Going Global: Culture, Gender, and Authority in the Japanese Subsidiary of an American Corporation

Chapter 2. Setting Transco within the Contexts of American and Japanese Corporations

❖ T he organizational mix of employees at Transco contains many categories. The top of the organization comprises mostly white males expatriated from the United States. In middle management Japanese of both genders predominate, but there are also a few expatriated female and male managers sent in for two- to four-year stints. Employees in R&D who focus mainly on research, clerks from all divisions, and secretaries who are not bilingual have the least contact with expatriated management. My research focuses on the four categories of employees who have the most cross-cultural interaction: (1) expatriated managers (EMs), (2) Japanese men in management, (3) Japanese women in management, and (4) Japanese bilingual female secretaries. In this chapter I will first present an overview of gender issues in both Japanese and American organizations to provide the reader with some points for comparison to Transco, and then I will offer some general employee characterizations of Transco as a place to work and to have a career trajectory, before I move on to the detailed ethnography provided in Chapters 3 through 5. 2 Setting Transco within the Contexts of American and Japanese Corporations Japanese Contexts Historically, Japan was characterized by the highest rate of female labor-force participation in the industrialized world, owing mainly to the confluence of agriculture and family-run businesses.1 The female labor-force participation rate in the United States did not surpass that of Japan until 1975.2 However, within the last couple of decades, the rate for Japan has leveled off to around 50 percent,3 while the rate has continued to increase elsewhere.4 The so-called rational economic strategy in the Japanese corporation offers some explanation for the leveling off. In the achievement of a corporation’s balance between competitive and cooperative advantage, the careful choice of external competitors matched with orchestration of the internally cooperative environment necessary to compete successfully against them, Japanese women are a trade-off. When Japan was riding the high tide of economic success in the 1970s and 1980s, numerous analyses of the successful Japanese corporation appeared, stressing features such as their chosen “competitive fundamentals” of A growth bias A preoccupation with actions of competitors The creation and ruthless exploitation of competitive advantage The choice of corporate financial and personnel policies that are economically consistent with all of the preceding.5 Although not stated as such, these competitive fundamentals include the maintenance of a highly cooperative internal environment based on the management of human resources as a core competency.The characterization of Japanese business strategy as human-resourcesdriven in contrast to the capital-driven American strategy6 can be an oversimplification at times; nonetheless, it is true that the differences in the allocation of labor and capital led to two types of economic and corporate systems.7 The human resources model in Japan, however, is one that employs women, usually part-time8 for such things as Setting Transco within the Contexts 33 electronics assembly and computer programming, but underemploys women in management in order to overemploy men. Numerous sources, including the Japanese Ministry of Labor, can be called upon to support the contention that native Japanese firms rely on the exploitation of women as a distinct component of their business strategy. For one thing, the employment of women is seen as a buffer to economic downturn.The recession following the 1973 oil shock resulted in the adoption of an on-the-spot labor cost adjustment strategy based on the dismissal of large numbers of female employees9 ; since 1975 this strategy has become a permanent feature of the employment system. During the “lost decade” of the 1990s, predictably, women were hired in increasing numbers into nonstandard work (i.e., temporary, part-time, or contract) that paid much less and offered no benefits in order to shelter corporate profits ; these types of problems continue to this day.10 In addition, the personnel system of lifetime employment and seniority-based promotions11 sets up an irresolvable competition between women and men, where the creation of career opportunities for the former would translate directly into loss of career opportunities for the latter.12 However, some scholars have argued against this assessment, believing instead that there is room for women in at least lower administration, as evidenced by the following fact: The Japanese system of organization and management features a narrow span of control, with an average of 5 to 15 people under one direct supervisor at each...