From ‘Entering into a Firm’ to ‘Entering into a Profession’: An Anthropological Approach to...

British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.1214754:3 September 2016 0007–1080 pp. 552–573

From ‘Entering into a Firm’ to ‘Enteringinto a Profession’: An AnthropologicalApproach to Changing Personhood inJapanHuiyan Fu

Abstract

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the article uses discourse analysisto examine the social dynamics involved in the construction of personhood inJapan. While the gap between powerful discourse and lived reality is a well-documented phenomenon, there is little systematic empirical research on how tointegrate individual and social levels of analysis in this process. By contrastingdiscourse from above and from below, the article illuminates power asymmetryand the resulting tension between discursive freedom and social exclusion amongdisadvantaged groups.

1. Introduction

‘It is the role of these intermediary institutions (such as the mass media) whichexplains how it is that a society can suddenly become fixated on a certain issue whenthat issue is in fact long-standing in nature and only one among many’ (Goodman2002: 7).

Haken’s Dignity (Haken no Hinkaku), a very popular Japanese TV dramaseries with an average viewing figure of over 20 per cent, was broadcastbetween January and March 2007 when I was conducting ethnographicfieldwork in Tokyo. The Japanese term ‘haken’ is an abbreviation for‘dispatched employment or workers’, referring to a relatively new category ofnon-regular workers in temporary agency work (TAW). TAW is distinguishedfrom traditional types of temporary employment, due to its institutionalizedtriangular structure where workers are typically employed and dispatched bystaffing agencies while working at the facilities, and under the authority, of user

Huiyan Fu is at Regent’s University London.

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From ‘Entering into a Firm’ to ‘Entering into a Profession’ 553

firms. The highly acclaimed TV show made ‘haken’ a buzzword of the yearand triggered intense media interest and political debate surrounding suchcontroversial issues as ‘widening gaps’ (kakusa) and ‘working poor’ (wakingupua).The suddenly discovered haken phenomenon emerged amid a series

of neoliberalism-informed economic reforms in post-bubble Japan, whichwere geared towards the development of external labour markets withincreased use of informalized or casualized employment relations. Intandem with the reforms, there was a clear shift in political discourseson personhood; languages such as ‘flexibility’, ‘individuality’, ‘diversity’and ‘self-development’ were used to redefine what it meant to be an idealperson. Professionally qualified, self-activating individuals with marketable,specialized skills were exalted as ‘ready fighting power’ (sokusenryoku)befitting Japan’s changing economic conditions. Those who were trained tohave a range of general skills suitable to a specific firm under the postwar‘firm-as-family’ management model were ousted from popularity. The newtrend was perhaps most forcefully pushed forward by the TAW industry,Japan Staffing Services Association (JASSA), which launched a campaign tochange the notion of ‘entering into a firm’ (shusha) to that of ‘entering into aprofession’ (shushoku); the latter, enabled by haken, was regarded as providingbetter opportunities to develop an appropriate career (JASSA 2008).It should be noted here that the core-peripheral, dual employment structure

was a long-existing feature of Japan’s postwar economic growth (Chalmers1989; Gill 2001; Gordon 1985). ‘Part-timers’ (pato), the largest group ofnon-regular labour, were long used as an indispensable buffer against thenegative effects of economic fluctuations and as a means of propping upthe all-important ‘lifetime employment’ (shushin koyo) essential to the ‘firm-as-family’ management. Compared to part-timers, haken accounted for arelatively small proportion of the total employment in Japan, between 2 and 3per cent according to official statistics. A further pertinent fact was that regularworkers, benefitting from superior wages, bonuses and other perquisites oftheir status, would presumably have more socioeconomic advantages in termsof self-activating capabilities and professional improvement. Historical andcontemporary developments in this regard have posed two interconnectedresearch puzzles:

1) Why was haken given particular discursive emphasis and symbolicprominence?

2) Perhaps more importantly, how did the discourse surrounding hakenreflect social changes in the Japanese context?

Drawing from existing literature and participatory fieldwork, the articlesets out to address the puzzles by combining macro- and micro-level analysis,with a view to drawing heuristic comparisons between the production andconsumption of powerful discourses. Powerful discourses have typicallyideological, normative and instrumental functions and play an important role

C© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics.

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in shoring up a society’s key political, economic and cultural institutions.Symbolic, grandiose and malleable in nature, they are constantly beingconstructed and reconstructed by ruling elites from above to legitimize socialorder or change. By contrast, discourses from below are kept out of thepolitical limelight; how powerful discourses are perceived and acted upon byordinary people — especially those who are not granted sufficient politicalspace to articulate their feelings — is often rendered insignificant or reducedto neatly arranged categories that serve the purposes of a political agenda.Indeed, not much is known about how individual persons in more amorphousand mundane forms of everyday life make sense of themselves relative to theirsurrounding institutional and social contexts (Creed et al. 2014; Hallett andVenstresca 2006; Voronov and Vince 2012). This is the area where the articleaims to make a contribution.The rest of the article is organized as follows. I begin by briefly outlining

the development of discourse analysis and its paradigm shifting implications,with particular reference to anthropology. A critical emphasis is placed uponpower asymmetry inherent in discourse and the resulting tension betweendiscursive freedom and social exclusion among disadvantaged groups. Havingestablished the theoretical underpinnings, I present my empirical investigationof the haken discourse in two steps. First, I provide a literature review onthe changing discourse of personhood in Japan, which aims to shed light onboth culture- and history-specific constructions of the relationship betweenautonomous selfhood and social roles. Moving from the analysis of broadercontexts, I then turn to an ethnographic study of lived realities, looking closelyat how regular and hakenworkers perceive and act upon the newly constructeddiscourses. In conclusion, I return to the research puzzles and explore theimplications of the contrast between imposed powerful discourses and reifiedeveryday discourses.

2. Discourse from above and from below

Influenced by Foucault’s pioneering work, anthropologists increasinglyuse ‘discourse’, instead of ‘culture’, to accentuate the malleable nature oflanguage use and the key role it plays in the social construction of reality.Withits implicit connotations of power asymmetry and possible contestation,discourse draws attention to actor-centred interpretive/constructivistapproaches to social dynamics. The study of discourse has a chequeredhistory in anthropology. More than half a century ago, in his highly originalanalysis of social structure and conflicts in Burma, Leach (1954) developed adistinctive approach to the then dominant structural-functionalist paradigmby highlighting the fluid and shifting nature of cultural meanings and politicalpower struggles among the diverseKachin of the Burmese highlands. Throughthe prism of language use, society was seen as always in a state of flux, whichwould render any rigid grids of thought and behaviour nugatory. However,the primary focus of interest has since diverged, with some anthropologists



concentrating on the interpretation of culture-specific symbols and othersasymmetrical and dynamic power relations. As Ortner (1984) summarizes,the two major trends until the early 1970s were typified by the Geertzianenthusiasm for webs of cultural meanings (Geertz 1973) and the Turnerianemphasis on symbolic multivocality and active forces in political struggles(Turner 1967, 1969). Cohen (1969, 1974) had proposed analysis of the twodimensions as being in a dynamic relationship and they have since beenbrought together as a collective concern in the area of discourse analysis orsymbolic/semantic anthropology (Bourdieu 1991; Parkin 1982, 1984).Geertz’s hermeneutic project of ‘thick description’ certainly goes a long

way towards understanding the richness and complexity of social life andcontributes to a compelling vision of culture as webs of significance thatguide action. However, it is well acknowledged that his intimation of universalinterpretivism ascribes somewhat transcendental qualities to culture; in otherwords, how exactly webs of cultural meanings influence individual perceptionand action on the ground is not really explored. We need to engage not onlywith a theory of culture in which autonomous agents interpret meaning, butalso with a more robust understanding of structural influences, includingwider political and sociological frameworks in which actors operate (Ortner1984). As Parkin rightly argues, all linguistic and cognitive symbols embody‘hegemonic aspects, in the combined sense of shaping and dominating other’swills’ (1984: 360). Power asymmetry is therefore a salient feature of discourseanalysis; the latter thus provides fertile ground for the development ofinnovative theory-building strategies that have cross-cultural applicability andpractical relevance. For anthropologists, the paradigm-shifting implicationsof discourse lie in its capacity to link cultural meanings with unequal powerrelations, to offer revealing insights into the process of social change fromabove and from below, and to resist the critical narcissism of certain post-modern or poststructural writers during the 1980s where culture was viewedas little more than contending ‘texts’ and ‘presentations’ (Clifford 1988).The importance of discourse is echoed in many other disciplines, including

business and management studies (see, e.g., Alvesson and Karreman 2000,2011; Bargiela-Chiappini 2011; Iedema 2011; Mumby 2011), as evidenced bya cornucopia of disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates surrounding theso-called ‘linguistic turn’. Because of its emphasis on symbolic constructionand competing truth claims, discourse analysis brings society in transition tothe fore. The rising popularity of discourse signals, among other things, theproliferating acceptance of a constructivist, processual or historical view ofinstitutions and society. It is noteworthy that discursive dynamics, embodiedin the dialectical and co-generative agency-structure relationship, take place atthe levels both of above and below. From above, high-profile discursive debatesbetween ruling elites and powerful groups make visible the legitimization,contestation and transformation of a society’s core values and beliefs. Thecoronary is that social realities are constantly in the process of being formedand deformed. From below, everyday life is profoundly affected by powerfuldiscourses from above. Of particular interest are the different and complex



ways in which ordinary people interpret and act upon the imposed realitiesthey inhabit, which require careful and more qualitative investigation.One of the main themes in discourse analysis is the often-observed gap

between powerful discourse and empirical reality, which can be explained ontwo fronts. First, discourse from above focuses on systematic rationalizationor structuralization, in contradistinction with more amorphous andmundaneforms of everyday life. While being depicted as rational, utilitarian-driven andperfectly functional in the former, individuals in the latter do not possesscomplete information, nor have the same ingrained tastes or abilities, noract purposefully on the basis of a hierarchy of preferences. As Smelser(1998) convincingly argues, everyday experience is imbued with ambivalentfeelings, emotional tensions, paradoxes, ambiguities and temporalities, whichrational choice theory does not account for. Second, there invariably existsinequality in means and ability to construct, mediate, ignore, challenge orchange discourses. Compared to the glut of powerful discourses that purportto confer an objective point of view of social reality, the voices of sociallydisadvantaged groups — along intersecting and overlapping inequality axessuch as race, gender, sexuality, class and age — tend to be silenced, ignoredor reduced to simplistic categories. Thus, power domination, unequal humanrelations and alienating social conditions underlie considerable differencesin the way individuals react to imposed discourses and engender enduringtensions between discursive freedom and social exclusion.The gap between discourse from above and from below calls for a holistic

approach, which takes as its central subject the intricate interconnectednessbetween structural forces and individual autonomy. Within management andorganizational studies, much needs to be done to systematically ‘ground’through empirical research — rather than ‘postulate’ as in the Foucauldiansense — muscular discourse and its imposition in everyday life. As Voronovand Vince (2012: 75–6) suggest, extant institutional research needs a strongerconnection with the personhood of the agents studied; it is important todevelop research methods that bridge macro and micro levels of analysis andallow researchers to get close to people’s lived experiences. What follows isan empirical examination of the changing discourse of personhood in Japanpertaining to the popularity of haken, which moves from a literature review— combined with fieldwork and investigation of various sources includingmagazine and newspaper articles, popular novels and television shows — ofbroad social and institutional changes to ethnographic case studies.

3. From above: the changing discourse of personhood in Japan

Human beings acquire an ongoing sense of individual and collective identitiesin social milieu by drawing symbolic and cognitive boundaries between‘who I am’, ‘who we are’ and ‘who I am not’, ‘who we are not’. Suchbinary oppositions, manifested in a variety of boundary-forming processes,are indispensable for everyday sense making. In anthropology, the focus on



individual identification is often referred to as personhood, which rests onthe relationship between self, or ‘moi’, and social roles, or ‘persona’ (Mauss1985). The notion of personhood offers revealing insights into other collectiveor group-oriented identities and serves as a fundamental criterion by which‘western’ or ‘capitalist’ societies might be distinguished from all the others,‘non-western’ or ‘pre-capitalist’.A particular, actual person in any human society is composed of,

and indeed capable of exercising, both an autonomous self- and socially-imposed roles. This generic feature notwithstanding, what constitutes the‘ideal’ person, as described in mainstream culture and ideological discourse,differs considerably from society to society and changes over time. Forexample, American society tends to romanticize selfhood, emphasizing theindividualized performance of a role, whereas Chinese society often extolsthe utopian ideal of performing a role so devotedly that the self is almostnon-existent. By contrast, Japanese personhood values a complementaryrelationship between self and social roles, with precedence given to fulfillinga role without negating self. To be a respectable ‘social person’ (shakaijin)in Japan, one has to be adept at ‘kejime’ or ‘differentiation’, the knowledgeand ability needed to move fluidly between spontaneous/intimate self anddisciplined/distant persona (Rosenberger 1992). Compared to a core of valuesand beliefs in typical American ‘individualism’ and Chinese ‘socialism’ thatconflates self and roles, the Japanese kejime is predicated upon a complexof values and beliefs prescribing how one should allocate self and rolesseparately and properly in different contexts, dimensions and stages of life.Accordingly, the same individual may draw the line of kejime at differentpoints when talking to different people or even at different times whentalking to the same person if the level of group with which the individual isidentified changes (Graham 2003: 235–6). As a result, the ideological makingof personhood in Japan appears to be situational, multifaceted and enigmatic,if not ‘chameleon-like’ (Van Wolferen 1989).During the postwar development, the cultural saliency of kejime was

epitomized by the Japanese salaryman, also known as ‘the company man’(kaisha ningen), under the paternalistic ‘firm-as-family’ management model.He was constructed as the ideal person, who would derive much self-worth from his unwavering commitment and loyalty to the firm, toillong office hours, only socialize with colleagues or clients through after-work drinking or golf-playing on weekends, rarely spend time with hiswife and children and much less do anything about household chores.The construction of the ideal person was reinforced by Confucianism-informed kinship ethics in the traditional Japanese household known asie, which embraced the subjugation of personal interests to the continuityand maintenance of the family and the benevolence of parents/superiorsin exchange for the loyalty of children/subordinates. The collectivism-centred social life prioritized organizational goals and left limited roomfor individual self-development within the organizational context. For men,‘company belongingness’ was a key element in the ideological make-up of



hegemonic masculinity encapsulated in their breadwinner roles as ‘the mainpillar’ (daikokubashira). For women, ‘household belongingness’ was deemedessential for fulfilling the feminine ideal of ‘good wife, wise mother’ (ryosaikenbo). Along with the gendered dimension of organizational belongingness,both men and women were supposed to adhere to kejime whereby self wascarefully controlled and assigned to its minor place so as not to intrude onall-important collective concerns in a decorous social life. This basic culturalprinciple of personhood, although still exerting considerable influence incontemporary Japan, has been undergoing constant transformation.The changing process was particularly felt during the post-bubble era

when the country’s shifting economic and political conditions, combinedwith intensified global forces, brought about a burgeoning interest in thereconstruction of the ideal person. Following the ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s,large firms adjusted themselves to a new flexible firm and innovation modelwith a ‘multi-track’ personnel (Crump 2003; Jackson and Miyajima 2007).They increasingly limited long-term security to a shrinking aristocracy oflabour and shifted the burden of job insecurity and cost reduction to non-regular or temporary workers (Yun 2010). According to the latest labourforce survey, non-regular workers account for more than one-third of thenational workforce; it is widely acknowledge that the increased use of non-regular workers is the single most important change in the Japanese labourmarkets and management practices (Rebick 2005). The trend has beenaccompanied and reinforced by a renewed discursive emphasis on kosei, theJapanese term for individuality or self. While previous interpretations focusedlargely on the subordination of personal interests to collective concernswithin an organization (Hendry 1992), the new conception of individualitypromoted a market-oriented person with considerably more appreciation ofself-acting qualities beyond organization-centred contexts. Put another way,the culturally valued kejime was redrawn, with the pendulum of emphasisswung more to the self and away from the social.The new market-oriented person was vigorously championed by the state

and employer associations, which frequently invoked such globally powerfuldiscourses as ‘flexibility’, ‘diversity’, ‘self-development’, ‘self-responsibility’,‘employability’ and ‘free market’ to underline individual exercise of freechoices. Appeals to those popular rhetorical tropes, of which self andsubjectivity were the leitmotif, were abundant, not least when it came todeflecting public attention from an increasingly divided society. This wasespecially the case with the development of haken. During the Koizumideregulation reforms where a strengthened alliance between employerassociations and the state was formed, haken regulations were drasticallyliberalized from the early 2000s. As a result, the number of haken workersand the scale of the industry grew exponentially. Leading staffing agenciesbecame influential in managing discourse and reshaping development as theygained ground in their efforts to further legislative relaxation of governmentregulations, to influence firms’ human resource strategies and to control thechoices and constraints of individual workers. As Imai (2009) explains, the



haken industry played a pivotal role in constructing external, market-orientedlabour markets that both aligned with and diverged from conventionalpractices of internal labour flexibility within the Japanese keiretsu or networkof group firms. For individual workers, agency-mediated temping becamea viable option for making an entry into employment across a wide arrayof industries, occupations and firms. Far from being inferior, insecure andlow-paid employment, haken was often portrayed as flexible, liberating andempowering, which would benefit career-oriented professionals and supportindividualized lifestyles.While being a prominent symbol of labour flexibilization reforms, haken

also became a key representation of such controversial social phenomena as‘gap-widening society’ (kakusa shakai) and ‘working poor’ (waking pua). Therise of haken sparked off intense political debates, amplified and accentuatedby the mass media, over the sharp division of treatment between regularand non-regular workers. A chorus of criticism emerged from a group ofacademics, pundits and social activists. Some worried that the wideningsocioeconomic inequalities would cast a blight on the coherence and integrityof Japanese society; others were concerned about the abject poor and thevarious disadvantaged social conditions faced by many non-regular workers.Significantly, the contending interpretations attested to political pluralism anddynamism within the Japanese establishment. The new discursive emphasison self or individuality also aroused the ire of older generations; duringmy fieldwork, a new term ‘Me-Fetishism’ (mıfechi) was coined to denigrateyounger generations of workers with strong ‘narcissistic tendencies’ (jikoai).Such derogatory comments pointed to the enduring interdependence andtension between forces of change and tradition; to be sure, shared historicallydeveloped — or ‘invented’, to use Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983)’s famousterm— institutions and values, as Jackson (2010) states, have the character ofsocial facts and provide the focal point for actors to transform society throughpolitical actions. In summary, the production of haken discourses in Japanwas characterized by a complex, non-linear process where contradictions,fragmentations and discontinuities frequently occur — which questions, asCheater (1999: 4) points out, Foucault’s overstraight link between discourseand (dis)empowerment and explains why social change is often accompaniedby subtle transformations and unintended consequences.

4. From below: ethnographic case studies

The above analysis provides a macro-level lens on the shifting socialconditions in Japan from which self and subjectivity emerged as importantdiscursive ingredients of ordering society. While being characterized bykejime or the culture-specific complementary relationship between self andthe social, Japanese personhood was reconstructed, with a new emphasison self-activated qualities and free market principles. In the domain ofwork and employment, this meant that entering a profession, even as a



non-regular worker, was more meaningful than traditional organization-centred human relations and career development. Drawing extensively onlong-term participatory fieldwork, the following case studies offer an intimatelook at how the newly constructed personhood was perceived and acted uponby real people in more mundane forms of everyday life.1

Notes on Participatory Fieldwork

Already a fluent speaker of Japanese from previous experience, I conductedyear-long ethnographic fieldwork from 2006 to 2007 in Tokyo where I workedas a haken worker myself inside two Japanese firms. From the beginning ofjob-searching, throughmultiple registrations and interviews, toworking insidea firm, I threw myself into the haken world. The immersing participatoryfieldwork provided me with naturally occurring opportunities to interact withregular and non-regular workers, staffing agencies and user firms. Perhaps,more importantly, it allowed me to delve into minute details arising fromeveryday activities and routines that were ‘often the clue to implicit worlds’(Dresch and James 2000: 10).Most haken workers were registered with more than one agency in order to

find a suitable job as soon as possible. The process of securing a haken contractwas often time-consuming and stressful; many of my fellow workers expressedtheir frustrations with the ambiguous triangular employment structure (ofagency, employer and worker) that rendered them susceptible to managementdiscretion and manoeuvre (Fu 2011: 40–56). Throughout my fieldwork, Iattended six registration sessions with six staffing agencies and eventuallysecured two haken job contracts. My first contract was concerned with aJapan–India joint project in a well-known Japanese consumer finance firm.After three months, I shifted to the second contract in a long-establishedJapanese manufacturing conglomerate where I worked for more than fivemonths.No notes were taken in the presence of research subjects and informants,

but conversations and observations were written up immediately afterwardson a daily basis. While gaining and maintaining informed consent fromthe people I studied was a long negotiating process, efforts were made torespect and protect their privacy and confidentiality through the device ofanonymity. The haken workers I met in the two firms were dominated byfemale white-collar office workers, who took relatively unskilled or semi-skilled clerical or secretarial jobs — the so-called jimukei that constituted astaple part of the Japanese haken industry. In addition to everyday observationinside the two firms, I frequently socialized with colleagues through after-work drinking sessions and ‘Saturday-or-Sunday lunch gathering’ (donichiranchi kai); the latter was especially popular with my female colleagues. I alsoconducted semi-structured and unstructured interviews with people outsidethe two firms, whom I got to know through my existing network of friendsand acquaintances; many of them were skilled knowledge workers workingin different sectorial segments of labour markets. Those different types of



qualitative primary data were then compared with, and complemented by,quantitative and qualitative secondary data from various sources includingofficial statistics, books, newspapers, novels and TV shows.

Regular Workers

For younger generations of regular workers in Japan, the idea of being loyalto a single firm throughout one’s lifetime seemed rather uninspiring. Duringmy fieldwork, a best seller captured this by pointing to the fact that around30 per cent of newly hired university graduates resigned within three years oftaking their jobs. Following the neoliberalism-informed labour flexibilizationreforms, many younger people felt betrayed by the Japanese firm, whichfavoured senior workers and became ‘more solicitous of and deferential to theowners of their capital and more inclined to treat their employees as meansrather than ends’ (Dore 2007: 395). One of my informants, C-San, who waspreviously a journalist of a major Japanese newspaper, was outspoken in hiscriticism of the Japanese corporate management:

The Japanese firm is corrupt from within. I felt so suffocated by a number ofunreasonable rules and regulations. . . . I fell foul of my superiors by openlycriticising the newspaper on my personal website. The management was not happywith the criticism and asked me to shut down the website. I refused to do so and wassubsequently suspended from my job. I was absolutely furious at the unwarrantedpunishment and filed a lawsuit against the newspaper for a flagrant breach offreedom of speech. . . . I lost the lawsuit in the end, but I found a new purpose formyself. I am now a freelance writer, spending most of my time talking to youngpeople and voicing their concerns on their behalf. The younger generations ofworkers aremost vulnerable to corporate abuse and exploitation. Throughmywork,I wish to make an impact by revealing the wrongdoing of the Japanese firm. This is,I believe, what a proper journalist should do.

Not all, however, could risk being stripped of their superior regularemployment status and venture into the unknown such as C-San. To besure, belonging to a firm remained central to the ideological make-up ofhegemonic masculinity. It was well acknowledged that an employee of a bigfirm was a more desirable husband and son-in-law than an employee of asmall firm, and certainlymore desirable than a non-regular worker. Accordingto a government survey in Mainichi Daily News (13 March 2009), 12 percent of single men in non-regular employment got married over the five-year period from October 2002, compared to 24 per cent of regular workers,and only 8 per cent of men who earned less than 1 million yen per yeargot married, compared to 21 per cent of those who earned 4–5 million yenper year. Given the continuing importance of men’s breadwinner roles, therewas a good deal of pressure on young men to find regular employment andstay loyal to such employment especially during the downward economictrends. The majority of regular workers I encountered were fairly content withtheir privileged employment status; belonging to a firm was considered as animportant prerequisite to successful manhood and professional development.



However, many were eager to distinguish themselves from the traditionalsalaryman and his firm-dependent lifestyle. In fact, the term salaryman wasoften used in a pejorative sense. Some scorned the idea of ‘burying theirbones’ (staying until retirement) in the firm; others denied being a ‘normal’salaryman by highlighting either their professional role or personal ability,rather than foregrounding the membership of a particular firm, say Toyota orSony, whichwas regarded in the past as crucial to one’s personal identification.For example, D-San, an IT engineer in his early 30s, who was working for alarge foreign-affiliated firm, pulled a wry face when I suggested that he was asalaryman:

I am not the kind of salaryman you are talking about. I am an IT engineer. My lifeis not centred on the firm. Of course it is important to build good human relationswith your peers and superiors, but I like to spend quality time with my family andcatch up withmy old friends. I was amember of a musical band in the university andthe band members still gather together sometimes to perform a live show in pubs,which is good fun. I am also keen to make new friends from different walks of life,which I think will broaden my perspectives. . . . Before moving to the current firm,I worked for two different Japanese firms where I learned IT engineering throughon-the-job training. The occupation of IT engineering is challenging and requires asubstantial amount of individual study. In the near future, I would like to set up aninformal association of engineers across different firms and sectors so that we couldexchange information, enhance our professional quality, and build up a network offriendship.

It was evident that professionalism, a kind of self-development withan emphasis on marketable occupational skills, was deemed increasinglyimportant. Many young regular workers were keen to develop specializedskills and improve their occupational mobility through self-study and on-the-job training provided by the firm. At the same time, self was also makinginroads on other dimensions of the traditional ‘firm-as-family’, collectivistvalues. There was growing tolerance and sympathy towards elements ofindividuality. When I was working inside the large Japanese manufacturer, E-San, a regular worker in his early 30s sitting opposite me, often intrigued mewith his various, small ‘idiosyncrasies’. In contrast to the ambitious C-San andD-San, he was not very enthusiastic about his career promotion and seemedrather happy with his rank-and-file position, as he said:

Nowadays those who are in managerial positions are not earning as much as youmight expect. They risk losing a big portion of income, if they fail to obtain goodresults because of the new performance-based pay. . . . If I were married and hada family to support, I probably would like to take the risks. . . . It is important tocherish your own time. Frankly, I do not have much ambition about work. As yousee, I just get on with it. Unless necessary, I would avoid working overtime. I tend tobalance out the overtime hours on some days by working less on other days. So, onaverage I put in normal hours and thus never claim overtime pay. . . . If there weresomething that I would like to dowithmy career, I hope I could be transferred to oneof the firm’s foreign branches soon, preferably in America, Australia, or Germany.. . . The way Americans work is much more relaxed and efficient. It would be a great



experience indeed, although I do not envisage myself living abroad for too long. Inmany ways, Japan is still the best place to live.

Like many young men, E-San tried to distance himself from the oldgeneration of salarymen by, for example, developing a broad range of leisureinterests. He was a very popular figure in the workplace known as ‘a man whoknows everything’ (nandemo shitteiru otoko). His popularity was also relatedto the fact that he made the least effort to curry favour with his superiors, onlymaking a token gesture towards hierarchical rules — a key component of the‘firm-as-family’ human relations. At times his air of nonchalance borderedon the rude, but neither his direct manager nor other high-ranking bossesseemed to bemuch bothered. E-San also often declined to attend work-relateddrinking sessions — the enforced socialization aimed at smoothing collegialand superior–subordinate relationships and strengthening social obligationstowards others — and instead preferred to socialize with his own friends whoenjoyed playing basketball together.

Haken Workers

At the beginning of the article, I mentioned thatHaken’s Dignity, the popularTV drama series, played an important role in generating a social phenomenonfeaturing the contrast between haken and regular workers. Seizing upon thephenomenon, the Japanese mass media tended to both question the sharpdivision of unequal treatment and sensationalize the freedom, individuality,and flexibility purportedly vested in haken workers; the latter echoed theindustry’s statement that haken was in the vanguard of the new trend towardsentering a profession. Moving betwixt and between staffing agencies and userfirms, haken workers were obviously not a traditional type of temporary orcasual labour. Moreover, unlike the majority of non-regular workers whowere concentrated in service or retail sectors, haken penetrated almost allkinds of industries and firms. It was widely observed that white-collar hakenworkers were used to replace regular workers on the ‘auxiliary employmenttrack’ (ippanshoku) traditionally reserved for female ‘Office Ladies’, asopposed to themale-dominated ‘general or comprehensive employment track’(sogoshoku) (Keizer 2007). For employers, haken workers were not only just-in-time and low-cost, but also more institutionally organized and reliable. Forworkers, the haken way of working could to a certain degree improve theircurriculum vitae and appeal to some employers. While clerical or secretarialjobs remained a staple part, it was true that a small but growing numberof well-paid haken professionals and specialists were increasingly favouredover regular workers and frequently featured in the media as the symbolicpersonification of professionalism, flexibility and individuality.However, the vast majority of haken workers were disadvantaged non-

regular workers, who were excluded from the same array of benefits asavailable to regular workers, ranging from job security, bonus payments andsocial security coverage to child care, sick leave and paid holiday.Hakenmightbe considered as ‘flexible’ in terms of dispatching patterns, but certainly not



‘empowered’. The stressful and often time-consuming job-hopping process,combined with rampant illegal practices, tended to have a pernicious effect onthe well-being of workers. Perhaps more strikingly, compared to the farawaydream of entering a profession, entering a firm was an immediate goal formany of my fellow workers, especially males. Because of the long-establishedgendered employment and cultural norms, female haken appeared to havelittle difficulty in integrating into the male-dominated workplace; in manyways, they were recast as a new type of Office Ladies, albeit working on lessfavourable terms. By contrast, for males, being a haken meant they had tostruggle with inferior masculinities and social standing associated with their‘second-class’ employment status. They normally kept a low profile and hadto endure emotional pain that often went unnoticed. For example, during mysecond haken contract in the manufacturing firm, I noticed that a young malehaken, whose job was of an auxiliary nature, was struggling to carve out aniche for himself. He was a hard-working and shy man. He always came to theoffice earlier than regular workers and was often the last one to leave, despite a2-h commute.Most of the time he worked alone, rarely interacting with others— a young girl in his section once described him as an invisible (medatanai)figure with a somewhat strange personality. There were a couple of timeswhen my direct manager deliberately ignored his small requests, leaving himstanding there, awkward and embarrassed. I surmized that as a male andrelatively unskilled haken, he might be suffering from other ‘cold eyes’ as officebullying in Japan can take various subtle forms.There was, however, another young male haken, F-San, in the same firm,

who received much better treatment. F-San and I worked in the same sectionand we developed a good working relationship. He stuck me as a gentle,amiable and modest man. He was hired as a technical expert and was wellrespected and liked. Not only did he offer seniormanagers his expert opinions,but also was sometimes asked to supervise or coach new recruits. Consideringhis excellent specialist skills, I was wondering whether he had tried to applyfor a regular position in the firm. One late night, after an after-work drinkingsession, we headed home together on the train, he said:

I wish I could become a permanent member of the firm. But the firm’s personnelsystem is not flexible. . . . Now that haken is the norm, midcareer direct hiring couldbecomemore difficult. . . . Surely I’d havemuch better pay, promotion opportunities,and a career ladder to move up if I were a regular worker. It is unfair to have suchdifferentials based solely on employment status.Many of my frustrations come fromthe fact that no matter how much I contribute to the firm, the part I am allowed toplay in the big picture is always limited. The management keeps certain corporateinformation secret from me.

Although feeling frustrated with the exclusion from ‘members-only’meetings and information, F-San did not fall into despair and bitterness. Hequickly turned to what he perceived as the positive side of his non-regularemployment status:



Looking on the bright side, I can take advantage of what a big firm can offer:learning new things, trying out professional skills, and building up experiences. Atleast, work at the current firm is never boring. I am grateful to have the opportunityto focus on my skills and self-development . . . Of course, I will apply for a regularjob in the future, perhaps in a foreign-affiliated firm, especially for my family. I gotmarried last year. My wife is a haken worker too, so our financial situation is notgood. If we want to have children, I need to be a regular employee.

Beneath the confident exterior, F-san was faced with a difficult situation wherehe strived to reconcile the limited benefits of staying in a big firm with thestrong desire to have his skills and hard work proportionally rewarded.F-San’s ambivalent attitudes resonated with many of my fellow workers,

who were simultaneously critical and appreciative of haken. This wasespecially true for a small group of female haken whom I met in the financefirm during my first haken contract. Most of them came from a middle-classfamily background, had studied abroad and possessed certain marketableskills such as English language and IT knowledge. Some were accomplished,confident and career-oriented young women, who were enthusiastic abouttheir professional development and would delay entry into marriage andfamily life. Others were toying with the idea of juggling both a careerand a family and challenging the conservative assumption that women’sfeeling of belonging and attachment resided primarily in the household. Iwas particularly impressed by A-San, a highly motived and talented youngwoman in her middle 20s, who had a wide range of agency-mediated workingexperiences. A-San was very critical of ‘kakusa’ or widening gaps betweenregular and non-regular workers and between males and females:

Being a haken has certain short-term advantages, but we actually sell our skillsfor a discounted price. Our hourly pay does not include any benefits and bonuses,which figure importantly in the overall salary of a regular worker. How can it bejustifiable to work alongside regular workers with more or less the same skills andtask performances and yet to be worth less? . . . Every time we shift to a new job,we have to re-enrol in the social insurance system. The re-enrolment won’t takeplace until we finish the initial trial period (which lasts between half a month andtwo months). Agencies and user firms are making good profits out of those non-protection periods. . . .

I am sometimes quite offended by the way in which the manager talks to me. . . . Yes,he is always trying to be nice and friendly, but beneath his superficial politeness andperfunctory smile, he is patronising and treats us as outsiders, floating elements, ordisposable commodities unworthy of any substantial relationship building.He refersto us as ‘haken-san’ (-san in Japanese is a title of respect added to a name) as if wedon’t have proper names and are a special species!

Like many ambitious young people, A-San considered regular employmentas an essential prerequisite for professional development:

Of course, my ultimate goal is becoming a regular employee. But I do not wantto settle in a mediocre job and firm. That is why I think haken is flexible and ausefulmeans of trying out differentworkplaces and lines ofwork.And I have learned



a lot of professional skills from different haken experiences, which I think wouldeventually benefit my future career. I haven’t got a clear idea of what profession andcareer path I want to choose now. . . . Last year, I nearly joined a foreign-affiliatedbig firm, which offered me a regular position after a haken contract. I initially saidyes but changedmymindwhen I found outmy linemanager was amiddle-agedmalechauvinist whom I disliked very much during the haken contract. I have passion formy job and career, but I just couldn’t bear the thought of working under such anunpleasant man every day!

The opposing effects of haken were variously expressed by other lessambitious young women. Although entering a firm might not be their firstpriority, they were keen to learn professional skills, develop friendships andfoster social bonds. To some extent, haken offered them a new way toenvisage and exercise alternative life paths where they could negotiate newboundaries of womanhood between family and firm. However, their dreamsand intentions were frequently thwarted by conservative gendered norms andtheir second-class or outsider employment status. Some reacted with apathyor gaman — the Japanese art of endurance, persevering with an attitude ofstoicism, dignity and resilience. Others reacted strongly, openly railing againstunfair treatment, as demonstrated by a young woman, who often vented herfrustration during our lunch gatherings:

A middle-aged salaryman, who sits right next to me, would write a rambling emailover something urgent instead of explaining tome in person. And I am often the onewho is to blame for misunderstanding things. . . . I am not interested in cultivatinga good working relationship here. Unless necessary, I would rather not interact withthem at all. I just want to do my job properly and professionally so that thosearrogant men won’t assume that my work is sloppy simply because I am a womanand a haken!

During my fieldwork, I also met some ‘traditionalists’, whose perceptionof self and womanhood were primarily centred on family and marriage.Haken was seen as a better substitute for conventional part-time jobs tosupplement their husband’s main income, to make short-term financial gains,or to find Mr Right from a larger pool of candidates. B-San, a single womanin her middle 40s, with whom I developed a close friendship during my firsthaken contract, was an interesting case. Having overcome a series of lifeadversities and challenges, she was remarkably resilient and enjoyed learningnew skills and experiences through different haken assignments. She remainedhopeful that haken would allow her to move between different firms andmeet interesting people, but her thoughts and narratives were shifting andsometimes contradictory. The main reason I suspected was that the prospectof working permanently as a temporary worker filled her with a deep sense ofinsecurity and anxiety. All too often, she seemed to be caught up on the hornsof a dilemma:

Haken offers a wide range of job opportunities and makes it easy to shift from oneworkplace to another. It is flexible and helps in learning useful professional skills . . .What is perhaps more important for me is ‘exciting encounters’ (deai) where I can



meet my future life partner. I long for a happy marriage. If the working environmentdidn’t look promising, I would simply refuse to renew the contract, even a highlypaid one, and move on.

I should provide for my old age, especially considering my age and weak physicalcondition.Moving fromone job to another is not easy at all; the registration sessionsand interviews are very time-consuming and frustrating. Sometimes I have to endurea long time of unemployment without pay between job assignments.

Discussion: Regular Workers versus Haken Workers

It might be superfluous to claim that life as lived is full of equivocations,discontinuities and contradictions. Yet, the complexity of everyday life wouldnot have been conveyed to the same degree had discourse analysis beenlimited to social structures and abstract postulates. The above ethnographicaccount cast light on the complex and multifaceted ways in which individualsconceived and acted upon the newly constructed personhood discourses. Bycomparison with regular workers, it was evident that such an intersecting setof variables as employment status, gender and age resulted in asymmetricalhuman relations and alienating social conditions with which haken workershad to contend. AsWeathers points out, haken and other non-regular workerswere prone to ‘a web of gender, age and status discrimination, coupled withconstant worries about job security and income’ (2001: 202). The forced,unequal social environments and power domination created considerablebarriers to the empowerment that the new market-oriented person wouldstrive for. The corollary was that many were beleaguered with a constant,unresolved tension between the desire to pursue self-activating freedom andthe debilitating effects of social exclusion.The differential treatment based on regular and non-regular employment

status permeated various key institutions, including social welfare, legislation,collective bargaining and corporate management. For example, the socialsafety net in Japan was known as ‘welfare corporatism’ whereby the firm,rather than the state, was a primary provider of social security.2 This meantthat without regular membership of a firm, a great number of non-regularworkers were denied access to a range of social protection and welfarebenefits. The existing welfare policy frameworks were designed to protectregular workers. This was particularly calamitous during economic recessionswhen non-regular workers were disproportionately affected by job losses.Furthermore, non-regular workers were not entitled to join enterprise-basedlabour unions. Themainstream unions in Japan committed themselves mainlyto the job security of regular workers at the firm level, thereby leavingnon-regular workers exposed to job insecurity, low pay and managerialmistreatment — with only limited support from alternative voice mechanismssuch as civil societies, non-governmental organization groups and communityunions (Weathers 2010).In addition to the division between regular and non-regular employment,

the persistence of traditional gendered norms had a profound impact on career



motivation, professional development and organizational identification.While in many industrialized countries, a gender-based labour division waspredominantly along occupational lines, in Japan, it was located withinoccupations along the lines of regular and non-regular employment status.Despite their long-existing participation in the labour market, Japanesewomen until lately had not been recognized as pertinent to the discussionof important labour issues. The existence of cultural and institutionalbarriers hindered young women from pursuing an ambitious career in themale-dominated workplace and from successfully juggling work and familydemands.3 The gendered employment norms also had an adverse effecton male non-regular workers. Although haken was a predominately femalephenomenon, the ratio of males to females was growing sharply in the pastdecade (Fu 2011: 28). More and more men, young and old, were forced totake up temporary contracts as firms froze regular hiring and introducedearly retirement in order to reduce labour costs. Against the rapidly changingemployment landscape, entering a firm as a regular worker continued tofigure prominently in Japanese hegemonic masculinity (Dasgupta 2012).Compared to their female counterparts, male haken workers were subject tovarious subtle forms of office bullying, emotional pain and stress due to theirmarginalized masculinities and low social standing.Suffice it to say that, while these and other fundamental social and

institutional issues remained unresolved, the much-touted market-orientedperson endowed with freedom of choice, individuality and professional skillswould only serve to legitimise political agendas and mask glaring inequalitieson the ground. According to my fieldwork experience, it was with a handfulof privileged, regular (male) workers that the new personhood discoursesstruck a chord. Belonging to a firm, especially a big one, remained anessential prerequisite to successful and satisfying personhood, which would,in turn, provide opportunities to realize the newly appreciated qualities ofself-determination, whether by improving professional skills or pursuingalternative personal lifestyles.

5. Conclusions

We are witnessing a global ‘temp revolution’ and ‘blended workforces’,which brings an increasing number of workers to and from the workplacewith greater frequency (Fu 2015; Koene et al. 2014). Although focusingon Japan, this article has wider implications for discursive personhood oridentity research in the areas of employment relations and organizationalbehaviour. In broad terms, the study poses important questions aboutthe ascendancy of neoliberalism — often subsumed under the rubric of‘globalization’ — where ‘free-market’ principles are seen as a guide for allhuman action (Harvey 2005). Subjected to promises of individuality, freedomand flexibility, the market-oriented person is then morally obliged to beemployable and entrepreneurial. As Costea et al. (2008) potently argue, the



‘colonization’ of self and subjectivity in contemporary flexible capitalism andmanagerialism needs to be deconstructed and challenged. This necessitates aholistic approach combining macro and micro levels of analysis and, givenpower inequality inherent in discourse, empirical research methods that givevoice to actual people in concrete situations, particularly those belonging tosocially disadvantaged groups. This study therefore adds support to Voronovand Vince (2012), Creed et al. (2014) and others’ call for efforts towardspersonhood research and the integration of individual-level analysis andexisting institutional theories.More specifically, the article aims to address the two interconnected

research questions identified at the beginning:

1) Why was haken given particular discursive emphasis and symbolicprominence?

2) Perhaps more importantly, how did the discourse surrounding hakenreflect social changes in the Japanese context?

The changing discourse of personhood in Japan subscribes to the viewof ‘society as discourse’ (Parkin 1984), which stresses the important roleof language use, with its implicit connotations of domination and possiblecontestation, in constructing and reconstructing a large collectivity that wecall ‘society’.4 The focus on discourse offers a new analytical lens throughwhich society emerges as a fluid and pliable entity where structural forces andagential opportunities interact in a dialectical and co-generative fashion. Animportant finding that emerged from this study is the process of discourse: themanner in which it is constructed, challenged, mediated, accepted or ignored,which throws into sharp relief asymmetrical power relations and the complexnature of social change.The concept of ambivalence is perhaps useful for understanding the

perception and practice of social change from below. Many haken workersexpressed their views and feelings in often-contradictory ways; whileadmitting insecurity, discrimination and exclusion were major sources offrustration and stress, they referred to haken as ameans of achieving flexibilityand professional skills. In this connection, the newly constructed personhooddiscourse did have a reality of its own; it provided fresh impetus to undertakethe challenges and reimaging of the world surrounding them. In real-worldsituations, this newfound freedomwas, however, frequently restricted by socialexclusion caused by imposed gender, employment and other inequalities. Theresulting tension, as discussed earlier, was manifested in their ambivalentreactions, an emotional tool they used to cope with realities and adapt tochanging circumstances.From above, haken, as a newly normalized institution, embodied novel

features and connotations pertaining to the shifting economic, politicaland sociocultural conditions. The discourse surrounding haken generatedintense political debates where labour flexibility and professional ability werejuxtaposed, negotiated and clashed with widening gaps and inequalities.



Indeed, newly constructed symbolic and cognitive frameworks tend to createnew political pluralism and dynamics that reshape a society’s core values andnorms in often complex ways. The haken debate took the form of a processualdiscourse where contending powerful elites and interest groups came togetherwith different agendas to compete for the legitimacy of their discourses.Together, those factors have implications for the changing relationship ofindividuals to organizations, to the state, to entrepreneurial opportunities andto the wider world. To a great degree, it is the resulting ‘discursive’ outcomeintensified by the mass media, rather than the ‘materiality’ experienced ineveryday life, which had made haken a powerful discursive symbol in post-bubble Japan.

Final version accepted on 24 June 2015

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank anonymous reviewers and the editor for theirhelpful feedback and guidance. A special thanks goes to David Parkin, whoselifelong devotion to anthropology and interdisciplinary research has providedmuch inspiration, insight and encouragement throughout the development ofthis research.

Notes

1. Everyday life inside the Japanese firm is a well-documented subject. There is anenormous literature ranging from earlier ethnographic writings of Vogel (1963),Nakane (1970), Dore (1973), Rohlen (1974) and Clark (1979) to more recentaccounts of Kondo (1990), Hamabata (1990), Ogasawa (1998), Matsunaga (2000)and Graham (2003, 2004).

2. The Japanese state had a relatively small amount of budget for unemploymentbenefits, which was far below many industrialized countries. To receiveunemployment benefits, workers were required to have held the same job for at least1 year, which would exclude the majority of haken and other non-regular workerswhose contracts were often as short as a couple of months.

3. In the face of an unfortunate combination of a rapidly ageing population anddeclining fertility rates, the Japanese government had come up with a series offamily friendly policies, which were designed mainly to create an environment thatwould encourage women of reproductive age to have children while continuing towork (Roberts 2002). Instead of tackling gender inequality at work, those policiescontinued to reinforce women’s traditional familial roles as ‘goodwife, wisemother’(ryosai kenbo) and the popular assumption that women’s involvement in outsidework was ‘not an alternative to home-making’ but rather ‘an extension of thedomestic role’ (Smith 1987: 16).

4. Scholars in Japanese studies have increasingly adopted discursive approaches toexplore various areas of social dynamics in Japan, such asMannari andBefu (1983),Ishida (1986), Goodman (1990), Fruhstuck (2003), Martinez (2004), Takeda (2005)and Hook and Takeda (2007), to name but a few.



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