The Wages of Affluence

The Wages of Affluence

Author: Andrew Gordon

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2001-11-15

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9780674037816

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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.


Disparaged Success

Disparaged Success

Author: Ikuo Kume

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-09-05

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 150173184X

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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.


Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan

Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan

Author: William D. Hoover

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2011-03-18

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 0810854600

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The Historical Dictionary of Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan relates the history of postwar Japan through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events, places, organizations.


Postwar Japanese Economy

Postwar Japanese Economy

Author: Mitsuhiko Iyoda

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2010-08-05

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1441963324

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Since the end of World War II, the Japanese economy has seen rapid changes and remarkable progress. It has also experienced a bubble economy and period of prolonged stagnation. The book seeks to address three major questions: What kind of changes have taken place in the postwar years? In what sense has there been progress? What lessons can be drawn from the experiences? The book is organized as follows: It begins with an overview of the postwar Japanese economy, using data to highlight historical changes. The four major economic issues in the postwar Japanese economy (economic restoration, rapid economic growth, the bubble economy and current topics) are addressed, with particular focus on the meaning of economic growth and the bubble economy. The next chapters examine the important economic issues for Japan related to a welfare-oriented society, including income distribution, asset distribution, and the relative share of income. Another chapter deals with the household structure of Japan, the pension issue, and the importance of the effect of demographic change on income distribution. The final chapter gives a brief summary, examines quality of life as a lesson of this research, and briefly outlines a proposal for a basic design towards achieving a high satisfaction level society. This book will be of interest to economists, economic historians and political scientists and would be useful as a text for any course on the Japanese economy.


The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan

The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan

Author: Andrew Gordon

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 1684172527

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"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."


Industrial Development in Postwar Japan

Industrial Development in Postwar Japan

Author: Hirohisa Kohama

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-10-04

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 1134075219

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Structured into sub-sector by sub-sector analyses, this book provides a clear and accessible examination of industrial development, without over-generalizing or being weighed down by historical details. Written by an authority in the area of development economics it explores the companies and the individuals that have pushed Japan's economy forward


Japan Works

Japan Works

Author: John Price

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780801483608

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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.


A Companion to Japanese History

A Companion to Japanese History

Author: William M. Tsutsui

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2009-07-20

Total Pages: 633

ISBN-13: 1405193395

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A Companion to Japanese History provides an authoritative overview of current debates and approaches within the study of Japan’s history. Composed of 30 chapters written by an international group of scholars Combines traditional perspectives with the most recent scholarly concerns Supplements a chronological survey with targeted thematic analyses Presents stimulating interventions into individual controversies