The conventional picture of industry and industrial relations in Japan is of a number of very large firms providing extremely attractive working conditions for their happy and contented workforce. Norma Chalmers shows that there is in fact another, very different side to the picture, which occurs in the the peripheral sector. Here, conditions are often poor, wages very low and continuity of employment virtually non-existent. There are many small firms where the effectiveness of worker organisation and bargaining declines as the firm's size and proximity to the industrial centre decrease. Moreover, as Chalmers shows, the peripheral sector is very large, and the conventional picture of the model workforce should probably be confined to a few flagship companies. The book argues that the model nature of the large firms may stem in part from the fact that they are able to off-load problems onto smaller firms who produce the components necessary for the large firm sector at disadvantageous subcontract terms.

Price probes the paradoxes in postwar labor-management relations, particularly in the years between 1945 and 1975. Basing his analysis on the history of labor in Mitsui's Miike mine in Kyushu, Suzuki Motors in Hamamatsu, and Moriguchi City Hall, the author questions the common interpretation that industrial relations are based on lifetime jobs, seniority-based wages, and enterprise unions. He also asks whether Japanese workers have been genuinely empowered by the developments in recent years.

This book is a comprehensive study underpinned by thirty years of research conducted by the author relating to Japanese human resource management and labour-management relations. Its aim is to achieve a better understanding of the Japanese model for human resource management and labour standards issues, and its transferability to supply chains in Asia. Seeking a better understanding of the strength of Japanese management and its applicability to foreign countries, Japanese Human Resource Management introduces a new agenda for Japanese corporations that wish to operate in sustainable and inclusive ways in local societies and in global supply chains. Organized into three major themes this comprehensive study is essential reading for students, researchers and government who wish to promote productivity improvement and constructive labour-management relations.

Japanese scholars have begun to challenge conventional wisdom about effective labor organizing, and Ikuo Kume has written the first book in English to advance their controversial theory. Since at least the early 1980s, the power of organized labor has weakened in most advanced industrial countries. The decline of organized labor has coincided with the decentralization of labor-management relations. As a result, most observers assume that decentralized labor is destined to lose power in a capitalist economy, and that enterprise unions will tend to be docile and powerless.Kume documents the one notable exception. The Japanese trade union confederation has steadily grown in importance, expanding its scope beyond individual companies to national policy making. Kume traces the achievements of enterprise unionism in private firms. Labor, he argues, slowly gained legitimate corporate membership by establishing joint institutions with management. By the 1960s, labor-management councils, stimulated by foreign competition, had become a widespread feature of Japanese industry. Soon unions were regular participants in the government deliberation councils and in the information exchange that shaped policy when inflation hit the Japanese economy. The unions had become a full partner by the 1980s and were crucially involved in the 1993 defeat of the Liberal Democratic Party after thirty-eight years of rule.

Andrew Gordon goes to the core of the Japanese enterprise system, the workplace, and reveals a complex history of contest and confrontation. The Japanese model produced a dynamic economy which owed as much to coercion as to happy consensus. Managerial hegemony was achieved only after a bitter struggle that undermined the democratic potential of postwar society. The book draws on examples across Japanese industry, but focuses in depth on iron and steel. This industry was at the center of the country's economic recovery and high-speed growth, a primary site of corporate managerial strategy and important labor union initiatives. Beginning with the Occupation reforms and their influence on the workplace, Gordon traces worker activism and protest in the 1950s and '60s, and how they gave way to management victory in the 1960s and '70s. He shows how working people had to compromise institutions of self-determination in pursuit of economic affluence. He illuminates the Japanese system with frequent references to other capitalist nations whose workplaces assumed very different shape, and looks to Japan's future, rebutting hasty predictions that Japanese industrial relations are about to be dramatically transformed in the American free-market image. Gordon argues that it is more likely that Japan will only modestly adjust the status quo that emerged through the turbulent postwar decades he chronicles here.

Dealing with such productivity improvement programmes as action learning, quality circles, inter-firm comparisons and business clinics, this book also offers information on the most important areas in which productivity can be improved and on techniques field-tested in developing countries.