Author : Andrew Gordon
Publisher : Harvard Univ Asia Center
Page : 560 pages
File Size : 20,5 MB
Release : 1985
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674271319
The century-long process by which a distinct pattern of Japanese labor relations evolved is traced through the often turbulent interactions of workers, managers, and, at times, government bureaucrats and politicians. Gordon argues that it was not until the 1940s and 1950s that something closely akin to the contemporary pattern emerged.
Author : Andrew Gordon
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 550 pages
File Size : 14,62 MB
Release : 2020-03-17
Category : History
ISBN : 1684172527
"The century-long process by which a distinct pattern of Japanese labor relations evolved is traced through the often turbulent interactions of workers, managers, and, at times, government bureaucrats and politicians. The author argues that, although by the 1920s labor relations had reached a stage that foreshadowed postwar development, it was not until the 1940s and 1950s that something closely akin to the contemporary pattern emerged. The central theme is that the ideas and actions of the workers, whether unionized or not, played a vital role in the shaping of the system. This is the only study in the West that demonstrates how Japanese workers sought to change and to some extent succeeded in changing the structure of factory life. Managerial innovations and the efforts of state bureaucrats to control social change are also examined. The book is based on extensive archival research and interviewing in Japan, including the use of numerous labor-union publications and the holdings of the prewar elite’s principal organization for the study of social issues, the Kyochokai, both collections having only recently been catalogued and opened to scholars. This is an intensive look at past developments that underlie labor relations in today’s Japanese industrial plants."
Author : Andrew Gordon
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 33,41 MB
Release : 2001-11-15
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780674037816
Andrew Gordon goes to the core of the Japanese enterprise system, the workplace, and reveals a complex history of contest and confrontation. The Japanese model produced a dynamic economy which owed as much to coercion as to happy consensus. Managerial hegemony was achieved only after a bitter struggle that undermined the democratic potential of postwar society. The book draws on examples across Japanese industry, but focuses in depth on iron and steel. This industry was at the center of the country's economic recovery and high-speed growth, a primary site of corporate managerial strategy and important labor union initiatives. Beginning with the Occupation reforms and their influence on the workplace, Gordon traces worker activism and protest in the 1950s and '60s, and how they gave way to management victory in the 1960s and '70s. He shows how working people had to compromise institutions of self-determination in pursuit of economic affluence. He illuminates the Japanese system with frequent references to other capitalist nations whose workplaces assumed very different shape, and looks to Japan's future, rebutting hasty predictions that Japanese industrial relations are about to be dramatically transformed in the American free-market image. Gordon argues that it is more likely that Japan will only modestly adjust the status quo that emerged through the turbulent postwar decades he chronicles here.
Author : Andrew Gordon
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 381 pages
File Size : 50,73 MB
Release : 1991-02-20
Category : History
ISBN : 0520913302
Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan examines the political role played by working men and women in prewar Tokyo and offers a reinterpretation of the broader dynamics of Japan's prewar political history. Gordon argues that such phenomena as riots, labor disputes, and union organizing can best be understood as part of an early twentieth-century movement for "imperial democracy" shaped by the nineteenth-century drive to promote capitalism and build a modern nation and empire. When the propertied, educated leaders of this movement gained a share of power in the 1920s, they disagreed on how far to go toward incorporating working men and women into an expanded body politic. For their part, workers became ambivalent toward working within the imperial democratic system. In this context, the intense polarization of laborers and owners during the Depression helped ultimately to destroy the legitimacy of imperial democracy. Gordon suggests that the thought and behavior of Japanese workers both reflected and furthered the intense concern with popular participation and national power that has marked Japan's modern history. He points to a post-World War II legacy for imperial democracy in both the organization of the working class movement and the popular willingness to see GNP growth as an index of national glory. Importantly, Gordon shows how historians might reconsider the roles of tenant farmers, students, and female activists, for example, in the rise and transformation of imperial democracy.
Author : John Price
Publisher : Ithaca, NY. : LR Press
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 41,18 MB
Release : 1997
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN :
Price probes the paradoxes in postwar labor-management relations, particularly in the years between 1945 and 1975. Basing his analysis on the history of labor in Mitsui's Miike mine in Kyushu, Suzuki Motors in Hamamatsu, and Moriguchi City Hall, the author questions the common interpretation that industrial relations are based on lifetime jobs, seniority-based wages, and enterprise unions. He also asks whether Japanese workers have been genuinely empowered by the developments in recent years.
Author : James R. Lincoln
Publisher : CUP Archive
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 23,7 MB
Release : 1992-06-04
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780521428668
Author : Ikuo Kume
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 36,46 MB
Release : 1998
Category : History
ISBN : 9780801484940
Japanese scholars have begun to challenge conventional wisdom about effective labor organizing, and Ikuo Kume has written the first book in English to advance their controversial theory. Since at least the early 1980s, the power of organized labor has weakened in most advanced industrial countries. The decline of organized labor has coincided with the decentralization of labor-management relations. As a result, most observers assume that decentralized labor is destined to lose power in a capitalist economy, and that enterprise unions will tend to be docile and powerless.Kume documents the one notable exception. The Japanese trade union confederation has steadily grown in importance, expanding its scope beyond individual companies to national policy making. Kume traces the achievements of enterprise unionism in private firms. Labor, he argues, slowly gained legitimate corporate membership by establishing joint institutions with management. By the 1960s, labor-management councils, stimulated by foreign competition, had become a widespread feature of Japanese industry. Soon unions were regular participants in the government deliberation councils and in the information exchange that shaped policy when inflation hit the Japanese economy. The unions had become a full partner by the 1980s and were crucially involved in the 1993 defeat of the Liberal Democratic Party after thirty-eight years of rule.
Author : Sanford M. Jacoby
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 42,37 MB
Release : 2007-07-22
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0691133840
The author traces the enduring diversity of corporate culture in Japan and the U.S. to national differences in economic history and social norms, and, paradoxically, to global competition itself.
Author : John Whitney Hall
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 896 pages
File Size : 37,65 MB
Release : 1988
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521223577
This comprehensive work surveys the historical events and developments in Japan's polity, economy, society and culture.
Author : Sheldon Garon
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 12,69 MB
Release : 1987
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0520068386
'This book is recommendable not only to students of Japanese political or labour history, but also to those interested in studying comparative industrial relations. It is an excellent example of how a historical account sheds much light on what might easily be swept aside under the umbrella of culture to explain a nation's industrial relations systems.' - Mari Sako, Work, Employment & Society.
