Reworking Japan: Changing Men at Work and Play under Neoliberalism

Reworking Japan examines how neoliberal economic restructuring and reforms have challenged Japan's corporate ideologies, gendered relations, and subjectivities of individual employees, reshaping Japanese corporations, workers, and ideals. It explores the human dimension of the reforms, challenging preconceived ideas about Japanese men and the social effects of neoliberalism.

Format: Hardback
Length: 306 pages
Publication date: 15 January 2021
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Reworking Japan examines the impact of neoliberal economic restructuring and reforms on Japan's corporate ideologies, gendered relations, and individual employees' subjectivities. Japan's remarkable economic growth since the 1950s has led to the New Middle Class family ideal, but the nearly three decades of economic stagnation and reforms since the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s have intensified corporate retrenchment under the banner of neoliberal restructuring. Gagné demonstrates how economic restructuring has reshaped Japanese corporations, workers, and ideals, as well as how Japanese companies and employees have resisted and actively responded to such changes.

Gagné explores Japan's fraught and problematic transition from the postwar ideology of companyism to the emergent ideology of neoliberalism and the subsequent large-scale economic restructuring. By juxtaposing Japan's economic transformation with an ethnography of work and play, and individual life histories, Gagné goes beyond the abstract to explore the human dimension of the neoliberal reforms that have impacted the nation's corporate governance, socioeconomic class, workers' subjectivities, and family relations.

Reworking Japan, with its firsthand analysis of how the supposedly hegemonic neoliberal regime does not completely transform existing cultural frames and social relations, will shake up preconceived ideas about Japanese men and the social effects of neoliberalism.

Weight: 630g
Dimension: 162 x 238 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501753039