Section 5 | Anthropology and Sociology | Session 5B, Session
chair: Scott Clark (Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, Indiana)
Wim Lunsing (University of Aarhus)
The purpose of this paper is to find out the democratic status in Japan by looking into the present practice of a self-governing association. The fieldwork was completed by interviewing people in a community in Kyoto Prefecture over the past year. The neighborhood consists of 23% old-timers and 77% newcomers. The latter, however, have not been admitted into the association despite the fact that it is a territorial association which should act under the "democratic operation" as defined in Article 2 of 260 of Local Autonomy Law, 1947; and that the new residents pay the same amount of annual cooperative fees as the old-timers do. The conclusion of this investigation is that democracy in Japan as it is today is not in agreement with the legal requirement and far from Article 1 of the imperial Charter Oath, 1868, and from Article 14 of the Constitution of Japan, 1946.
Petra Röska, University of Vienna
The equal employment opportunity law gives men and women the same career opportunities, but reality shows that men automatically get assigned to the career-track and promoted whereas women become chosen and promoted only in exceptional cases. Therefore still only a few women are in key management positions.
This paper’s purpose is to examine which role the career networks play in the career making of women on the manager track in Japanese medium-sized or small companies, These smaller companies are the ones that give women the opportunity of being promoted. Therefore I want to find out how women act in this career networks and understand their motives, problems and strategies. I want to analyze how these networks operate, how different womens' networks act in comparison to mens' networks. I will examine how women in these networks see themselves.
Mikiko Eswein, University Kaiserslautern
This contribution focuses on the permeability between social layers in Japan since 1945, i.e. on social mobility and equality of opportunities through education. In order to assess social mobility, the chances of promotion to the elite level will be analysed. For this purpose, the following working hypothesis is established and verified: In modern society, the members of the elites gain their positions not through their social origin but by the attestation of their expertise acquired within the educational system.
Besides empirical data, three theories or theory groups are used to verify the hypothesis: the functionalist approaches (meritocracy as a reality), the power theories (meritocracy as a myth), and Rosenbaum’s tournament mobility theory (promotion within the employment system as a new selection mechanism).
The data used, stemming from recent empirical studies completed in Japan, and the development of the Japanese society since the 1980s confirm the power theories’ predications: elite positions are indirectly determined by social origin, which until the late 1970s was not the case. The analysis made here also suggests that the quality of educational achievement does no longer guarantee the attainment of an elite position, with early signs of this hardly perceptible in the 1980s, but with clear evidence since the 1990s. The data on the promotion of white-collar workers in the 1980s and 1990s thus confirm Rosenbaum’s theory. The tendency of new selection mechanisms forming within the employment system is to be interpreted as the germ of a functional specialisation. Besides educational policy since the 1990s and the economy’s need for a creative workforce, the differentiation of preferences among youths is to be considered as the main reason for this development: no longer do all of them want to attend the best university and reach top-level positions in society.