This dissertation uses an empirical study of the lifetime employment system in four large Japanese corporations and the principal work values of their core white-collar university graduate male employees to inform a theoretical discussion on the nature of modernity and capitalism in contemporary Japan. As such, therefore, it lies within the academic disciplines of sociology and Japanese studies. For some time now the lifetime employment principle has been the ideological and functional basis of the Japanese management system. However, due to the steadily accumulating stresses exerted by the further intensification and globalisation of economic competition, coupled with changes in Japanese society stimulated by the achievement of material abundance, Japanese corporations feel they are under increasing pressure to implement fundamental changes to the system of employment. For their part, employees are adopting a more independent, critical, and reflexive employment orientation. Making use of both Western and Japanese theoretical representations, and contrasting the post-war paradigm of employment security and stability within a rapidly growing economy with the present period of corporate restructuring and economic stagnation, the dissertation posits a hypothesis that Japanese society is undergoing a period of systemic and cultural transformation that lies between a post-war “transitional” and a global “hybrid” modernity. That is to say, the post-war Japanese company can be said to have possessed both modern and fictive pre-modern attributes and was thus a “trans-modern” corporation. Moreover, the present period of corporate rationalisation, together with the progressive modernisation of the Japanese salaryman’s work and career consciousness, signifies that the Japanese corporation is entering an age characterised by a global hybrid form of capitalist modernity.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)