Japanese Company in Crisis

Fiona Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134278497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Japanese white-collar workers have been characterised by their intense loyalty and life-long commitment to their companies. This book is based on very extensive ethnographic research inside a Japanese insurance company during the period when the company was going through a major crisis which ended in the company's bankruptcy and collapse. It examines the attitudes of Japanese employees towards their work, their company and related issues at a time when the established order and established attitudes were under threat. The wide range and detail of the reporting of workers' attitudes, often in their own words, sustained over a considerable timescale, makes this study a particularly valuable resource.

1
Introduction

In 1999 I received a grant from the Japan Foundation to make a documentary film on C-Life, a major life insurance company at which I had worked for two years as a fresh graduate more than ten years previously. I mentioned the project to NHK—the Japan Broadcasting Association—who agreed to show the programme. By making a documentary film on C-Life I was able to spend a further three-to-six-month period inside the company, during which time I conducted a series of in-depth interviews with a wide range of employees.

Why the intense interest in C-Life? C-Life was, at the time, a major white-collar, very traditional company, which was ailing badly as the Japanese economic downturn continued. It was to go spectacularly bankrupt in October 2000. This book follows the demise of C-Life from the point of view of the employees working inside the company.

C-Life was one of the eight major life insurance companies in Japan and an investment power-house in the days of Japan's economic ‘bubble’ in the late 1980s. At this time, the life insurance industry was one of the most prestigious in which to work. Life insurance companies had begun to invest in overseas securities for the first time and the future looked bright for the largest life insurance industry in the world. But in 1999, hit hard by the near-ten-year recession that followed the stock market crash of 1990, C-Life had a crumbling asset base, diminishing returns, and new insurance policy sales were dwindling. It was teetering on the brink of failure, with some observers believing it might be the first major insurance company to go under in the post-war period—an assessment that, as events turned out, was proved absolutely correct. Looking at the lives of C-Life's employees during its last days, surrounded by conflicting information, uncertain values and insecurity, provides a fascinating case study of life in a traditional white-collar Japanese company in distress. But it also sheds light onto how individuals and groups strategise in different ways to maintain or improve their position.

Objectives of this work

The literature on Japan has looked extensively at companies, both from the point of view of management techniques and social organisation. But there have been few works that have looked at the company in times of economic downturn. Thus the view of the Japanese company in the literature is rather static. Japan has been experiencing economic downturn now for over ten years. By 2001 the benchmark Nikkei stock index had fallen to 1985 levels, effectively wiping out fifteen years of growth. Bankruptcies have been common and stories of restructuring and unemployment are splashed over the headlines of newspapers.

But we have little idea of what is happening inside these companies. How have Japanese employees handled the economic downturn? How do they feel about the state of the economy? How do they feel about living with the constant threat of restructuring? Has this changed their famous loyalty to their companies? Does anyone believe in life-time employment anymore?

In my previous book Inside the Japanese Company, I presented a detailed ethnography of C-Life. My focus there was on what it was like to work at the company, from the point of view of the individual employees. One distinctive feature of that work, compared to other ethnographies of Japan, was the fact that it was based on employees of different ages within one department of the company, seen during three separate stages of fieldwork, conducted over a fifteen-year period during which time the company was going through great changes, both economic and social. In this book, by contrast, the focus is on the final stages of C-Life's demise and how the employees have coped with it. It is a study of strategies, particularly the strategy of each individual faced with changing and uncertain circumstances.

In particular, I look at a group of employees, all of the same age and all of whom started out in C-Life during the same year—1985. I look at where this generation—of fifty people—has got to, by choosing seven typical patterns of reaction and career models from among these people and describing them in detail. By doing so, we get a real, in-depth picture of what these employees' lives are like, how their careers progressed and how they are managing in the economic downturn. We get a sense of the current situation in Japan and a sense of direction; where these employees—the important middle-management generation—are headed and what the future in the Japanese company is likely to look like.

I look at the employees and the company—not in isolation as a self-enclosed entity, but against the economic background and restructuring taking place in Japan today. It is against this atmosphere of great change that we must look at the employee to get a true view and to gain a real sense of the era. Above all, the company must be seen in the context of the economy if we are to make sense of the thinking and life-view of the Japanese employee. I look at how employees in C-Life react to the economic downturn in different ways, and especially at how they strategise to improve their lot as the fortunes of their company wax and wane and, eventually, as the company collapses altogether.

Plan of the book

I begin, in the first chapter, with a brief discussion of economic strategising, with reference particularly to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. This serves to introduce the focus of the book and the primary theme of the fieldwork chapters. In chapter 2 I set out the context for this study by describing briefly the rise and fall of the Japanese economy prior to the collapse of C-Life and look at the state of the life insurance industry in particular.

These chapters set the scene for the fieldwork chapters which follow and which focus on the employees themselves; through their voices we gain a vivid picture of life at the company as it starts to go under. Throughout, I quote extensively from the employees themselves. As a result, the atmosphere of the company at the time is easy to appreciate. The first three fieldwork chapters explore what the employees experienced during this period and what their views of the current situation were.

Chapter 3 looks at the current situation with regard to the economy and C-Life, as viewed by the employees. We see that they are quite realistic about the situation, although they take little action about it. Their plight is illustrated not only by quotations from interviews with them but also by several short case studies, featuring the stories of particular employees. These bring home the real human cost of C-Life's downfall.

Chapter 4 looks in detail at the effects of the restructuring itself. I describe the increasingly radical steps taken by C-Life's management as it attempted to stave off the company's collapse, culminating in the dismissal of 800 employees. The effects of these policies on the employees is examined and discussed. At the same time, I consider the issue of responsibility for the company's situation, an important question for the employees at the time, and how they envisage the future for C-Life.

In chapter 5, I build on the issues discussed in the previous two chapters. Why is it that the management of C-Life—and of many Japanese companies in general—has found it so hard to adapt to the changing economic circumstances? Here, I examine the employees' views on these important issues. I look at their attitudes towards Japanese management itself and what they think the future has in store.

Having discussed the employees' situation in depth, I then turn to an examination of how they are coping with changing circumstances. In chapter 6, 1 present case studies of eight employees, all ‘doki’, or members of the same year-group, at C-Life. These individuals represent several different typical responses to the changing times at C-Life: some escaped from the company as quickly as possible, whilst others condemned such actions and remained with the company to the last. There was a whole spectrum of possibilities in between. These case studies show the range of individual reaction among employees in Japan today, and demonstrate both the range of individuality and the degree to which employees have changed from the days when ‘life-time employment’ was regarded as normal.

The case studies also illustrate how different individuals use different techniques to advance their own interests, an issue I discuss in more depth in chapter 7, where I take up the themes introduced in my discussion of Bourdieu in chapter 1 and reflect on the fieldwork, using it to illustrate my theoretical conclusions. I discuss the different ways in which individuals and groups strategise to pursue their own agendas. In particular, I focus on the ways that ideology is used in these strategies; the first part of the chapter is devoted to a study of the nature and role of ideology, with a focus on its different levels and the relations between them, The points I make here are reflected in chapter 8, where I describe the process of filming at C-Life. Everybody involved in the filming was actively pursuing their own agendas and using the filming as a tool to do so.

In chapter 9, I reflect on the methodology of this study and some of the themes to have emerged from it: the role of narrative in company life and in an ethnography of that life, myth and ideology. The chapter includes a brief look at the way that the ‘nihonjiron’ literature had mythical qualities within Japan.

I conclude, in chapter 10, with an account of the final collapse of C-Life. I also present the responses to this event of some of the employees described earlier in the book.

Economic strategising

First, then, I introduce the subject of strategising and consciousness. This establishes the primary theoretical focus of this work: not only how people manipulate ideology, but why they do it. My discussion centres in particular on the work of Pierre Bourdieu.

Bourdieu and economic strategising

I have found Bourdieu's ideas to be particularly useful in understanding the means and purposes of strategising. Bourdieu attempts to escape the ‘economism’—as he calls it—of Marxism, which reduces the social field entirely to economics. He also breaks with the objectivism of Marxism, which ignores symbolic struggles within the social world (Harker, Mahar and Wilkes 1990) and concentrates solely on the economic realm. Bourdieu's novel approach is also helpful in collapsing the individual/structure dichotomy without falling into the mire of either structuralism or post-structuralism. He does this by re-focusing attention on individual action and strategy. Rather than opposing objective structures and subjective representations, Bourdieu argues that it is necessary to understand both ‘the genesis of social structures and…the agents who live within these structures’. So we need both to look at ‘the company’ and also to look at the individual employees inside the company to see the range of individuality, the range of individual choice and thinking, and the ways in which the individual interacts with the company. The individual conforms to the company on one level, but on another, s/he acts to advance his or her own strategies, to promote individual goals and to achieve satisfaction of individual needs.

Bourdieu's crucial point is that the scarce goods for which people compete include all kinds of categories, not just the merely economic, as Marxist theorists believe: they are any social and symbolic goods that are valued in a particular society. Thus, as we shall see, in the Japanese company status is the primary symbolic good—even more important than economic goods. Corresponding to the variety of goods being played for, there is therefore a variety of different games occurring at any one time, and any individual may be playing in more than one of them at the same time.

The social realm is divided into ‘fields’, which are separate domains of forces and tensions. Each field is the arena for a game, the playing of which determines what happens to the field. All the fields taken together make up ‘social space’. Although distinct, the different fields touch each other, since the same players may be active in different fields or transfer capital between them. Capital is whatever is played for in the different fields. It may be material goods, or other things that are valued such as prestige. The value of any cultural notion is not its meaningfulness or its usefulness but the social distinction embedded in such meaning or use, that is, the effects of the cultural products on the social positions of the producers. This works in reverse also: the rebel derives his or her cultural capital from a refutation of the dominant ideology. Capital, in short, is all the goods that are sought after in a particular social formation. It is convertible, since a player may sacrifice capital in one game to gain a different kind in another. However, such strategising may not happen consciously. Moreover, symbolic capital is not always recognised as a convertible source of power. The process of conversion may be ‘masked’ by agents' ‘structuring’ of the world. Agents construct their social world, then they act to reproduce their positions and to gain position in the social world. For Bourdieu, ideology often functions to hide the calculations that lie behind the strategising which forms much of social life. For example, the economics of gift-giving is disguised by reconceptualising it within the ideals of honour, generosity, reciprocity and so on. So the company's agenda—to survive as a company and to be profitable—may be hidden behind a mask of Japanese values.

Central to this is the concept of habitus. By using the concept of habitus — internalised schemes which, having been constituted in the course of collective history, are acquired in the course of individual history—Bourdieu attempts to unite the individual/social structure divide. While he speaks of different kinds of strategies by which players seek to improve their standing in various fields, or even move between them, he claims that their ability to do this is limited by ‘habitus’, which, for Bourdieu, is an essentially unconscious structure. This concept means, in essence, that we act habitually, without thinking consciously about much of what we do. Partly as a result of this, habitus is very hard to change: Bourdieu thinks of it as constructed during childhood, as the individual learns the rules and structures of its society. Habitus therefore has a dominating role for the rest of the individual's life, being largely unchanged by later experience.

Bourdieu's ideas incorporate both the individual and a larger theory of domination in the social field. As a method, Bourdieu's ideas are neither symbolic nor material; they are about the relationship between the two spheres. His contribution has therefore been a synthesis of the economic and the symbolic orders. Symbolic power is a form of power with material force. His theory, therefore, unites both the individual and social structure by looking at how individuals behave in the context of society. He has also united the economic/cultural spheres by looking at how people behave in the context of the economic world and the economic goods that they strategise to obtain.

The relevance for this book is that I use these theories in order to look at the ways in which the individuals in C-Life acted in relation to the overall demands of the organisation of the company, and I look at the economic and symbolic goods that they desired and how they strategised in order to obtain these. I also look at how all of this changed as the economy changed and the company faltered. In relation to Bourdieu's notion of habitus, I look at how conscious the individuals in C-Life were of the social rules and how conscious they were of the fact that both they themselves and the individuals around them were engaged in a strategic struggle to improve their economic and symbolic positions.

Other views

Other schools which are of relevance to this argument include transactionalism, or action/practice theory (associated with Barth, Bailey, Paine and the Manchester School: Cohen, Comaroff, etc.), which is also an attempt to look at how individuals behave in the context of the overall society. It looks at people as centres of action, capable of making individual decisions, competing with each other to create meaning and achieve their goals. Individuals actively strategise to create their futures. Individual agency, in this view, comes first—is privileged above social structure—and gives rise to socio-cultural processes which are in use for a certain time and participated in by a certain number of people for variable amounts of time. Barth (1959, 1966) argues that we need to look at society as a whole, or social structures, in terms of how individuals use them in strategising. Thus, social structures remain in pla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• A Japanese company in crisis
• RoutledgeCurzon Contemporary Japan Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Economic background
• 3 The current situation
• 4 Restructuring
• 5 The company and change
• 6 The flowers of 1985
• 7 Ideology and economic strategising
• 8 Strategising during the filming of C-Life
• 9 Narrative and myth
• 10 C-Life goes under
• 11 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index