Tuesday 5 December 2006
6:00pm – 8:00pm
Perspectives on Work, Employment and Society in Japan
Daiwa Foundation Japan House
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
Edited by Peter Matanle and Wim Lunsing
Published by Palgrave Macmillan
Since the bursting of the ‘Bubble Economy’, and the decade and a half of stagnation which followed, work and employment in Japan have been said on many occasions to have undergone some profound changes. This has been matched with a renewed interest among scholars in the structures, processes and cultures of work in Japan. Perspectives on Work, Employment and Society in Japan uses macro- and micro-level data and analysis to examine subjects such as ‘lifetime employment’, expatriate engineers, ‘freeters’, and senior volunteers. The authors describe how the meanings that individual Japanese attach to their work and employment are changing, and set their arguments within contemporary developments in the Japanese socio-economy. The book demonstrates the continuing centrality of work to an understanding of contemporary Japan and the development of its society.
About the contributors
Wim Lunsing
Wim Lunsing has taught at Oxford Brookes and Copenhagen universities and was a research student at Kyoto Seika University (1991–93) and a research fellow at Tokyo University (1996 and 2001–02). He is the author of Beyond Common Sense: Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Japan (2001) and numerous papers on sexuality, gender, and research methods and ethics in Japan. While his explorations in the area of sexuality and gender in Japan continue, his latest projects include individual ways of dealing with the changing employment situation in Japan, migration and multi-ethnic societies, and sustainable development.
Kevin McCormick
Kevin McCormick is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sussex. His main interests lie in the sociology of work and employment, and in comparative studies of Europe and East Asia. His current work is exploring education, training and employment for information technology professionals in Britain and Japan. Some recent publications include Engineers in Japan and Britain: Education, Training and Employment (2000) and ‘Post-war Japan as a Model for Reform in Britain’, in C. Tsuzuki, G. Daniels and T. Kusumitsu (eds), The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations 1600–2000: vol. 5, Social and Cultural Perspectives (2002).
Leo McCann
Leo McCann is Lecturer in International and Comparative Management at Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. In 2002 he completed his PhD in sociology at the University of Kent. Leo’s main research interests lie in comparative management and the sociology of work. His books include Russian Transformations (2004) and Economic Development in Tatarstan (2005). He is currently working on a book with John Hassard and Jonathan Morris on middle managers and organizational restructuring in the UK, USA and Japan, to be published by Cambridge University Press.
Peter Matanle
Peter Matanle (chair) is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield’s School of East Asian Studies, from where he gained his PhD in 2001. From 2004 to 2006 he was the recipient of a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Post-doctoral Fellowship to Niigata University. He is the author of various publications in the sociology of work in Japan, including Japanese capitalism and modernity in a Global Era: Re-fabricating Lifetime Employment Relations (2003), and is the founder and general editor of the Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies.