Globalisation and Japanese Organisational Culture

An Ethnography of a Japanese Corporation in France

Mitchell Sedgwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9780415492164
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134064151
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Globalisation ? the global movement, and control, of products, capital, technologies, persons and images ? increasingly takes place through the work of organisations, perhaps the most powerful of which are multinational corporations. Based in an ethnographic analysis of cross-cultural social interactions in everyday workplace practices at a subsidi

Part I
Siting an organisation

1
Introduction

Opening

This book examines the implications of globalisation upon social relations. Although a widely used contemporary term, ‘globalisation’ remains largely undelimited and unspecified. As such, anxiety accompanies efforts to conceive its meaning. At a general level it may be agreed that globalisation is an outcome, or an artefact, of rapid change upon boundaries of social, technological, political and economic arena that seemed previously to be less permeable. That said, although an increasing number of scholars have sought to pin down globalisation by specification, in my view they have met with limited success. ‘Globalisation’ seems unwilling to be packaged. The more interesting analytical problem, rather, is ‘globalisation’s’ ubiquitous yet hazy explanatory usage by actors within myriad contemporary contexts. Thus, while this study explores an unambiguously globalised site in considerable ethnographic detail, as a methodological strategy it purposefully allows ‘globalisation’ its evasive and open-ended quality. My ethnographic emphasis is not upon what scholars have said about ‘globalisation’, then, but how persons caught up in it, as we all are, make sense of their contemporary experience.

By any definition, multinational corporations are active vehicles of globalising processes, directly engaged in the movement of persons, images, capital, products and technologies across regional, national, urban, suburban, rural, ethnic, linguistic and other frames. Multinational corporations’ activities, their public relations statements and their products affect – some would say they drive – our excited and often contradictory understandings of ‘globalisation’, and ‘the globe’. For example, multinational corporations have placed tools into our hands, i.e. communications technology, that would seem to untether all sorts of spatial, temporal and social relations from the day to day human ground of tangible physical localities. Further afield, a coalition of corporate, governmental and scientific interests has made possible the travel of persons and things ‘out of this world’. While not widely known, some corporations – for example, those seeking to make perfectly spherical ball-bearings – go so far as to take industrial production into the gravity-free environment of outer space. In ‘bringing it back home’ they perhaps inadvertently reinforce appreciation of our globe as a discrete and interconnected whole. Perhaps more directly meaningful to us, this work in outer space aligns with literal images of the globe that have only become available (as fully believable photographs) within the last thirty-five years. Multinational corporations assist, then, in giving ‘the globe’, as a unifying concept, more precision and tangibility than ever. Meanwhile they assist in the apparent displacement of the relevance of locality. A structuralist might claim that with the one understanding – an estranged spatiality – we have required the other – a unified globe.

In spite of their perhaps inadvertent contributions to such complex perceptual matters, multinational corporations also create specific, indeed tightly bounded, local places of considerable social gravitas. Among these are found an increasingly common feature of our social landscape: the cross-cultural organisation. In order to make sense of globalisation, this book examines globalisation’s bearing upon social relations in one such location: a French subsidiary of a large, Japanese multinational corporation, which I call ‘YamaMax’. Here the French and their Japanese colleagues, along with their accompanying technologies, make videotape-based products with materials – ‘inputs’ – from three continents. Their ‘output’ is subsequently sold and used in every corner of the globe. Members of YamaMax are participants in a network, headquartered in Tokyo, of a famous Japanese consumer electronics giant – called here the ‘Yama Corporation’ – which employs over 150,000 persons, more than half of them outside of Japan.

Members of YamaMax, in France, are thus engaged in processes immediately attributable to globalisation. I take day to day formal and informal practices of the Japanese and French in this setting to constitute an ongoing negotiation in cross-cultural relations. Separated by language, knowledge and power, the Japanese and their French colleagues at YamaMax accommodate and resist each other’s understanding of appropriate organisational activity; creating an obviously ‘hybrid’ organisation.

There are specific and important differences between ‘foreign’ (or ‘hybrid’ or ‘cross-cultural’) corporations and ‘domestic’ corporations. It is understood – at what is commonly referred to as the ‘macro’-level – that multinational corporations’ decisions to make investments abroad, and their de facto authority over these investments, challenge state control over domestic economic affairs. Multinational corporations thus (perhaps inadvertently) contribute to destabilising the authority of local and national political actors. Meanwhile – at locations that are commonly described as ‘micro’ – day to day social relations in a ‘foreign’ subsidiary make ‘work’ quite unlike what it has meant, respectively, in well-analysed domestic organisations such as, say, a Toyota automobile factory in Japan, or a French-state bureaucracy.¹ Due to the organisation’s Japanese–French constitution, action in and around YamaMax may be partially delinked from the French or Japanese sources of social identity and political discourse with which its members no doubt feel a more ‘natural’ affinity. That is, both Japanese and French members to some extent experience YamaMax as a ‘foreign’ locality. If that is the case, what are the effects of this foreign feel to working at an industrial firm or, in taking the same question at a slightly different angle, what are its effects on forms and practices of the organisation itself ? This study seeks to make sense, then, of how members of ‘hybrid’ organisations, that are increasingly produced by processes attributed to globalisation, interpret and act on the delinkage of their organisational experience from the cultural frames with which they are more familiar, and, indeed, among my French informants, to which they literally return home daily.

I argue in this book that in-depth study of such complex organised contexts – in this case a ‘hybrid’ subsidiary of a multinational corporation – may assist in collapsing the analytic relevance of commonly deployed macro–micro distinctions. That is, the central problem encountered in such contexts is the day to day organising of socio-technical relations. If ‘scale’ is in play at all, it is as a flexibly deployed individual perspective brought to bear in any particular interaction. Within the contemporary context of modernity those socio-technical relations are increasingly exhibited within and across organisations: the core arena reproductive of that very modernity in which we live. The quality of social interaction in hybrid organisations thus alerts us that we may need to adjust the methodological and analytical parameters by which general organisational behaviour is interpreted.

Ethnographically, the book focuses most intimately on the Japanese manager/engineers at YamaMax, who experience the most radical displacement among all members of the Japanese–French subsidiary. Their day to day interactions together, and with their French colleagues, both at work and at leisure, are described. However, I also consider in detail an analysis of social relations and power within the firm that was co-produced through my interactions with a group of highly qualified French engineers. This discussion is revealing, I believe, with regard to how ‘data’, or information, are organised and communicated among engineers and, so, suggestive in relation to anthropological analysis of technology, and, of course, industrial organisation. Furthermore, given that their data set reached back several years before my fieldwork even began, it also encourages a review, from a fresh perspective, of questions regarding who is ‘the ethnographer’, who ‘an informant’ and what constitutes, and validates, data, interpretation and ethnographic time and place. That said, in this book I grant primary analytic weight to interpreting the interactions of Japanese and French engineers in overseeing mass production and, especially, the very stressful periods during which their work is redesigned, i.e. in order to more efficiently produce higher-quality goods, typically through the integration of new technology or know-how into day to day industrial activities. In this context, the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic experiences of members of YamaMax are treated as a platform for critiquing, among other things, traditional organisational studies’ and actor–network theory’s analytic dependence on the cultural continuities inferred by the prerogatives of single-language use, based implicitly or directly in language theory and its methods. The book also intimately examines how Japanese managers construct and reproduce for themselves the (large, Japanese) corporation as a ‘seamless social whole’ and how, in turn, they make sense of – through what appear to be forms of erasure – their own experiences of globalisation, i.e. through working at places like YamaMax. I argue, finally, that from an entirely different perspective, but through similarly totalising methods, anthropology’s ‘new ethnography’ at times also entertains such powerful, and myopic, constructions.

If I might describe ‘globalisation’ as a metaphoric fluid, I take the socio-technical relations constituting YamaMax to be a cloth, tightly woven by the knowledge and experiences of its members, that filters and is, in part, shaped as processes of globalisation pass through it. It is my hope that through analysis of the social relations of a group of Japanese and French people attending seriously to the work of organising and reproducing globalisation’s effects in the world, this study may help to untangle the significance of globalisation, and its attendant hybridity, without excessive anxiety.

Analytic perspectives on globalisation in anthropology

Analysis of globalisation is dominated by reference to data gathered at the ‘macro’ level and the decision-making required to cope with it. In academia, these arenas overlap with, and indeed are generated by, the theoretical, methodological and practical concerns of the closely linked disciplines of political science, government and international relations, as well as economics and business studies. I will return to a discussion of the uses and misuses of macro approaches at a later point. Here I wish simply to note that in pressing ‘globalisation in a local context’ in my own work I am pushing against the general analytic stream.

In spite of anthropology’s supposed explicitly localised methodology, i.e. participant-observation, I am, surprisingly, also pushing against the bulk of anthropology’s assessment of ‘the global’. Anthropology has acknowledged that ‘our’ contemporary ‘villages’ – and their occupants – are substantively influenced by global phenomena. However, for the most part, our theoretical account of how problems of scale are to be engaged, and, more specifically, what a local analysis of the ‘global’ would consist in – assuming that is the sort of arena where anthropologists can make the most important contribution – remain naive. Not unlike other disciplines, and typical of an early stage of interest, anthropology has so far tended to name, rather than analyse, the effects of globalisation. The most widely circulated of such work is Appadurai’s five ‘scapes’ of ‘global cultural flow’: ‘ideo-scapes’, ‘ethno-scapes’, ‘finance-scapes’, ‘media-scapes’ and ‘techno-scapes’ (1990). While I acknowledge that such grand categories may be helpful at the start for thinking through the boundaries of an analytic field, similar to macro-data gathering and analysis, the work of these categories is detached and externalised; they seem flat. In spite of the suggestiveness of the phrase ‘global cultural flow’ we gain no sense of how ‘scapes’ intersect with each other, as they obviously do, how persons move within and between them, nor a sense of what difference it might make to engage such categories at macro- or micro-levels of analysis. As Tsing puts it: ‘flow is valorized but not the carving of the channel’ (2000:330).

Sharing the top-down approach characteristic of anthropology’s rather insightful analyses of the effects of colonialism (Asad 1973) or development (Ferguson 1990; Escobar 1995; Mosse 2005), anthropology typically considers the impact of globalisation upon communities. There tends to be little, at the very least, theoretical consideration of the reciprocal effects of local and global actors, or activities, the one upon the other. This would assume, of course, that local–global categorisations are analytical relevant to unpacking the effects of globalisation. Indeed, albeit an atypical site of ethnographic fieldwork, analysis of activities within a global corporation would suggest problematising such analytic divisions altogether. My own perspective suggests, rather, that in our mundane day to day, local activities, we are all global actors.

Another anthropological strategy for coping with the ‘global’ is to describe extremely displaced communities or persons. Implicit in this approach is the claim that stories about people in unusual circumstances, generated by ‘global’ effects, provide more leverage on analysis of globalisation than do examinations of how average people live. It might be argued that I do just this: the obviously strong global effects on the people at my study site assist in focusing my analysis. However, care needs to be taken in acknowledging and expressing degrees of difference between subjects’ (or our own) experience and that of others. (This would especially be the case when discussing ‘global’ phenomena, a word which, in commonsense terms, conjures universality.) Where this is not done, analysis may easily be read towards absolute difference and, so, uncommensurability, unapproach-ability, inaccessibility and so irrelevance to our own, more typical, experiences. Thus, Hannerz’s work on the radically decentred lives of those working as foreign correspondents seems in its analysis, not choice of subject matter, to excessively stretch the qualities of communications under conditions of globalisation (1996:112–24). If the case were extended to roving correspondents and photographers, some of whom seek out battlefield or other violent situations, their flirtations with ‘danger’ so literally pepper their lives that it may serve to undermine analytically the ‘contingency’ of all lived experience, and so weaken the potential theoretical expansions arising from our considerations of globalisation.

Meanwhile, Appadurai’s work on persons in a globalised world is also, unfortunately, displaced and anecdotal, and under-localised. For instance, unless couched in a theory of change in forms of political mobilisation, the finding is unremarkable that, due to the ‘net’, activists on the political front lines in Third World nations now stay in near real-time contact with supporters in cosmopolitan centres (Appadurai 1996:195–8). Nor is it significant to claim that ‘globalisation’ should create the circumstances whereby a visit to an ...

Table of contents

• Globalisation and Japanese Organisational Culture
• Japan Anthropology Workshop Series
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I Siting an organisation
• Part II Organising persons in places
• Part III Incorporating cultures: local reductions, global repercussions
• Figures
• Bibliography
• Index