develops this discussion in three further interesting directions, although
none is developed as far as might have been possible if the analyses that are spread
over the two volumes had been sharpened and integrated more fully. First, she empha-
sizes the historical importance of the prolonged process of initial induction into the
company — which involved a shared rite of passage as neophyte salesmen — in forging
a widespread acceptance that personal fulfilment would come from intensive effort to
meet demanding targets. However, this was not an unproblematical process: senior
management had to reduce the rigour of this induction in the bubble years as it led
to high drop-out rates, while some who stayed remained personally unconvinced of
the terms of this commitment. Second, she suggests that the visible tension between
dominant corporate ideologies and personal feelings in the period of crisis also throws
valuable light on the complex relationship between official organizational discourses
and personal strategies in the bubble period and earlier. While such tensions were less
explicit then, the efficacy of the official account nevertheless depended on the scope
that it afforded for managers to gain recognition and progression and thus to align
their own objectives with corporate rationales, a process that was both uneven and
incomplete. Furthermore, this depended on nurturing immediate mutualities and
alliances among subsets of managers while outmanoeuvring other such groupings.
Finally, Graham suggests that those who left the firm developed alternative vocabu-
laries of individual fulfilment and achievement, drawn partly from personal experience
of other countries, partly from pioneering quitters and partly from debates in the mass
media, but such alternative vocabularies often continued to involve a hope of marry-
ing achievement with the job security provided by another ‘good employer’.
Thus, Graham’s account is compatible with the argument that management micro-
politics and power relations always mediated the implications of the Japanese corpo-
rate ideologies that were couched in terms of familialism, sacrifice and mutuality.
However, her exploration of these features is in some respects rather shallow, as
hierarchical relations and decision-making processes within management remain in
shadow. In her second book, Graham provides a useful outline of the crises besetting
the Japanese financial sector, but it serves as background context with little explora-
tion of the evolution of corporate responses to these changing conditions. This means
that her analysis of a spectrum of individual managerial strategizing remains separate
from any discussion of corporate organizational strategizing. This is perhaps partly
because of limitations of access but also flows from her central preoccupation with
mapping the varied narratives of her own peer group. To my mind, it is also allied
with a rather diffuse discussion of disparate theoretical literatures on ideology, con-
sciousness, narrative and myth, which does not adequately address wider issues of
structure and power relations.

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT