Inside the Japanese Company


Product Description
Graham explores the attitudes of Japanese employees towards their work, their company and on related issues. Based on extensive original research inside a Japanese insurance company (C-Life), which subsequently went bankrupt, the book shows that attitudes towards lifetime employment, company loyalty and the other characteristics of Japanese working life, which are often portrayed in stereotype form in the West, are in fact more complicated than is at first apparent.Inside the Japanese Company Review
Don't ask how I came to be reading this, as I know nothing about Japan, anthropology, or business studies. But I was hooked from the start. It's a fascinating trawl through life in a large Japanese company, which makes "Lad's Army" look like Butlins: if the employees survive the brutal totalitarian discipline of the training centre, the "voluntary" weekend working hours, and the "entirely non-compulsory" karaoke outings, they'll probably succumb to the imaginative bullying of their peers. Yet all is not well in the company as Japan's economy crumbles, and for the first time in a generation the samurai-like code of the white-collar worker is in serious jeopardy. All this could be fearsomely academic, but the author illustrates everything with anecdotes of her own experiences as an employee at "C-Life", and also with extensive quotes from the other employees - in which we see their habit of repeating the "company line" ("How I love this company! I love it even though they have asked me to "voluntarily retire!") breaking down in the face of their need to say what they *really* think. It's written in an interesting and lively style with a minimum of jargon. Although this book is doubtless of great interest to anthropologists, business students, and those interested in Japan, I think it should also be fascinating to practically anyone who likes real stories of ordinary people caught in a bizarre Kafka-esque world of bureaucracy, jargon, and perverted values - a world that is all the more poignant for its transience.Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "Inside the Japanese Company" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from Inside the Japanese Company ...

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