By Martin Denton - Copyright November 1995
Feel free to quote me... but don't plagiarise me
If you would like to know more about this thesis, or obtain information on the rest of the work or the bibliography, please email me. ex6m015@ipcku.kansai-u.ac.jp
This paper was originally presented in the Department for Asian Studies at the University of Adelaide, as part of the requirement for the Honours Degree in Japanese Studies.
Japanese workers construct their own meaningful understandings of their companies from their daily experience. Their perspective mediates a central social process of capitalist societies: the coming together of competing interests. It forms a juncture between ideological and material processes; between dominant ideas and dominant practices. It should therefore be of crucial interest to anyone seeking to understand the Japanese firm and its place in Japanese society.
Yet social commentators bring their own perspectives, and these are often in disagreement. In the years since the economic performance of Japanese companies brought them to academic attention, the resulting characterizations have ranged from images of harmony and cooperation to those of exploitation and coercion.
The past decade has seen the emergence of a new paradigm that supports a positive interpretation of the Japanese firm. This paradigm, here identified as employee corporatism[1], describes a network of personnel and production practices that are favourable to workers and tied together by the notion that ownership, control and representation structures make workers the primary constituents and beneficiaries of the Japanese firm.
It is the task of this paper to critically examine the employee corporatist paradigm, identifying its weaknesses and locating it within the process of the ideological construction of the Japanese firm. Only by acknowledging the diversity of workers' experiences and the centrality of ideology to the operation of the firm, it will be argued, is it possible to give an accurate depiction of Japanese companies, their meaning for workers and their place in a wider social context.
Two arguments have commonly given support to the view of a consensual work environment in Japan. One of these, the culturalist argument, has centred around such notions as a 'group oriented' national character, or the legacy of Confucian values and social structures. It is often considered to belong to the body of nihonjinron ('Theories of the Japanese') literature, which identifies unique traits of the Japanese and their culture. Hazama was one of the earliest to discuss Japanese management in terms of underlying principles of 'groupism' and 'personalism' as opposed to Western 'individualism' and 'impersonalism'.[2] These themes have survived criticisms of nihonjinron, and Odaka, for example, as late as 1986 describes groupism as a central factor in Japanese management, maintaining that 'groupistic value orientation is a Japanese cultural trait'.[3] Others, such as Murakami, emphasize structural continuities and the importance of traditional organizational units like the ie (household) or the mura (village).[4]
These culturalist type arguments are disposed to hypostatize values, practices and social structures that have in the past been instituted and maintained in the interests of sectional groups. Societies are, however, inherently characterized by a potential for both continuity and change. The use of 'culture' as an explanatory concept is restricted in that it uncritically emphasizes and thereby naturalizes the potential impetus for continuity. It ignores the ever present possibility of change. There is a need to examine how aspects of 'culture' are consciously or otherwise preserved, altered or discarded by human subjects. In this respect, a number of scholars have criticised culturalist arguments for fulfilling an ideological role themselves.[5]
The second argument in support of a consensual view relies upon the unique organizational attributes of the Japanese firm. The 'three pillars' of the Japanese employment system - 'life-time' (or long-term ) employment, the seniority wage system, and enterprise unions - are almost common knowledge, and they remain pervasive in contemporary analyses of Japanese companies.These personnel practices, it is argued, link a worker's fate to that of the company, thereby uniting their interests. The employee corporatist analyses maintain the importance of these practices and draws on this analytical tradition. They differ considerably, however, in locating such arguments in an analysis of Japanese capitalism that resists criticisms to which the 'Japanese employment system' approach has been vulnerable.
Those who present the Japanese firm as coercive tend to argue that consensual views take at face value the ideological aspects of the processes whereby exploitative social relations are reproduced. Therefore the mechanisms that spontaneously ensure consent and cooperation according to one view, are identical to those which in the other are put to ideological use, consciously or otherwise, and result in coercion. Sugimoto and Muto epitomize this critical view, presenting a picture of exploitative collusion between the state and business elites.[6] The postwar period has also been described as involving a management victory in a contest with labour for the ideological definition of 'workplace culture'.[7] Both culturalist explanations and those that appeal to the logic of Japanese personnel practices, according to this critical view, provide an consensual ideology to mask a coercive reality.
A second critical position is offered by the dual economy argument. This maintian that Japanese personnel practices and production systems split workers into an elite core and a disadvanteged periphery. According to Atkinson's flexible firm model, functional flexibility at the core requires numerical flexibility at the periphery.[8] A restricted number of workers are equipped with multiskilling and tied to the firm through good conditions and job security. The company compensates by using part-time, temporary or sub-contracted workers on terms that involve poor conditions and easy dismissal. Positive interpretations of the Japanese firm have therefore been described as ideologies that legitimate this dualism, and hide the technological rationale behind it.[9] It should be clear that negative characterizations of Japanese work organization have more readily found a role for ideological manipulation than their positive counterparts.
By reviewing the labour process and intra-firm organization in relation to the structure of Japanese industrial capitalism, employee corporatism promises to overcome the problems presented by these Marxist critiques. It attempts to show that Japanese workers share the interests of their corporations within and by virtue of existing property relations. Instead of appeals to 'groupism' or simple criteria like increases in average income, it contends that management represents workers and is insulated from the influence of shareholders. With this as the basic setting for the Japanese corporation, employment practices and production systems can be reinterpreted as providing an organizational environment conducive to the fulfilment of workers' interests.
The employee corporatist paradigm has emerged not only in contrast to a culturalist tradition, but against a Western re-evaluation of the Japanese firm. Ronald Dore's comparison of Japanese and British industrial firms and their employment practices has been particularly influential.[10] His terms 'welfare corporatism' and 'organization oriented system' in many ways foreshadow the essential components of the analyses examined in this paper. By 'welfare corporatism' Dore refers to his notion of the 'enterprise as community', a system whereby the firm's relation with its employees extends beyond the wage contract to include welfare entitlements such as housing, medical schemes and transportation. Among other distinctive features, Dore describes a Japanese firm in which union relations with management are cooperative, educational credentialism allows for security in and respect for authority, decision making and responsibility are diffuse, teams are central to shopfloor operations, and worker morale is high.[11] Dore notes that company directors are largely drawn from the ranks of ordinary employees and therefore are more likely to see themselves as elders of a corporate community rather than as men responsible to the shareholders for wringing the maximum profit out of the shareholder's property, the firm.[12]
This final point is of most interest to the present examination, for this notion of the firm as a community, with managers who represent workers instead of shareholders, ultimately plays a central role in any interpretation of Japanese corporations as favourable to workers. It is central to the employee corporatist paradigm.
Rodney Clark has also noted Japanese directors' concern for workers' interests over those of shareholders'. He further develops the idea that it is the shareholding structure of Japanese firms that wrests control form shareholders and delivers it to managers. This emphasis on the implications of shareholding patterns, as an appeal to empirically verifiable fact, is what differentiates employee corporatism from previous theories of a consensual Japanese firm. Moreover, Clark's conception of the centrality of the company in Japanese society, and the existence of a 'society of industry', offers an early form of the notion of a 'company centred society'.[13]
Many have retained faith in the consensual view of the Japanese firm in the face of criticism of culturalist and Japanese-management arguments. However their attention has been directed towards issues of ownership, control and representation and away from issues of culture. There has also been a move away from industrial relations and towards the idea that management-capital relations are a key element in determining employees' relations with the firm.
The resulting employee corporatist paradigm, while not wholly consistent among its proponents, is nonetheless a coherent trend. There is considerable variation, on the one hand, in the terms used to refer to the model: enterprise-ism (Kigyoism), company-ism (Kaishashugi), employee sovereignty (Juugyooin Shuken), and human-capitalism (JinponShihon-shugi). On the other hand, there is a common core to these theories that seeks to affirm that workers are the primary constituents of the Japanese company.
In what follows the employee corporatism is criticized in two respects. Firstly, it is shown that the central elements of the paradigm are invalidly inferred from empirical and theoretical arguments. Secondly, it is argued that this recent approach reproduces a basic shortcoming of its predecessors, by underestimating the importance of ideological constructions of the Japanese firm in its ongoing operation.
Chapter one reviews several recent analyses in order to introduce the employee corporatist paradigm. It will be argued that many Japanese personnel practices and production systems are in themselves ambiguous and can only be interpreted within an ideological understanding of the social relations that constitute the Japanese company. The employee corporatists' assertion that Japanese firms are primarily for Japanese workers will be shown to fulfil such a role.
The second chapter aims to demonstrate that this orientating assertion does not follow from the empirical data commonly given to support it. To this end a number of alternative conceptions of the Japanese firm and the structure of late industrial capitalism will be discussed, and a more dynamic and versatile model introduced.
In the third chapter the focus will shift to the importance of ideological constructions of the Japanese firm and the place of employee corporatism in that process. As indigenously produced (or reproduced) and consumed commentaries, employee corporatist analyses are themselves possible agents in the system they purports to describe. Therefore, one is inclined to treat the paradigm as valuable for an understanding of Japanese capitalism not only for what it says explicitly about that system, but because it is likely to embody assumptions that favour certain sectional interests. That is, it can be treated as an ideological component of late twentieth century Japanese capitalism. In this final chapter the assumptions of the employee corporatist paradigm will, through a comparison with more critical conceptions of a 'corporate society', be shown to be congruent with an ideology of management in basically capitalist relations of production.
The broader aim of this study is to contrast the employee corporatist paradigm with one that is more critical and dynamic. There is a need to emphasize the ideological mediation that takes place at the level of individual workers between their general perception of the firm and the various practices implemented by management.