1996 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
A Social Historical Research on the Shaping of the Japanese Employment System
| Project/Area Number |
06630059
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Economic history
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| Research Institution | Tohoku Gakuin University |
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Principal Investigator |
SUGAYAMA Shinji Tohoku Gakuin University, Department of Economics, Assistant Professor, 経済学部, 助教授 (00202127)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1994 – 1996
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| Keywords | white-collarisation / Japanese employment system / democratisation of firms / single status / employee Unions / from school to work transition / Labor market of fresh school leavers / regular recruitment |
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| Research Abstract |
From a historical perspective, the 'Japanese employment system' characterised by some as 'white-collarisation' of blue-collar workers emerged as the spread of employment relations originally institutionalised in white-collar staff employees to the blue-collar workforce. This study aims to verify the process of 'white-collarisation' by examining changes in work discipline, labor relations and labor market in Japan from the 1930s to the 1960s. Firstly, the status hierarchy, in Japanese enterprise collapsed during the tumultuous years of 'total war' and post-war democracy. The labor ideology of the wartime planned economy, which saw enterprises as production communities and assumed equality between white-and blue-collar workers, challenged the nature of employment relations. As the experience of the post-war union movement reveals, this wartime ideology exerted apervasive influence on Japanese labor, and, during the US occupation, it forced widespread 'democratic' reforms on enterprise management.
Secondly, the acute shortage of labor which followed rapid economic growth and remarkable improvement in academic achievement had a great impact on the structure of Japanese labor market. The number of temporary workers fell sharply in the 1960s, and companies began to employ high school graduates-who formerly would have worked in low-level white-collar jobs-as manual laborers. This shift resulted in the spread of recruitment management of white-collaremployees to the blue-collar work force, and the estalishment of regular hiring, a system in which job vacancies were matched to available graduates by the employment services at affiliated high schools.
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[Publications] Sugayama, Shinji: "Kigyo-Minshuka" Okazaki, Tetsuji, Sugayama, Shinji, Nishizawa, Tamotsu, Yonekura, Seiichiro, Sengo Nihon Keizai to Keizai Doyukai. Iwanami Shoten, 1-78 (1996)
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