Women Managers In Neoliberal Japan

This book, based on extensive original research, presents a detailed analysis of the varying opportunities and challenges experienced by Japanese women with professional careers, an important category of the population in Japan, whose lives remain little known. It addresses many key issues, including the problems of flexible work in an increasingly neoliberal environment; the pervasiveness of precarious work conditions in gendered managerial employment; the state’s neglect in transforming antiquated labour laws and in combating abusive corporate practices; the implications of dysfunctional employee-employer relations and those among co-workers; media representations as barometers of resistant social norms; the ambivalent effects of work related drinking practices; and the lack of collective representation due to ineffective labour unions. Overall, the book presents the disheartening realities of conflicts and ambivalence experienced by many women managers in contemporary Japan.

Drawing on ethnographic data gathered from fieldwork spanning a 15-year period, this book offers new insights into understanding the lives and experiences of women managers in Japan. Based on empirical case studies, it explores the ways in which professional women in Tokyo creatively mobilize their friendships as a strategic site for mitigating the disappointments in their working lives, and conceptualizing new understandings of independence and equality. It analyses their use of language, time, space and money to negotiate new identities in an increasingly flexible work environment. In examining the challenges and opportunities faced by these corporate workers, this book also extends anthropological debates about the changing meaning and importance of work for women, as well as their relationship with money and separation from the realm of domesticity. As a study of women's lives in and out of the workplace in Japan, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese culture and society, anthropology, sociology, gender and women's studies.

This book describes the little known world of Japanese women managers. Though largely unrecognized, women in Japan are moving into management positions in increasing numbers, and their importance to Japan's future competitiveness is becoming more understood.

Since Japan’s economic recession began in the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolutionary changes as greater numbers of women have sought to establish careers. Employment trends indicate that increasingly white-collar professional women are succeeding in breaking through the "glass ceiling", as digital technologies blur and redefine work in spatial, gendered, and ideological terms. This book examines what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in the contemporary neoliberal economy, and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. It analyses how professional women contest conventional notions of femininity in contemporary Japan and in turn, negotiate new gender roles and cultural assumptions about women, whilst reorganizing the Japanese workplace and wider socio-economic relationships. Further, the book explores how professional women create new social identities through the mutual conditioning of structure and self, and asks how women come to understand their experiences; how their actions change the gendering of the workforce; and how their lives shape the economic, political, social, and cultural landscapes of this post-industrial nation. Based on extensive fieldwork, Career Women in Contemporary Japan will have broad appeal across a range of disciplines including Japanese culture and society, gender and family studies, women’s studies, anthropology, ethnology and sociology.

Based on extensive, multi-sited ethnographic research, this book focuses on the culture of work in today’s urban China and on how it has permeated beyond the workplace to shape bodily training, family life, and kinship and social relationships among white-collar women in their twenties and thirties. Facing challenges to cope with the increasingly intensified dual burden of work and family, whitecollar women are not turning their backs on their jobs but are turning their bodies and homes into work. In an era when the state and society heighten pressure on individual young women’s productivity and reproductivity at the same time, the book examines how white-collar women seek to protect their right to work, embody a work ethic, and make their reproductive life a productive domain. Integrating studies of labor, the body, gender, and kinship, this book shows how the ethics and strictly defined discipline of hard work and overtime work are transposed from the office cubicle to the gym and home. It thereby demonstrates how the emergence, embodiment, and extension of a work culture perpetuate the hegemony of the work ethic, and how they have exerted a profound impact on women’s bodies, selves, and lives.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,0, TU Bergakademie Freiberg (Chair of Business English, Business Communication and Intercultural Communication), language: English, comment: Verknüpfung von Ergebnissen aus Wissenschaft und Praxis. Mit Bestnote ausgezeichnete Diplomarbeit., abstract: The representation of women in management is a globally and frequently discussed phenomenon. Albeit the worldwide number of female managers is continuously increasing, progress is still slow and full of barriers (ILO, 2004). These obstacles are described as an invisible glass ceiling: Negative attitudes and prejudices within organizations prevent women from climbing the career ladder (Wirth, 2001). However, culture seems to be an important factor of influence for female management opportunities. For example, female managers tend to be generally less accepted in Asia than in America or Eastern Europe (ILO, 2004). Among Asian countries, Japan is very special: Although the country is one of the most developed and richest economies in the world, gender equality is extremely low there (UNDP, 2007; Fackler, 2007). Women are often hired for administrative tasks only and not allowed to pursue own careers. Despite growing attempts to strengthen gender equality, Japanese females are still discriminated against and expected to stick to their traditional duties as mothers, wives, and "office flowers" (Faiola, 2007; Ogasawara, 1998). Female under-representation is notably high for management positions and seems to increase with the level of seniority (Wirth, 2001). Consequently, the Japanese glass ceiling is also known as "concrete ceiling" reflecting the enormous level of gender discrimination (Wahlin, 2007; Penketh, 2008). Japan's rigid and outstanding gender inequality is strongly influenced by the national culture and its major impact on the societal role of women. On the one hand, the Japanese are known

The number of women in positions of power and authority in Japanese companies has remained small despite the increase in the number of educated women and the passage of legislation on gender equality. In Too Few Women at the Top, Kumiko Nemoto draws on theoretical insights regarding Japan’s coordinated capitalism and institutional stasis to challenge claims that the surge in women’s education and employment will logically lead to the decline of gender inequality and eventually improve women’s status in the Japanese workplace. Nemoto’s interviews with diverse groups of workers at three Japanese financial companies and two cosmetics companies in Tokyo reveal the persistence of vertical sex segregation as a cost-saving measure by Japanese companies. Women’s advancement is impeded by customs including seniority pay and promotion, track-based hiring of women, long working hours, and the absence of women leaders. Nemoto contends that an improvement in gender equality in the corporate system will require that Japan fundamentally depart from its postwar methods of business management. Only when the static labor market is revitalized through adoption of new systems of cost savings, employee hiring, and rewards will Japanese women advance in their chosen professions. Comparison with the situation in the United States makes the author’s analysis of the Japanese case relevant for understanding the dynamics of the glass ceiling in U.S. workplaces as well.

Using data from surveys conducted in a department store and a supermarket, Kimoto discusses the forces shaping job segregation by gender. One of the main themes is the need for Japanese women's labor studies to develop the theoretical and methodological momentum required for a fuller analysis of paid work using a gender perspective. Kimoto stresses the need for empirical studies to reveal the realities of workforce conditions and of job segregation by gender. This is linked to another major theme: the need to escape from the tendency of Japanese labor studies researchers and those working in Japanese personnel offices to think of women as necessarily disadvantaged participants in the labor market because of their household and child-rearing duties. Kimoto shows that this thinking serves only to prevent one from seeing how gender norms and therefore gender relations actually develop in workplaces. A clear picture emerges of the reasons for women's difficulties in moving beyond the lower levels of management.