Japanese Capitalism and Modernity in a Global Era

Refabricating Lifetime Employment Relations

Peter Matanle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415305747
• eBook ISBN: 9781134403790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Japon

First Published in 2004. This book provides an in-depth examination of one of the most central and defining aspects of capitalist modernity in contemporary Japan-the lifetime employment system. It investigates the key themes surrounding the system, including the work attitudes and values of Japanese company employees and whether or not Japan is converging on Western forms of capitalist organisation. Peter Matanle presents and analyses original documentary data, drawn from extensive research within four large Japanese corporations, in order to explore these issues from the perspective of both management and employees. The findings are then discussed in terms of the development of Japan's capitalism and modernity. It will be of interest to researchers of Japanese studies, Business studies and Sociology.

1 Introduction

Researching Japanese capitalism and modernity

Modernity is as much a state of mind as it is a material condition. It can most neatly be understood as a transformative ethic that has as its engine pushing it forwards and outwards the positivistic and economistic rationalism that is capitalism. With capitalism as its engine, modernity seeks a progressive and linear transformation of the human experience into a rationally and reflexively ordered life-scape that can be proactively controlled and manipulated for the purposes of providing an ever more comfortable, fulfilling, liberating, challenging, and complex life for its human subjects.

Mediating the mental and the material aspects of modernity are the institutions and organizations which individuals and groups construct in order that they might express their consciousness through the process of creative adaptation. That is to say, institutions and organizations are the social mechanisms by which people not only create their environment out of the mental images they have developed but also accommodate themselves to the circumstances of their lives.

Moreover, because capitalism requires expansion if it is not to implode under the weight of its own internal contradictions, so capitalist modernity compulsively expands out from its centre in the West.¹ In so doing, it becomes both a globalizing and a totalitarian phenomenon. It is globalizing in the sense that it ceaselessly and ineluctably extends into previously untouched areas of the world and totalitarian in the sense that as it enters into and interacts with ever deeper and wider realms of the human consciousness it becomes a seductive and beguiling yet enforced and problematic liberation from traditionalism. Like a giant seismic sea wave it colonizes and envelops the future as well as the present and the past in its steady and irresistible advance across and around the earth. Yet, just as the advancing wave, by dint of the underwater terrain it encounters, must possess within it cross- and counter-currents, so capitalist modernity, as it spreads out from its epicentre, contains the capacity to mutate according to the character of the domains it confronts. Consequently, and initially at least, through the process of the globalization of capitalism, modernity becomes not a singular phenomenon but evolves to develop and exhibit a variety of forms according to the circumstances of its appearance and subsequent development in any particular region of the world.

Accordingly therefore, and paradoxically, an epiphenomenon of the globalizing tendency of capitalist modernity is that of the collision and perhaps hybridization, or even convergence of different versions of the modern. Thus, the ongoing transformative process of the destruction, reconstruction, and mutation of ever more complex versions may also have within it the capacity for capitalist modernity to evolve itself into a singular global phenomenon.

Work in capitalist modernity

Work is, with the possible exception of the family, the most important social institution of the modern world (MOW, 1987) and research in the sociology of work is thus central to an understanding of both capitalism and mod-ernity.² For in circumstances where premodern ascribed social roles and relations have all but disappeared, life in modern capitalism compels all but the most resourceful to seek the satisfaction of their basic physiological needs through the wage relation. The exchange of labour for money, or paid employment, in a monetized society allows individuals to purchase food and shelter as well as provide security for themselves and their families. In addition, those who do not engage in regular paid employment in the formal economy must ordinarily, through the mediating role of either the state or the family, depend on people who are thus employed.

However, work in the modern world is not simply an instrumental means to physiological security. It is also indispensable to the achievement of a modern self-identity. The content of a person’s work, the social and status relations external to the family determined and made possible by work, and the consumption and leisure opportunities opened up to an individual through the wage relation not only provide the principal means by which an individual can construct his or her identity, they are also the principal means by which a person’s identity is unwittingly revealed as well as deliberately signalled to others. Furthermore, involvement in work may also provide an opportunity for individuals in mass society to experience feelings of liberation, fulfilment, and deep enjoyment through the activation and actualization of productive and creative abilities and impulses (Csikszentmihaly, 1988).

It is also important to recognize that few people are likely to be able, or perhaps even wish, to use work in employment as a vehicle for the satisfaction and expression of the full range of their needs, desires, and values. Examples of degrading conditions are legion and many are compelled by force of circumstance to struggle even to provide basic material comfort and security for themselves and their families. Boring or repetitive labour that requires little creative input is also unlikely to result in feelings of satisfaction or psychological enrichment. And here lies, of course, one of the basic predicaments of capitalist modernity. Although we are compelled by the ideologies of liberty and self-determination to create our own individual identities and biographies, and we are seduced by the fiction of each person having an equal chance to participate in the race to achieve success in this endeavour, the structural requirements and limitations of a modern capitalist political economy prevent or inhibit a significant proportion of the people of the world’s advanced industrial democracies, not to mention the majority of those living in developing countries, from doing just that. Nevertheless, in the modern world, even at this impoverished level, as Jahoda (1982) observes, only work in paid employment, as opposed to unemployment, provides the categories of experience necessary for the maintenance of an individual’s mental health and sense of well-being.

[I]t imposes a time structure on the waking day; it enlarges the scope of social relations beyond the often emotionally highly charged family relations and those in the immediate neighbourhood; by virtue of the division of labour it demonstrates that the purposes and achievements of a collectivity transcend those for which an individual can aim; it assigns social status and clarifies personal identity; it requires regular activity.

(Jahoda, 1982: 83)

Thus, capitalist modernity and, within it, the modern culture of work, are characterized by their tremendous transformative capacity, both through the visible changes that are wrought on the material environment by the industrial and commercial processes as well as by the invisible transmutation of consciousness that engenders and is engendered by the reflexive construction of an entirely different way of life. Modernity, through work as its core social element, defines itself in negation to the past and in its discovery of the future as a temporal territory to be colonized, constructed, and transformed. Thus, work, capitalism, and modernity are intimately bound together in a transformative embrace, each within the other, each acting on and reacting to the other. Without the institution of work, and in particular paid employment, modern life would be impossible in its present form.

Work values

If we can accept the proposition that modern life is inconceivable without a modern culture of work, asking why one would wish to research aspects of people’s work values might seem, at first glance, to be unnecessary. Indeed, most research on the subject implicitly assumes an objective validity in examining work values without raising questions as to its underlying purpose.

The enormous interest shown by researchers in work values, attitudes, and dispositions has mainly been generated by the assumption that by studying the meanings and orientations that people bring to their work tasks we can in some measure predict economic and work-related behaviour (Furnham, 1997). Underlying this approach lies the assumption that some values might have a positive relationship to productivity while others might have a negative relationship. Thus, it might be possible to manipulate the work context to maximize the impact of positively related values in order that an economic benefit may accrue. Immediately, one is tempted to ask the question: for whose benefit is this assumed and predicted improvement in economic performance?

Even if this approach does indeed bring forth concrete and positive economic results, and these are shared equitably among all stakeholders in the enterprise, economic expansion per se is not supposed to be an end in itself. It is only important in so far as it provides the means by which people might lead longer, more comfortable, happier, and more fulfilled lives (Oswald, 1997). While the spectacular expansion in the material well-being of the peoples of the world’s most technologically advanced industrial societies over the past 100 years or so has no precedent in the entire history of the human race, and this has been accompanied by real and measurable improvements in the standard of living of the majority of people in the developed world, can it be confidently asserted that personal happiness and fulfilment worldwide have increased in proportion to the advances in our material wealth? Notwithstanding the undoubted importance of the economic arena, are we not in danger, therefore, of confusing the means for living in the modern world with its ends?

It appears that much of the academic research on work values and related social phenomena is done with material enrichment in mind and sometimes therefore, by implication, places the interests of employees in a subordinate position to those of management and owners. In so doing it also subordinates all concerns to economic and political priorities, thus contributing to a devaluation and a corruption of the legitimate social, emotional, and psychological needs, desires, and values of all stakeholders as well as of the nobility of the institution of work itself. While economistic and managerial approaches can make a justifiable claim to seeking improvements in working conditions for all employees, and they may be considered a significant step forward from the harsh authoritarianism of Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management, they continue to be as manipulative and to deny employees the opportunity to be considered a stakeholder in the enterprise as well as denying all stakeholders the opportunity to satisfy interests that go beyond the merely mechanistic and material.

Interestingly, and aside from the above ethical issues, there is considerable debate even as to the validity of the assumption that sustainable productivity increases might be achieved by improvements in the working context and, thus, work satisfaction of employees. Intuitively it might be assumed that the relationship is in the direction of productivity but some research suggests that the causal relationship might be in the opposite direction. Reversing the presumed dependency, Paul, Robertson, and Herzberg (1969), as well as Locke and Latham (1990), found that satisfaction tends to increase as a result of high but attainable challenge and performance. Furthermore, Csikszentmihaly and Csikszentmihaly’s edited volume (1988) points unequivocally to attainable challenge being the source of deep satisfaction in the process of task completion. Setting aside for a moment ideological and moral criticisms, even if, as Sagie, Elizur and Koslowsky (1996) suggest, the causal relationship is reciprocal rather than simply in the direction of satisfaction alone, the rational economic validity of economistic and managerial approaches is itself questionable.

Moving closer towards a humanistic explanation for this research, if work takes up approximately one-third of the waking hours of a mature adult for a period of, say, between 30 and 50 years, then it is perhaps trite to state that the quality of that experience will be of great importance to the participant. If education and preparation for the world of work, the impact of work on individuals’ non-work activities and relationships, and the effects of work on the length and quality of life after retirement are also taken into consideration then the importance of the work experience becomes yet more significant. Likewise, when the unambiguous consequences for people’s life chances of structural inequality are combined with an increasingly global and complex division of labour in society, great variation in people’s experiences of work and its outcomes can produce feelings of envy, exclusion, and even hatred, loathing, and contempt, with all the associated social repercussions of such divisiveness.

Accordingly, the study of work values ceases to be merely an exercise in finding ever more devious mechanisms for extracting greater surplus value from employees and takes on quintessentially human, social, and even political, requirements of its own.

Institutions and organizations of employment

While the theory of personal agency suggests that people’s experience of work depends on the demeanour they bring to their tasks, it is also clear that the institutions and organizations of employment influence the degree to which individuals can satisfy their needs and desires and realize their values. Thus, while it is important to study the ideologies and cultures of work in order that we might have a greater understanding of how people wish to live in modern society, it is also crucial that we study this aspect of social life in the context of the character and structure of the institutions and organizations that enable and constrain our ability to achieve our objectives.

In addition to providing a presumed basis for the prediction of economic behaviour, it has also been contended that work values might be a causal variable in organizational, institutional, and social change (MOW, 1987). It might be presumed, therefore, that the reverse is also true. For people not only develop meanings out of the work that they do but they also bring meaning to their work tasks and, thus, there should be a reciprocal relationship between change in both value systems and the circumstances in which those values are played out in social life. It might also be presupposed, therefore, that if structures are incompatible with or contradictory to those meanings, working people may take measures to alter the social or institutional constraints upon the realization of their needs, desires, and values to gain a greater degree of compatibility. Thus, in order to understand the process of organizational, institutional, and social change we must study the relationship between institutions and organizations and the ideologies of the individuals of which they are comprised.

A large body of research in psychology, sociology, and political economy has been steadily accumulating that advances the controversial opinion that governments and decision-makers in advanced capitalist democracies are attacking the wrong issues (Inglehart, 1990 and 1997; Oswald, 1997). In fact, it may not be an exaggeration to state that the principal goal of the governments of the capitalist democracies has become the achievement of continuous increases in the material standard of living of their peoples. The presupposition that dominates this strategy is to assume that the good life will more or less automatically follow from raising productivity and output. In addition, the principal aim of most capitalist enterprises, large corporations being the most enthusiastic advocates, is to achieve increases in revenues, profits, and market share more rapidly than their competitors. What is the philosophical foundation for such an ethos? Because, for employees, at least, the result of such government and corporate policies has been an apparently unrelenting intensification of the work process coupled to a progressively increasing insecurity within the work context that, combined together, produce ever greater feelings of anxiety among the producers of a nation’s wealth (Sennett, 1998).

Perhaps there is something in the nature of our institutions and organizations that causes us as individuals to feel trapped within a self-regulating system that prevents us from realizing our nature as unique human beings embedded in a sustainable society. For as Max Weber contested in his best-known and most controversial work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs … the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint like a light cloak which can be thrown aside at any moment. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

(Weber, 1976 [1904]: 53 and 181)

If correct, what does this say about the nature of industrial development, the institutional arrangements of market capitalism and liberal democracy, and their relationship with the human condition? Surely, if the course of capitalist development runs counter to, and the institutional arrangements of the modern political economy constrain or restrict the achievement of our goals, goals which may be as much determined by our essential humanity as they are by personal agency and structural conditions, then, should we not question the validity of and seek to reform our social, economic, and political institutions and organizations so that they facilitate the achievement of our ideals and aspirations? Research into the relationships between individuals and the institutions and organizations through which they channel their energies for the achievement of their hopes and ambitions, therefore, would seem to be an urgent priority.

Japan, the lifetime employment system, and the Japanese salaryman

Japan is an important challenge to Western assumptions about the nature of socio-economic development, its directions, and its possibilities. As the most technologically advanced and modern non-Western capitalist economy and representative polity, Japan offers a special opportunity to refine sociological theory and make it more generalizable than is possible through a concentration on Western individuals and institutions (Williams, 1996 and Clammer, 1997). For although the West was the first region of the world to experience modernity and industrial development, and Western capitalist expansion meant that all subsequent forms of modernity are derived in part as a consequence of contact with the West, the Japanese example shows that, although the West will influence and give colour to the Japanese experience, capitalist modernity is no longer a Western, but a global, phenomenon.

Nevertheless, although average material standards of living among the Japanese people have improved dramatically since Japan’s virtual collapse in 1945, and even after more than a decade of economic stagnation Japan is still the world’s premier industrial manufacturer and second largest capitalist economy, if one spends some time in Japan it is impossible to avoid the feeling that many Japanese people are not quite so sure that the progress their country has made is such an unqualified suc...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies / RoutledgeCurzon Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epilogue
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• preface
• Glossary of terms and abbreviations
• 1   Introduction: researching Japanese capitalism and modernity
• 2   Japanese capitalism and modernity in theoretical perspective
• 3   Lifetime employment in post-war Japan
• 4   Re-fabricating lifetime employment relations
• 5   Working under changing employment relations
• 6   Conclusion: Japanese capitalism and modernity in a global era
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index