Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (37 page)

TQM/TQC programs, worker responsibility, and the engineering of employee-subjects in the 1990s might not sound new. But what was different about the new government or self-government of workers under discussion here was the incitement of and mobilization of “the individual.” It was the individual
in her or his particularity
who was marked out as a new kind of corporate employee—especially among
women
employees—and this marked the birth of neoliberal corporate governance in Japan.

In the same year, management also announced the upcoming implementation of a new personnel evaluation system that more actively involved and implicated the employee’s self-evaluation (
jiko shinkoku seido
). Unlike the traditional personnel system, in which the supervisor unilaterally evaluated the worker’s job performance, the new system was more of a joint task between the supervisor and the employee, which took into consideration the worker’s self-evaluation and her preferences for job type, promotion, or transfer. Objectives for the next term of performance review were also to be set jointly by the supervisor and the employee, so that the employee came to be personally and reflexively accountable in a way she had not been when assignments were made without consulting employees. One’s
career goals
were thus materialized and subjected to joint management by the supervisor and the employee. Coercion and consent, as Foucault might tell us, here became more difficult to distinguish.

This
self-evaluation system was part a new “ability-based grade system” (
shokunō shikaku seido
), called the Job-Execution-Competence Grade System (JEC Grade System). While the existing personnel management system (job evaluation, salary, and promotion) was based on length of service and seniority—criteria that the company, perhaps grudgingly, recognized could be discriminatory against women—the JEC Grade System was to be based only on ability. Under the new system, jobs were clearly identified and delimited; they were carefully described in terms of concrete tasks and responsibilities; and they were categorized into specific grades. Pay raises and promotions would be based on measurable or otherwise objective performance standards in executing the job as formally described. The JEC Grade System was thus meant to replace the existing age-based system (
nenkōjoretsu
). In conjunction with the self-evaluation system, identifying and describing the job, its skill level, and other details would be done in a “consultative” exchange between the supervisor and the employee.

The management claimed the new participatory job description and employee evaluation systems as its affirmative response to the EEOL. The new personnel systems were intended by management to be the ultimate remedy for any gender inequality that might reside in the workplace. One of the company task forces on gender equality explained:

Due to the increasing shortage of labor and increasing business competition, a high-quality female labor force has been more in demand than ever before. The next ten years will see more women interested in working in corporate offices. There has, however, not yet been established any system in the business world that can provide women with equal opportunities. It is our view that the implementation of the Job-Execution-Competence Grade System, which is to be introduced in the next few years, will enable “equal opportunity” to be guaranteed
automatically
[as an integral part of routine personnel processes] and that the unwritten rule that prescribes gender-based job assignment will eventually become a thing of the past. . . . It is our hope that talented and motivated female employees at MJL will benefit from the JEC-Grade System and will no longer be discouraged by persistent social inequality. [emphasis added]

The presentation of the JEC-Grade System as a remedy for gender inequality clearly illustrates the company’s approach to the goal of equity. Gender and gender discrimination were understood as individual attributes with no
structural
linkage to systemic patriarchy or structural sexism. The JEC system was thus based on the “atom” of an individual worker abstracted from her historical and social context—that is, from concrete social relations of domination and subjection. The company thus managed to avoid introducing a personnel policy that could have as its target what are called “effects” in the affirmative action debate in the United States on the basis of which it could be evaluated.

Such programs inevitably discipline (or “empower”) workers to produce knowledge about themselves and their relation to their work. The climate survey provided them with an “empirical” and “scientific” narrative of who they are and how they are doing. The quality circles and the “business manner” campaign, described in the preceding paragraphs, disciplined them to learn how to monitor themselves as well as their co-workers in terms of job performance. Labor is converted into a concrete object that the individual worker can own and therefore manage by improving, economizing, standardizing, and streamlining. It masks the worker’s profound alienation from her own labor under capitalism by inaugurating her as an entrepreneur who invests in her own skills. The individual worker is, in this mode of governmentality, the owner and agent of her labor. The self thus becomes interchangeable with the objectification of the worker under capitalism: The worker is labor power and vice versa. Work is then one’s self-identity (Miller and Rose 1995).

What Do Women Want? The Equal Opportunity Task Force and Workshops

One of the task forces created in 1990 as part of “The Year of the Employee” campaigns was The Equal Opportunity Task Force (EOTF) (
Kikai kintō tasuku fōsu
), to which five section chiefs (
kachō
) (four men and one woman) from different divisions of the company were appointed. Defining equal opportunity as “job assignment on the basis of ability, potential, and qualification, regardless of gender,” an EOTF official memo states its mission as “realizing the coexistence of male and female employees based on the principle of ‘the right-person-in-the-right-place.’
” The EOTF’s activities and reports in 1990 laid the foundation for the subsequent EEOL-related programs and policy initiatives.

E
QUAL OPPORTUNITY SURVEYS

The EOTF survey was administered to female employees and male managers, and the following results were reported: (1) Little discussion takes place between male superiors and female workers regarding women’s career development. (2) Equality in pay is present only in the first three years of employment. (3) Women have little access to training programs for acquisition of new skills and knowledge. (4) Women have little participation in important meetings and conferences, which results in their receiving limited information in comparison to men. (5) Women are dissatisfied with male managers who view office chores (
zatsuyō
), such as serving tea, answering the phone, and copying, as “women’s work.”

In its report, the EOTF noted a significant gap in response between male managers and female employees to the last item on the survey, “Male managers know how to treat female employees.” While as many as 85 percent of male managers responded in the affirmative, 68 percent of the female employees answered in the negative. This consciousness gap (
ishiki kakusa
) between male managers and female subordinates came to be viewed, in the wake of the survey results and by both male and female employees, as the major source of gender inequality within the company and an urgent problem to be solved to achieve equal opportunity. On this, women and men, workers and managers, could agree.

The EOTF called for a self-enlightenment plan (
jiko keihatsu puran
), in which nonmanagerial employees, both men and women, were to evaluate their own job performance, plan personal career development, and discuss all this with their supervisors for feedback at least once a year. Tellingly, the EOTF’s final recommendation was that male supervisors should learn how to treat female subordinates. With the intent to expand women’s job opportunities, the EOTF concluded:

In the process of repeatedly giving female employees opportunities to expand their job territory, men (superiors) and women (subordinates) should mutually learn how to cooperate to work together. As a result, male superiors must rethink how to utilize the female work force. The accumulation of such experience will eliminate the rift between male superiors and female subordinates.

The six-year incremental plan for equal opportunity drafted by EOTF, which was never realized at MJL, exemplified the extent to which “equal
opportunity”
was contained by the discourse of individual psychology and consciousness:

Phase A (1990): Self-awareness (
jikaku
,
ishiki
);

Phase B (1991): Changing mentality (g
ishiki kaikaku, arainaoshi
);

Phase C (1991–1993): Anticipating chaos and confusion (
konran
);

Phase D (1994–1995): The new consciousness sinks in (
ishiki e no shintō
);

Phase E (1996): Implementation of equal opportunity (
kikaikintō no jitsugen
).

Although some of the EOTF recommendations related to women’s access to training and job assignment, the terms in which all the recommendations were ultimately couched and implemented displaced attention from structural and organizational imperatives to individual—and gendered—psychology. One might say that any suggestion of structural change, or seeking equality of results, was “deradicalized” (see Klare 1978) by translation into the project of changing how individuals think. Locating the truth in the individual’s psychology is, as Rose (1996) argues, a central characteristic of advanced liberalism as a mode of governance in democratic societies.

In 1991, the MJL management appointed a group of five female workers (aged twenty-six to thirty-four) to organize the Working Group for Women (WGW). The management assigned the WGW to work on two major issues: the expansion of women’s job categories and nondiscriminatory hiring. Assuming responsibility for complying with the Equal Opportunity Task Force initiatives, WGW members were to speak both
for
and
to
the MJL female workers and to mediate between the management and female workers as the latter’s interpreters. As one member of the task force put it, the WGW’s role is “to pump up the voices of women from the company’s bottom and to let them be heard by the management.” As did the EOTF, the WGW first administered a survey, but this time to all full-time female employees at MJL. The WGW’s role was then to make a narrative from the numerical data generated by the survey.

The narrative carefully constructed by the WGW with selected survey results gradually emerged to take this story line: Contrary to the stereotype that women plan to quit MJL on marriage, most women take their careers seriously and do not think of their current jobs as temporary, although childbirth and child rearing might complicate their career plans. The real problem
is
that they are not equipped to plan careers systematically, and for this reason many women have never discussed their professional goals with their superiors. Many women are also not satisfied with their current jobs and workplace, and they feel that they cannot grow there (
shigoto wo tōshite seichō suru
).

Based on their identification of the barriers to equal opportunity, the WGW proposed a theme for its task force activities: “Power-Up for MJL Women” (
mezase pawā appu
). It entailed two concrete objectives for its second one-year project:

1. “Consciousness reform” (
ishiki kaikaku
) of female workers by female workers: To think about what we as women should be and what we should do to realize equal opportunity.

2. Proposing ideas to improve the existing benefits program in a way that enables women to balance work and home.

The WGW thus translated equal opportunity from a legal right and entitlement into a rhetoric of individual responsibilities, merit-based privileges, and accountability on the part of female employees in terms of work ethics, self-discipline, and professionalism. The policy issues of expanding job categories for women and nondiscriminatory hiring practices were reframed as personal issues of women’s relations to their work. Taking on themselves the kind of obligations that the state (and the employer) might owe citizens and workers under a welfare-state regime (of the kind the American occupation envisioned in the aftermath of World War II), the WGW ended up presenting equal opportunity as a reward for women taking responsibility on themselves to become ideal gendered citizen-workers in an increasingly commonsensical neoliberal universe. It is not employers or government, but female workers themselves, who are to be held accountable for the realization of equal opportunity. All of this, of course, required a fundamentally new kind of gendered subjectivity.

“Improvement” on the matter of equal opportunity is to be sought at the individual level, in the individual psychological capacity to feel joy, fulfillment, and achievement through one’s job (Donzelot 1991). At the annual managers meeting, the WGW emphasized critical self-examination, urging each woman to trust her own sovereign self: “In order to implement equal opportunity, the most important thing is for all of us, the MJL women, to examine ourselves closely, to assess our own individuality and goals in work,
and
to have our own vision of career and opinions to express.” Regardless of the content and condition of her job, the worker with the appropriately “reformed consciousness” is capable of optimizing her potential and of growing to be a fully responsible adult—equal to men—through performing her job. Before anything else, be it a matter of entitlement or what the law prohibits or prescribes regarding the employer, equal opportunity is a reward for the fully-formed, gendered subject’s ethical and even aesthetic relationship to herself on the one hand and to her work on the other.

In a 1991 in-house newsletter article entitled “The Future Roles of Female Employees in the Changing MJL,” executive management declared it official policy to promote the idea of equal opportunity. Stressing the unique quality of women in having a closer and more natural relationship with “life” (understood to include both the natural and human-made worlds, including modern technology, products, and services), the article celebrates women’s potential to play a critical role in bringing insight to management regarding the company’s latest products. But to achieve this potential, the article continues: