GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

Gender, Work and Organization.

Vol. 13 No. 4 July 2006

A Feminist Critique of Japanization:

Employment and Work in Consumer
Electronics
Bill W. K. Taylor*
The debate over lean production and Japanization has now matured, with
a broad range of perspectives and analysis. Through analysis of the central
role womens labour plays in Japanese-owned enterprises, this article will
provide a critical discussion of Japanization. Japanization is neither a sufcient explanation of the nature of workplaces in which women work, nor
a necessary goal for labour management in Japanese-owned enterprises.
Using extensive ethnographic eld research drawn from studies in Japan
and the UK in Japanese-owned enterprises and a European-owned enterprise engaged in television assembly, this article argues that there is no
aspect of it which it would be appropriate to label Japanization.
Keywords: Japanization, gender, consumer electronics, labour process

Introduction

esearch interest in the transfer of Japanese management practices

through Japanese-owned multinationals has now been well established.
Moreover, there is now a growing analysis of womens experience of work
(Ogasawara, 1998; Roberts, 1994; Turner, 1995), labour market position
(Brinton, 1993; Kondo, 1990; Lam, 1992; Shirahase, 2001) and role in economic
restructuring (Gottfried and Hayashi-Kato, 1998; Hasino, 2000) in Japan and
in Japanese-owned plants in North America (Gottfried and Graham, 1993;
Liker et al., 1999; Milkman, 1997). The linkage between the Japanization
debate (with its more recent incarnation of lean production) and gender has
not yet been clearly established. Although much of the debate around just-intime (JIT) and lean production has focused on workplaces where predominantly men are employed (for example, Garrahan and Stewart, 1992; Kenney
and Florida, 1993; Reinhart et al., 1997; Stephenson and Stewart, 2001), the
Address for correspondence: *Department of Public and Social Administration, City University
of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, e-mail: Bill.Taylor@cityu.edu.hk
Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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Japanization literature has also included many studies in which women

make up the majority of the employees (Abo, 1994; Campbell and Burton,
1994; Delbridge, 1998; Kenney, 1999; Oliver and Wilkinson, 1992; Stephenson,
1996; Taylor et al., 1994).
This article will draw out specic issues related to gendered employment
and work practices in Japanese production plants in the UK, which will form
the basis of a fundamental critique of the Japanization thesis. The article will
attempt to begin to argue that there is no such thing as Japanization, as
dened in terms of a constellation of practices which derive from or are functually equivalent to management practices in Japan. Critiques have been provided in the past, through highlighting variation across sectors (Abo, 1994;
Elger and Smith, 1994) and rms (Delbridge, 1998; Taylor, 1994, 2001), and
worker resistance to such practices (Reinhart et al., 1997; Stephenson, 1996).
More fundamental critiques have been provided by Stewart (1998a) in
questioning the ontological basis of much of the research in the eld, and
Berggren (1995) and Whittaker (1990) have shown the shifting nature of management practices in Japan are such that any set of practices which may be
deemed as comprising Japanization may be transient. All these critiques,
however, still allow space for proponents to claim the saliency of their argument, while acknowledging a few revisions (Oliver et al., 1998) or impediments (Morris et al., 1998). The thesis that there is something which may be
termed Japanization, however, appears to stand fast against all attempts to
undermine it. An alternative form of critique is to undermine the thesis as
inherently contradictory by showing that managerial attempts to promote
practices which supposedly form part of Japanization would be either
unnecessary or counterproductive to managerial interests. Taylor (1999a) and
Williams et al. (1992) showed that JIT was counterproductive as a way of controlling production costs and labour-control systems based on participation
were irrelevant to improved labour productivity (Taylor, 1999b). In this article I will attempt to argue that rather than any need to look for new forms of
labour management pertaining to supposed Japanization, traditional and
universal forms of gendered work and employment form the basis of
shopoor politics. The argument goes that if gendered politics is the basis of
television production, there is simply no need for Japanization. Where management seeks to enforce new work practices, they do so and, just as in Japan,
in all likelihood will fail because the fundamental employment relationship
is not Japanized but gendered.
The article briey reviews the literature on womens role in and experience
of Japanese management, looking at assumptions about womens place in the
labour market and attitudes to work. Then the article examines womens
employment patterns, their role in the labour process and their experience
of work. Four case studies of television assembly plants in the UK, three
Japanese and one European-owned, form the empirical focus to explain the
ways in which considering gender in relation to the Japanization debate
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fundamentally undermines the Japanization thesis. The Japanization thesis

rests on such supposed practices as just-in-time management, single-source
components, multi-skilled and functionally exible workers and lifetime
employment.
The evidence given here is primarily empirical, by use of the illustration of
the labour process in consumer electronics. The descriptions in places are
familiar to researchers of gendered work, but the context is signicant here;
one of supposed Japanization, of supposedly new forms of labour management. This article will demonstrate that the Japanization proponents neglect
the centrality of gender. Women workers assemble televisions and have
always been central to the whole history of the industrialization process in
Japan. It is not being argued that Japanese rms discriminate in any uniquely
patterned way, rather that they utilize existing societal patterns of discrimination to further the degree of exploitation on the factory oor. Although
societal levels of discrimination in Japan (Brinton, 1993; Saso, 1990) appear
higher than in the US or the UK, the differences are based on the degree of
exploitation of women, and the forms of discrimination are largely similar.

Studies in Japanization
The internationalization of Japanese capital since the 1960s had gone relatively unnoticed until trade friction forced Japanese multinationals to start
investing in Europe and North America in great numbers during the 1980s.
While Cole (1979) and Dore (1973) stimulated some academic interest in their
claims that Japan represented a particular and unique form of industrial relations and industrial management, the impact of their studies only took hold
as Japanese capital started to undermine the dominance of western capital
in their home markets. This interest may be divided into two schools of
researchers: those from the international management perspective (for example, Reitsperger, 1986; Trevor, 1983; White and Trevor, 1983; Wickens, 1987)
and those interested in labour studies (for example, Delbridge, 1998; Elger
and Smith, 1994; Thompson, 1990; Turnbull, 1988; Wilkinson et al., 1989),
often (but not exclusively) from Europe. In Japan, and among international
management theorists, research gradually came to be based on how competitive advantage could be maintained while replacing exports with locally
produced goods in overseas markets.
In labour studies, in Britain especially, the interest focused on the impact
these imported practices had on the extant labour process in local industries.
Such research, drawing on the international management research,1 has been
concerned with demonstrating that the power of Japanese capital over
labour is not culturally bound. Moreover, the concern with workplace
management control has allowed scholars to add weight to the thesis
that the social organization of work is more important than Bravermanian

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technological determinism. The labour studies concern led to new terminology Japanization (originally coined by Turnbull, 1986). This term captures
both the strategies of Japanese inward-investing capital and the impact such
best practice has on (organised) labour in a country. Thus, it is concerned
with the impact of such best practice work organization in Japanese and
locally owned rms.
The study of Japanization requires an analysis of those managerial
practices that are Japanese (Bratton, 1992), or the constellation of (perhaps
some) universal practices organised in a uniquely Japanese way. While
there are a number of theories of Japanese business behaviour and practice,
two major preoccupations are centred on supposed JIT management
(Delbridge et al., 1992; Monden, 1983; Sayer, 1986; Voss, 1990) and the three
pillars of lifetime employment (Dore, 1973). In JIT a particular constellation
of management practices has been perceived to embody the ethos of Japanese management (Dedoussis, 1994; Oliver and Wilkinson, 1992, pp. 6887).
JIT was developed in Toyota automobile assembly in Japan,2 where such
practices as a friendly company union, a loyal network of suppliers, functionally exible and lifetime working (male) employees were (claimed to
be) common. This has allowed high quality production with low rates of
work stoppages through continual work improvement and the application
of state-of-the-art technology.
The theoretical arguments in the literature mainly draw on empirical case
studies of mens working environments and experiences, almost exclusively
within the auto industry and its component suppliers.3 Perhaps as a result of
this, the theoretical debate has become somewhat subconsciously gender
specic also. The term Japanization was originally coined by Turnbull
(1986), when looking at an auto parts maker in the UK and has been generalised to apply to any situation. However, the debate around whether
the term should be Japanization (Oliver and Wilkinson, 1988; Turnbull,
1986), Toyotism,4 Fujitsuism (Kenney and Florida, 1988) or Onoism is
an implicit recognition of divergent workplace settings.5 Thus, some have
argued that is not one Japanese form of management that is universally
applicable to all sectors and rms either in Japan or overseas (Elger and
Smith, 1994, pp. 401; Smith, 1994, p. 293).
Despite this diversity, there remains a tendency to assume a set of management practices which make up the Japanese management model (Mitter,
1986; Morgan and Sayer, 1988; Saso, 1990) Even when diversity is acknowledged, there are still attempts to nd a general or abstracted coherence to this
diversity, which in turn constitutes a holistic Japanese management model,
whether at the micro-level (Kumon et al., 1994) or the general level (Kenny
and Florida, 1993). Taken together, these sources may indicate that Japanization occurs mostly in industries that mainly employ men, rather than those
with mainly women shopoor workers. However, even studies which focus
on consumer electronics, an industrial sector that employs predominantly
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women, indicate that Japanese multinationals introduce Japanization successfully (Delbridge, 1998).

Gendered employment
Bradley (1989, pp. 1668) shows how within the history of the electrical
goods industry there was a change in the sexual composition of employment
in the early part of the 20th century. From the birth of the industry in 1885,
only men were employed in the factories, but with mechanization and
subdivision of labour the employment of women expanded. Bradley (1989,
p. 167) explains that women have been used for assembly tasks involving the
manipulation of tiny parts and ne wiring and on assembly-line production
where jobs are unskilled and repetitive.
By 1960, women constituted 40 per cent of overall employment within the
industry. Beechey (1987, pp. 3952) argues that among the advantages of
employing women instead of men is that women are paid less than the value
of their labour because of family relations that assume the male is nancially
responsible for production. Women as workers must buy products they
might otherwise make themselves (so increasing aggregate consumption),
and cheaper labour undermines the power of male workers in the labour process. To these advantages to capital, Beechey adds issues of exibility, in that
it probably costs less to make women redundant under legal provisions and
they are more likely to accept part-time or seasonal work than men because
of their insecurity relative to men in the labour market.
Collinson and Knights (1986, pp. 14650) argue that a number of factors
leads to the gendering of jobs and the restriction of women to unskilled occupations. Jobs are designed for women through the selective application of
technology, and their lower employment costs relative to men and the historical subordination of women all contributed to this segmentation. Phillips
and Taylor (1980) argue against this form of causation by saying that it is
womens inferior status in society that results in the skills they use being
interpreted as inferior to those used by men. Thus, womens work is
unskilled because it is womens work, gendering the denitions of skill, just
as sexes are ideologically ranked.

Gendered work patterns in Japan

Chalmers (1989), Koike (1988), Lam (1992) and Saso (1990) nd evidence of
extensive gender discrimination in Japan. However, Knights and Willmott
(1986), Mitter (1986) and Ward (1990) demonstrate that similar occupational
segmentation, vulnerability and social coercion (though occasionally articulated in slightly different ways) exist in the UK as in Japan. However, the
important distinction is that in Japan the argument revolves round women

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occupying a secondary labour market, as opposed to being supplementary

wage earners in the UK.
Despite the introduction of legal provisions in Japan to counter discrimination (Lam, 1992) and the rise of some middle-class women to professional
positions (Bonney et al., 1994), the majority of women constitute a peripheral
workforce. Because these women are not core employees supposedly beneting from the three pillars (lifetime employment, seniority pay and promotion and enterprise unions), their importance to models of Japanization is
overlooked. Thus, whereas Oliver and Wilkinson (1992, pp. 579) acknowledge that there is a dual economy in Japan consisting of large rms with lifetime employment and smaller subcontractors without such benets, the
position of women is left out of the analysis. Chalmers (1989), Koike (1988),
Lam (1992) and Saso (1990) describe womens position on the periphery of
the workforce, showing the extent of their lower pay and job insecurity.
Added to this, the growth of womens labour in Japan since the mid-1970s
has been as part-time workers, in addition to their traditional job opportunities in vulnerable small companies and the service sector (Bank of Japan,
1991, pp. 35; Brinton, 1993; Gottfried and Hayashi-Kato, 1998).
Thus, the central role of womens employment in Japanese factories
(Carney and OKelly, 1990) and the economy (Kondo, 1990) is as a peripheral workforce in the Japanese economy. However, the Japanization thesis
would hold such contingent employment as marginal, if at all relevant to
understanding the core employment practices they seek to examine. Nevertheless, women are central to the production process of consumer electronics. Porter (1990, pp. 3856) shows that Japan in the 1970s and 1980s
exported 49.5 per cent of the world market for TVs but only 30.8 per cent
for automobiles. Abe (1990) shows that almost half the workers in Japanese
electrical manufacturing plants were women, growing in numbers at a rapid
rate compared to the growth in employment of men through the years of
economic boom. This compares to about ve times as many men as women
in auto manufacture (Abe, 1990). However, even here the signicance of
women may be underestimated. Subcontractors in Japan produce most of
the approximately 20,000 components that go into a car. Brinton (1993)
shows that women often start work their working lives in large Japanese
rms but after birthing move into small family rms, in home-working and
part-time work. All these sectors are the basis of the subcontract component
supply system in Japan (Brinton 1993, pp. 13940), on which the auto assembly conglomerates and others depend. Thus, this segmentation should not
be seen as simply one of coreperiphery, with women relegated to the
periphery, but rather that womens employment is integral to the production process of so many Japanese rms. Therefore, womens role and experience in labour subordination should be a major concern of the Japanization
debate, at least among those claiming Japanization is universally applicable
outside Japan.
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Womens experience of Japanese multinationals

While the Japanization literature has largely ignored gender, the broader
interest in Japanese multinationals has highlighted gendered employment
patterns in Japanese factories operating overseas. This literature has drawn
on, and reinforced, the way industrialized societies predicate economic
growth on the dual roles of women: as reproducers of labour power and as
conducting essential parts of the labour process under capitalism.
Matsui (1987, pp. 3349) describes graphically the position of Malaysian
and Philippine women confronted with work in Japanese multinationals,
with pay higher than local employers but lower than western multinationals.
Her analysis is of young women working as cheap labour, just as in Japan, and
dreaming of not having to work any more, while in reality living in slums. To
Matsui (1987) Japanese management in these plants is simply about the
exploitation of this vulnerable young workforce. Mitter (1986) and Saso (1990)
both argue that women in Japan and in the UK are exposed to the same managerial practices, although they disagree over the nature of their position vis-vis their employers. Thus, whereas Saso (1990) argues that women in the UK
like their jobs more and are better off (experiencing less discrimination) than
women in Japan, Mitter (1986) argues that women in both countries experience Third World levels of pay and status (discrimination against them is universal). Further, Kumon et al. (1994, pp. 15165) indicate that when analysing
employment issues in Japanese electrical plants it is necessary to draw a distinction between men and women (the latter being assigned menial jobs,
while men have opportunities for career enhancement). This literature shows
clear gender discrimination operating in Japanese multinationals, based on
womens subordination to and peripheral role in such enterprises. However,
while their subordination is not contestable, designating women as peripheral workers carries the danger of undervaluing the degree to which womens
work is central to the economy and somehow implicitly allowing Japanization to maintain its patriarchal bias. Gottfried and her colleagues have
attempted to place gender more centrally in the analysis of the development
of Japanese capitalism (Gottfried, 2001; Gottfried and Hayashi-Kato, 1998). In
Gottfried and Grahams (1993) study of team-working and sexual politics in
an auto assembly plant, they claim that pre-existing sexual divisions undermine the adoption of Japanese management techniques. However, an alternative conclusion might be drawn that their study demonstrates the
ephemeral nature of Japanese attempts at gaining worker commitment, just
as has been shown in several other studies (Milkman, 1997, pp. 1707; Reinhart et al., 1997) and ironically, Delbridge, 1998.6
The gendered nature of society and its reection in employment and work
are extremely important elements to understanding Japanese business operations both domestically and overseas. However, there have been two tendencies that have encouraged an inadequate analysis of gender as an integral

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part of Japanese capitalism. Firstly, the assumption that, and concentration

on, traditional male-dominated occupations such as auto assembly as the
empirical basis for theoretical developments in Japanization theories has
ignored the importance of womens occupations. Secondly, the tendency to
see womens employment in Japan (and elsewhere) as peripheral to the
labour process and conceive of its importance mainly in terms of subordination and numerical exibility has encouraged the neglect of real analyses of
such occupations. The next section will address these issues by seeking to
answer two questions: are women peripheral workers undertaking menial
tasks in the labour market or are they integral to the production process? Is
the fundamental nature of the labour process, under which women work,
affected by working in Japanese multinational corporations?

Case studies in consumer electronics

Four plants were studied in the UK, three owned by Japanese companies and
one European multinational, all producing televisions, with interviews being
conducted over about a year with Japanese and local managers, supervisors
and trade unionists in all plants. The three Japanese cases represent large consumer electronics multinationals, two of which dominate the industry. The
European case was chosen to act as a benchmark to compare differences that
may be attributed to Japanization.7 Japanization was taken to mean JIT production practices, team-working, employment stability, worker involvement
and the like. However, the research was approached from the perspective of
analysing what practices were used in personnel and production management and how they were viewed by workers and supervisors, rather than
attempting to test some form of Japanese model. Plant visits and interviews
were conducted with managers and some engineers in Japan in two of the
companies studied in the UK, and in another two plants making televisions
in competitor companies. In addition, in two plants in the UK, one Japanese
(Jp18) and one European (Eur019), groups of workers were interviewed.
Finally, visits and interviews took place with managers and trade unionists in
various enterprises in Japan over an extended period during a two-year Japanese-government research scholarship held in Tokyo. In total over 100 interviews were conducted over a two-year period,10 30 of which were with line
workers in two factories. The interview technique varied according to circumstances. With managers more formal interviews were conducted; with technical staff, questioning during plant tours proved the most successful, and with
workers group interviews were conducted with two to ve workers at a time.
Employment strategies and the local labour market. Each of the Japanese
plants was located within 30 50 km of each other, but all were located in
uniquely different labour markets. Eur01 was located over 160 km away from
the Japanese cases, but the labour market resembled that of Jp2, and the
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community (in terms of dominant social values) was probably similar to the
locality of Jp1. On the shopoor, most workers were young women who had
recently left school (the average age of employment in all the plants was
between 22 and 26-years-old). Many of the women, were not rural workers
fresh into industrial jobs, as Saso (1990) found in NEC (but similar to her ndings in Matsushita), but urban workers seeking the higher pay of factory
work.11
Overall, 50 per cent of the employees in the plants were women, and
women made up 60 per cent of all production-related jobs. Men occupied the
bulk of the managerial, professional and technical jobs, whereas women were
assigned to jobs dened as less skilled. This meant that women were clustered in certain occupations, so that, for example, printed circuit board (PCB)
assembly had about 75 per cent women workers, with women occupying
almost 100 per cent of the work involving manual insertion in PCBs. Two
plants (Eur01 and Jp2) appeared to have more men in jobs usually assigned
to women in the other plants. Eur01 was located in an area of long-standing
light industry without alternative heavy male employment in the locality,
and Jp2 was located right in the centre of a male-dominated mining valley,
where male unemployment was high and the case plant had also shed many
workers. I was told that men, desperate for employment, clung onto and
sought jobs, even accepting womens work in Jp2, something visible during
my research visits to the factory.
Approximately 80 per cent of televisions are bought in November and
December in the UK and the other European export markets for which the
plants produced. This creates a huge variation over the year in demand
for products from factories, which must be managed through varying
Table 1: Workforce data
Eur01

Products made in plants (in

addition to TV assembly)
Total number of permanent
employees
Shopoor workers
Women on shopoor (%)
Number of temporary
workers in assembly jobs
Overall union membership (%)

Jp1

Jp2

Jp3

VCRs,
Satellite Microwave Picture microwave
receivers ovens
tubes
ovens
1276

1200

1600

850

828
60
50200

782
60
0

1200
60
40150

500
60
Up to 210*

40

95

65

60

Note: *almost half were men.

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production output (and thus labour utilization) or producing for stock (and
so stabilizing work hours and employment). By examining how each rm
utilized womens labour it will be shown that variations in production or
stock-holding were used, neither of which are supposed to be features of JIT
production management. To cope with this variation, three of the plants used
an additional shift of contract workers, employing mainly married mothers
on what was called the twilight shift or baby shift,12 from 6.00 p.m. to 10.00
p.m. Eur01 employed an evening shift of 100 contract workers, plus 50 to 60
on day-working contracts. Over a period of a few months it was intended
that out of 800 workers, 200 would be on six-month contracts. Some contracts
were renewed immediately; the idea was to retain a constant supply of
peripheral workers on the books to cope with expansion and contraction.
At Jp3, management operated a four-day a week twilight shift for PCB
assembly with 40 to 50 workers at the start of the year. By the end of the year,
the numbers grew to 100 or 150 casual women workers. Many of the workers
were ex-full-time employees who had left to have children and who would
return to full-time work when the family grew up. Managers in Jp3 said they
also used this labour turnover to achieve exibility in employment numbers,
reecting, to a lesser extent, the same phenomenon as in Jp1.
At Jp2, management had a policy that good (female) workers tended to
be recalled as temporary contract workers when they left to have families.
New contract workers undertook one week of training before they were
assigned work, while returning workers received a brief refresher. The idea
was to have about 850 permanent staff with a contract labour force that
varies. At the time of the interviews about 210 contract workers were used in
busy times, and this number was built up slowly each month to the busiest
months of the year, October to November.
Jp1 (a very large Japanese multinational enterprise) was the only plant not
to use contract or part-time workers, except for a contract caterer and for new
building projects. The personnel director claimed that Jp1 did not use such
exible employment practices in television assembly but, instead, relied to a
limited extent on voluntary labour turnover. In the slack season, leavers were
not replaced and in the busy season, more people were employed. This seems
an unsophisticated method of coping with the seasons, but was in fact made
possible because there was continuous expansion in which one years busy
season became the next years slack season. Labour turnover, while unpredictable, peaked at the start of the slack season, as there are fewer opportunities for bonuses and overtime allowances with lower production demands.
However, labour turnover in the plants also increased when new workers
were recruited, as a proportion of those new to the particular forms of working could not or would not accept the pace or environment and resigned
within the rst few weeks of taking up their job.
Eur01 and Jp2 did not rely on a form of exibility from labour turnover.
This reected an entirely different labour market situation from that facing
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Jp1 and Jp3. Both Eur01 and Jp2, although increasing in size, had a recent
history of drastic contraction. It may be said that there was a certain synergistic effect of expansion, from which these latter two plants had yet to benet, in terms of exibility in core worker numbers. Those plants using
temporary workers drew on the external labour pool for recruitment. There
was an incentive for the worker to be a good contractor in order to be picked
to replace natural wastage (consisting of those who resigned or retired from
the core) and for plant expansion. This process shows that women move in
and out of employment and between permanent and casual employment
because of a combination of societal norms and family circumstances, on the
one hand, and opportunities and exceptions (pressures) provided for/
imposed on women by company employment strategies.
A major consideration for success in employing such a coreperiphery
strategy is the shape of the local labour market. In the case of the twilight or
evening shift, the main source of supply was young women with children.
More crucially, there was an incentive to get workers who would be prepared
to work for periods of half a year and less. Jp2 was able to use some farm
workers, with almost half the contractors being male. Eur01 had attracted
some contractors who were encouraged to move from another part of the
country when a factory in the corporate group was closed. These contractors
moved with their machines and were contracted to teach the locals. Nevertheless, this was a precarious policy since if a competing employer moved
into the area and offered similar work on a full-time basis, then the company
might lose these contractors. This happened in Jp2 as a German company
moved into the same valley.
Beechey (1982, pp. 6871) argues that much of the disadvantage in the
labour market experienced by women comes from their unique relations
within the family, which lowers the perception of their labour value by men
at work. Moreover, as will be shown in a later section, women undervalue
their own labour power, so that there is no overt resistance to this form of
wage discrimination. However, I would add, along with Armstrong (1982,
pp. 389), that the men often gain their advantaged position at a price: in the
case of auto insertion workers, this means compulsory shift working.
A picture of employment strategies that peripheralize women while providing the Japanese employers with exible employment options has been
shown in this section. This however, needs to be understood with caution, for
it trivializes womens labour in the context of Japanese capital. The following
section will seek to place womens labour as central to the labour process of
these rms.

The labour process and gendered job allocation

The work at these plants may be analysed by dividing jobs between male
and female jobs and between skilled and non-skilled workers. Men did not

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perform work deemed to require dexterity, but rather they did the so-called
skilled work in assembly. They were also more likely to engage in what
traditionally has been called heavy work, although mechanization had
transformed much of this heavy work into light work. For example, boxing
television sets after nal assembly was not a heavy job because cranes have
been introduced to place the sets in the boxes. However, just as Cavendish
(1982, pp. 7697), Harvey (1987) and Phillips and Taylor (1980) show, such
segmentation by gender is a common practice in manufacturing. The following sections will address the complexities of the issues raised under job gendering, gendered images of skill,13 and the degree to which gender was used
to segment employment arrangements. It will be shown that much of the
segmentation common in the industry is not shaped by the origin of the
company ownership, but by the historical nature of the industry.
Most women in the plants worked on manual insertion, where they
placed small components onto printed circuit boards, sitting at conveyor
belts that controlled their speed of work. The cycle time for this repetitive job
averaged around eight seconds. The work was machine-paced so that the
women did not break their concentration, thus toilet breaks were rostered
and restricted to certain times of the day. As it will be explained later, because
the work required dexterity (manipulating small, delicate components), it
was considered unskilled.
Men worked as managers, maintenance/technicians and auto insertion
minders (auto insertion machines automatically place components in circuit
boards). This last job was noisy shift work, with two main activities: loading
(load components into the machines) and minding (watching the machines
and undertaking regular quality checks). The reason given by all who were
asked about this male-dominated arrangement was that shift systems
worked in each plant and shift work was mens work. Although this was
beginning to change with recent government legislation lifting the restriction
on women working shifts in certain areas, including one female interviewee
in Eur01 working on auto-insertion, the extent to which it was having any
impact on segregation in general was uncertain.
Manual insertion, once womens work, had become auto insertion
machines attended by men. This raised the question as to why women were
not moved onto the automated machines instead of newly employed men.
Armstrong (1982), studying a similar change, has argued that although the
shift system guaranteed men working on nights, women could have worked
the day shifts. Men cost more money but they were worthwhile because the
company was able to gain higher return on investment by the continuous
working of capital-expensive machines through shift working, so men
replaced the women. However, why could women not work on the day
shifts? Armstrong (1982, pp. 323) provides two explanations. Firstly, men
tired of permanent night shifts asked management for the opportunity to

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work sometimes during daylight, and thus shift rotations started. Secondly,
in order to lesson the chances of being prosecuted under equal work provisions within the Equal Pay Act (1970), employers sought to avoid employing
men and women on the same jobs. In addition to these reasons, women in the
research consistently characterized their jobs as supplementary to their husbands jobs (even in one case where the husband had been unemployed for
over a year), and thus were more reluctant than men to commit themselves to
rotating shifts that would create extra demands on their families than men
were.
On the line, women were almost exclusively working on the manual insertion sections.14 Their direct bosses were usually also female, in contrast to
what Saso (1990, pp. 2016) found in Matsushita Electric in the UK, but similar to what we both found in Japan. Higher level managers and technical
staff were invariably male. In jobs that were dened as semi-skilled, such as
test and reworking (repairing faulty boards), both men and women were
employed. For men this was their rst job or a transfer from a technical job,
but for women this was invariably a promotion from manual insertion. In
contrast to men, this would be the rst experience for these women to be
freed from the control of the conveyor-belt-paced line speed. Other examples
of gendered job demarcations included TV tuning, which tended to be a
womans province, and packing (a job now requiring little physical strength),
mainly undertaken by men.
In all cases outside contractors did the skilled jobs (maintenance of the
automated machines and computers). The other maintenance jobs, because
of the nature of the basic technology, were mainly mechanically based, with
some electrical work. In all cases, these jobs were the preserve of men. Thus,
there were strong patterns of gendered employment and little internal labour
market mobility. What mobility that did exist was also restricted to movement within gendered occupational divisions.
Another way of looking at the jobs in television assembly involves the
itemization of those jobs that are tied to the moving conveyor belt and those
that are not. Of those tied to the track, manual insertion was by far the most
difcult and exhausting work. All the others, especially those off the track,
had rest time. All the off-the-track jobs were tied to the track in some way by
making them service the line, by feeding parts or minimizing down time, but
they were less controlled by line speed. Women generally did jobs which
were more tied to, and consequently more controlled by the line than men,
and were thus were more prone to speed-up or real-time control. Moreover,
these women were much more prone to hand injuries and often talked of aching joints, especially if they did overtime.
Again, there is nothing specically Japanese about this segmentation.
This was in part due to there being little difference in the level of technology used among the plants (although there was some variation in the

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GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

organization of machines), but mainly because there was little need for the
Japanese to upset social norms of gendered demarcation on the shopoor.
Moreover, because the jobs women do in these plants are integral to the production process, their labour cannot be seen as peripheral to the labour process of television assembly. Further, the pattern of gendering in the factories
is similar in the European and the Japanese cases, but the variation among
the Japanese cases is due to the different labour market context of each individual factory.

Gendered denitions of skill

As stated previously, 60 per cent of direct workers in all the cases were
women, of which most worked on unskilled manual insertion assembly
lines. Men in unions and male managers, however, initially dened skills,
although there was a degree of justication in some grading, by looking at
the length of time it takes to train a person to perform a task competently.
Using the example of manual insertion, it takes only a few hours to reach line
speed, whereas it takes at least two weeks to become an auto insert machine
minder. Moreover, the range of tasks required for the minder is greater than
for the manual inserter. However, if we study the nature of the manual
inserters job, it is possible to see skills in precision hand movements, concentration and speed of operation, none of which are present to the same
degree in the male jobs. Moreover, whereas companies will pay for the preemployment training of a mans brawn, there is not a similar stance taken for
the learned dexterity of women.
The other skilled jobs include oats (workers capable of doing several
jobs on the line) and re-workers. The oats were skilled because of the work
organization and the human content. People go to the toilet, and have problems or lapses in concentration, and the oats were skilled at in-lling in for
all the different so-called unskilled work on their section to cover for such
contingencies. The re-workers must know how to mend complex boards and
understand the logic of the boards (the connections and parts) so that they
needed a conceptual understanding of the function of the boards. The work
was manually dexterous and highly skilled, although it was not recognized
as such in the plants.
In contrast to the proponents of Japanization, in this research it was found
that there appeared to be little need to develop exible work organization
patterns to achieve JIT management, or design work around technological
advancement. Rather, with some geo-historical variations, there is a great
deal of similarity between consumer electronics assembly wherever it is
undertaken, as Mitter (1986) and Saso (1990) found. Saso (1990), for example,
compared Matsushita and NEC factories in Japan and Matsushita in Wales
and NEC in Ireland, and found great similarities in the organization of
work among the three countries. The basis of this work organization is not
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fundamentally different from the European case or from previous studies of

electronics work, such as that investigated by Cavendish (1982) and Pollert
(1981).

A gendered labour process

While the limited empirical evidence provided here repeats well-established
gender research, few have examined gender in the light of Japanese production strategies, except at its periphery. I use periphery here in two senses:
rstly, in terms of integration of analysis with mainstream Japanization
debate, and secondly in terms of the theoretical analysis of the position of
women in Japanese employment-related studies.
Within the labour process of each case plant, women were disadvantaged
relative to their male counterparts on the shopoor at a material level. Jobs
were designed in such a way as to take advantage of womens place in the
labour market so that manual assembly was womens work and working
with machines was largely mens work. Male jobs accrued overtime and shift
premium opportunities, within a context of stable employment patterns.
Women, though gaining overtime, also took up signicant numbers of
casual and part-time jobs. The numbers of non-regular women employees
depended on managerial requirements, indicating a degree of substitutability and casualized employment patterns for all women in the plants. Contingent upon this differentiation were the denitions of what constituted
skill: womens dexterity was treated as a natural feminine trait, whereas male
machine minding was a learned skill that needed training and higher
payment.
Moreover, the experience of the labour process was also gendered, so that
working-class women in the plants talked in ways similar to those in studies
of ten years previous (Beechey, 1982; Pollert, 1981). A young woman in Jp1
expressed her wish to stay here until I marry and then Ill leave to have children and never come back and another talking of the management said,
They are distant during the day but irt with the young girls at the bar in the
evening. They ignore you unless you have a short skirt on. Women recognized their alienated position within capitalism, just as male interviewees
did, but in addition they were conscious of, and even agreed to, their subordinated position in relation to men within the workplace. This subordination
was expressed through a belief that their major role in life was dened within
the home. One woman interviewed along with two male colleagues working
on the semi-skilled (and usually male preserve of) auto-insertion machines
expressed this as follows:
[M]y husband is only home at weekend and my children are grown up, but
we all have huge mortgages. Its not as bad for me as for Bill and Ben,15
because I am not the breadwinner.

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GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

In this context, issues of gender in the plants were not seen as contentious or
problematic by those employed. However, this terrain of consent does not
mean that women were any less union minded or less ready to engage in collective struggle than men and women had initiated strikes or been involved
in collective disputes in all four companies. Moreover, whereas there were
instances of women feeling close bonds with their female supervisors or
work colleagues, (unlike several male interviewees) women felt no loyalty to
their employers. As one woman in her late thirties put it, [T]here is no commitment here. The wasted part of my life is at work. There is no life for free
time. More generally, I came across frequent references in all four companies
of rules being ignored, modied or challenged by both men and women.
Finally, the gendering of work is independent of the nature of ownership,
Japanese or European. Instead, the nature of the local labour market, and particularly the rate of unemployment among men is more important in shaping
gender demarcations. Moreover, the women talked of work stresses in similar ways: the desire to block off the outside world and concentrate on the job
to avoid thinking of the boredom, physical pain and criticisms of faulty work
if their concentration lapsed were expressed by women in both Eur01 and
Jp1. Sometimes this was expressed in the desire to go fast (a Jp1 manual
inserter) or to get to the end of the day without any rejects (a Eur01 manual
inserter).

Conclusion
The gender composition of the workforce is signicant to the study of
Japanese multinationals for two main reasons. Firstly, it may explain the
disparities between ndings that claim Japanization takes place (Garrahan
and Stewart, 1992; Kenney and Florida, 1988) and those who see a minimal
transfer (Abo, 1994) or none (Taylor, 1994 and 1999a) occurring. This may be
due to the focus of research: the advocates of Japanization researched maledominated industries, such as auto assembly, whilst sceptics looked at female
employment in consumer electronics. However, what cannot be understood
from a gendered explanation is the apparent occurrence of Japanization in
consumer electronics found by those such as Delbridge (1998), Oliver and
Wilkinson (1988, 1992).
The second signicance of gender in the study of Japanese multinationals
is the dominance of production regimes that are predicated on near universal
forms of societal gender discrimination. In the face of a lack of overtly new or
unique Japanese management practices in consumer electronics there is a
need to re-evaluate the usefulness of such a broad term as Japanization. Central to this re-evaluation, the notion of Japanization, in its understanding of
differing management policies to maintain control of production (Elger and
Smith, 1994; Stewart, 1998b), will have to address the subordination of
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women workers, the high levels of labour turnover among young women,
sexual politics and the gendered character of skill formations and reafrmations. In other words, the complexities of managing different types of workers, the opportunities and limits to the control of gender divisions and the
relationship between these and the external labour market, may have far
more impact upon both the ability to gain efcient output and the experience
of work of individuals in these plants than do forms of ownership. This, even
if one continued to claim the existence of Japanization, it is less signicant
than gender in understanding the nature and development of the labour
process in modern capitalism, even in Japanese-owned or inuenced
workplaces.
Oliver and Wilkinson (1992, p. 175) argue that Japanese-style manufacturing practices require willing cooperation, not mere compliance, on the part
of the workforce (italics in the original). The argument in this article is that
the social construction and experience of womens work facilitate such cooperation. However, unlike the argument presented by Delbridge (1998, pp.
10928), there is no need for employers to go beyond the power advantage
they already have over women: the means for work intensication and exibility are predicated on womens subordinated position within the labour
process, not on any new and supposedly Japanese management technique.
If there is something that can be called patriarchal capitalism, it is not
uniquely Japanese, but rather the nature of the labour process in certain
industries. The signicant point, however, is that these industries have been
central to the successful development of Japanese capitalism throughout the
20th century.

Notes
1.

Incidentally, I have never seen the reverse, where the international management
gurus have drawn on labour studies literature and ndings.
2. Though increasingly globalized supply chain networks and labour shortages in
Japan meant its signicance declined through the 1990s.
3. This applies not just in the UK but most of the literature in other countries: for
example, see Elger and Smith (1994) or Campbell and Burton (1994).
4. Dohse et al. (1985), Elger and Smith (1994, pp. 3945) and Wood (1991) prefer
this more specic term relating to the spread of practices from one founding
company.
5. Coriats (1993) discussion of the novelty of Japanese management, especially the
development of the polyvalent (multi-skilled, exible) worker, is implicitly as
much a discussion of gendered skills and occupations.
6. Delbridge (1998) undertook detailed ethnographic research of two enterprises,
one of which was a Japanese television assembly plant. While he provides an
interesting and detailed analysis of shopoor politics, work intensication and
so on, gender issues are treated more ambivalently. The majority of his informants and interviewees are women and, like Taylor (1993), he shows clearly

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7.

8.

9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

14.
15.

GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

gendered work assignments on the shopoor. However his analysis of gendered

differences does not extend beyond this.
While it may be possible to argue that the benchmark is irrelevant if Eur01 has
also undergone a process of Japanization, this study shows that Japanization is
not relevant to the European or Japanese cases, and that the main differences are
found between the Japanese cases themselves.
This is a pseudonym for the real name, condentiality being a requirement for
research access being granted. Jp1, Jp2 and Jp3 are the names given to the three
Japanese cases.
Eur01 is the pseudonym for the plant which is European (but not UK) owned.
The study formed the basis of the authors Ph.D., Taylor (1993).
Taylor (2001) also nds that Japanese employers frequently seek, not rural
women workers but more time-disciplined urban workers in China.
Called this because most of the workers on this shift were young mothers who
went to work after their partners arrived home to look after the children.
For the purposes of easing analysis of job types, references to skill (in single
quotation marks) indicate denitions used by the management and unions in the
cases. These people use categories of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled.
Skill, without quotation marks, refers to the authors personal understanding.
Women also undertook the jobs of telephonists and secretaries.
The other interviewees.

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