Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (36 page)

To develop my argument, I draw on my ethnographic research in the early 1990s in a corporate office of “May Japan, Limited” (a pseudonym). MJL management had just begun to implement various programs in compliance with the EEOL at a time when a historic corporate restructuring (
risutora
) was looming in response to increasing global competition. Giving an ethnographic account of how gender equity was imagined by managers, working women, and their supervisors at that conjuncture, this chapter presents an analysis of how the original EEOL was translated into concrete programs and practices of gender and labor politics. The Fordist remedy for gender equity as was envisioned in the original EEOL was transformed into a powerful apparatus that prepared women to liberate—and govern—themselves as subjects in a post-Fordist neoliberal political economy.

My ethnographic analysis is guided by Foucault’s concept of “governmentality.” The term
governmentality
refers to a particular political rationality of governing whose power-effects lie in “guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome” (Foucault, 1991: 221; see also Dean 1999; Miller and Rose 1990). What is at issue here is a form of power that
structures
the field of possibilities for an actor, making it easier to come to think of oneself in terms of certain interests and not others and difficult if not impossible to think in practical terms of rational alternatives to defining the self and one’s interests. Foucault’s contribution was to see this political structuring not as the imposition of false consciousness by the powerful on the powerless but as the mundane working out of everyday practical arrangements by which individuals make themselves into subjects of a determinate form and, thus, govern themselves, even if not just as they please. Ultimately, the everyday practical arrangements that interest students of governmentality may have an autonomy and effectivity that counts more than any intention or strategy on the part of the powerful (the state, the ruling class, men). Foucault’s notion of governmentality offers an effective key to understanding neoliberalism in general and to the way the EEOL in fact simply
restructured
gender inequality by showing how the modern dichotomies of freedom and domination, the state and the (market) economy, the personal and the political, and the private and the public are in fact the functions of the way neoliberal governmentality exerts its power (Lemke 2002). Foucault reminds us that freedom and domination are not mutually exclusive and that freedom is the necessary condition for domination, for “power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free” (1983: 221).

Women’s happiness, sense of fulfillment, and aspirations came to be the concern of government agencies, employers, women’s advocates, media commentators, public intellectuals, and informed individual women themselves—all of which constituted a complex public sphere around the issue of women, women’s welfare, gender equity, and the EEOL. Within corporations, management gathered and analyzed information about their women employees. But women workers also constructed knowledge about women workers, even if not as systematized or recognized as the management’s growing archive. In this chapter, I examine the concrete techniques and technologies of improving women’s lives through empowerment programs (Cruikshank 1999) and discuss how women were guided to freely choose a particular relationship to their selves, one that was avowedly based on their welfare.

A framing in terms of governmentality draws our attention to the specific practices and actions directed at women by management at MJL: company surveys, workshops, and task forces that produced a specific (cultural) truth about the MJL female workers. Through these communicative events and modes of knowledge production, the management asks, “What do women
want?”
This, of course, is an incitement to discourse, as Foucault might have said, and a way of encouraging women workers to engage in new forms of participation in the workplace. As much as it is a democratic speech act of inclusion and enfranchisement, the interrogative address sets up female workers as “other” insofar as it is equivalent to management’s saying, “We don’t know what you want because you are not us.” Rather than simply extending inclusion or entitlement to women, management claims that they first must know what women want. The surveys, workshops, and task forces constitute “speech acts” (Austin 1962; Butler 1997), or, more specifically, what I would call “neoliberal speech acts,” prompted by the question of “What do women want?” and thereby hailing women who respond to it by interpellating themselves into the subject position of neoliberalism. Under the framing of neo-liberalism, of course, gender equity cannot be a structural issue but is rather an issue of the ethics and aesthetics of how one conducts one’s relationship to oneself and one’s relationship with others. These communicative events imaginatively take place in an ideal public sphere (Habermas 1989), putatively realizing what Habermas (1979) calls the “ideal speech situation” of modern participatory democracy, where citizens freely, rationally, and truthfully express their opinions and where they fully and equally participate in discussion.

The “felicity condition” of neoliberal speech acts is that those who are hailed by them must be autonomous and free subjects who know and communicate what they want. This in turn gives birth to neoliberal subjects who are capable of taking responsibility for sovereign management of their own best interests. These communicative events
feminized
gender inequality and its correction under the EEOL, transforming the responsible subject from the employer to female workers themselves.

Not unlike Avery Gordon’s (1995: 17) notion of “liberal racism,” which entails the paradox of an “antiracist attitude that coexists with support for racist outcomes,” sexism in the era of neoliberalism would easily escape the liberal-democratic notion of domination and oppression. The original EEOL was not so much ineffective as it became the means of a new mode of subjection of women—to the family, to the corporate employer, and to the nation-state. Sexism no longer needed to resort to the outright exclusion of women but could operate—perhaps even more effectively—by
liberating
women from the older and familiar mode of sexism-by-exclusion. It subjects women by treating them as autonomous individuals and fully integrated corporate
citizens who affirmatively respond to, and imitate the pleas of, aspiring female employees: “We want to be treated not as women, but as individuals (
kojin to shite mite hoshii
).”

Women and Men at May Japan, Limited

May Japan, Limited, first established in 1966, was a midsized subsidiary of a European pharmaceutical and chemical multinational corporation dealing in the production, import and export, sale, and research and development of pharmaceutical and other chemicals with a total of 2,670 employees in Japan as of 1993. This is where I conducted ethnographic research from April 1991 through August 1993. This company de facto no longer exists. By the time I had left the company in fall 1993, it had began to undergo a drastic downsizing with some departments closed down or merged into another company and many full-time male employees forced out of work.

Before the downsizing, MJL had followed its standardized personnel management procedures. Men and women were segregated both vertically and horizontally, an arrangement reinforced by hiring practices and occupational tracking according to gender. Recruitment and hiring were the decisive points where men and women were differentiated and where the EEOL was least effective in facilitating reform. As with most Japanese white-collar organizations in the early 1990s, MJL preferred to hire predominantly men who were new university graduates for the core of the workforce. The EEOL did not prohibit this practice, which was outwardly discriminatory both in intent and in effect. Male recruits were largely baccalaureate graduates, except for those in research and development facilities with master’s or doctoral degrees or those in manufacturing facilities or in some offices and facilities with only high-school diplomas, vocational school certificates, or junior college degrees. Male workers were organized into a larger, rigorously graded age (or seniority) hierarchy in the primary sector in cohorts that were internally relatively egalitarian (education being equal). All male workers were full-time employees except for a handful of contract workers (
shokutaku
) hired to fill specific job assignments, such as warehouse security. Women were recruited mainly as flexible and contingent labor and were consistently found in lower-ranked positions and career grades in the company hierarchy. This meant that they were systematically confined to support, as opposed to
line
(profit-making), functions within the company. All part-time workers were female, making up 22 percent of the female workforce at MJL. The major path of entry into MJL for full-time female workers was through mid-career employment (
chūtosaiyō
), an irregular form of recruitment in contrast to the strict age-based system in which male primary-sector recruits entered the company as a cohort immediately on graduation.

“The Year of the Employee”

After EEOL was first promulgated in 1986, MJL adjusted its pay system to equalize men and women’s base salaries among cohorts with the same education level. This equal-pay system, however, applied only in the first five years of service. After that, the pay system incorporated discrimination based on gender as well as rank, age, occupation, education, and ability. Those in sales positions received sales-based increments, which made up the bulk of their total pay. Because sales jobs were available only for male workers, the salary gender gap inevitably grew, and the new pay system did very little to equalize pay.

In 1990 MJL management rolled out a mission statement, for the first time in its company history, titled “The Guiding Principle.” In addition to articulation of its business goals, its pledge to customers, and its assurance of good citizenship in the community, it showcased the company’s dedication to the welfare of employees in their “MJL life”:

Based on the principle that the employees are the most important asset for the company, MJL will value the individuality of each employee and will endeavor to bring out the best in him or her through well-planned programs. Job assignment and delegation of authority and responsibility will be made in accordance with individual ability and aptitude. MJL will endeavor to provide the employee with a rich and fulfilling MJL life by guaranteeing the fair evaluation of the individual’s job responsibility and performance.

“The Guiding Principle” was followed by the designation of the year 1990 as “The Year of the Employee” (
shain no toshi
). Between 1990 and 1992, a dozen task forces were organized to revisit the existing personnel and benefit
programs,
all of which were meant to provide employees with better working conditions to make their work and private lives more rewarding. The company also implemented new management programs that harnessed white-collar worker initiative and active participation and were meant to implant the employee’s active engagement with the company’s business goals and the big picture.

“The Guiding Principle” and “The Year of the Employee” marked the increasing responsibility given to
all
employees, not just women or those on the production line. For example, in April 1991, the company set up an ad hoc interdivisional office that promoted “total quality improvement” (TQM) and implemented “quality improvement teams” in the workplace. While MJL’s manufacturing plant had adopted TQM several years previously, the new initiative introduced for the first time the ideas of “quality” (
kuoriī
) and “quality improvement” to employees in corporate administration, sales, and research and development. All full-time employees were required to work in small teams, proposing and executing concrete projects to improve office productivity. Twice a year, the Quality Steering Committee selected the best project and widely publicized it within the company. The CEO made a speech to MJL employees in 1991: “We think it important to achieve higher quality in all aspects of company life by each of the employees actively participating in the company objectives and goals and identifying them as their own objectives and goals.” TQM thus facilitated a particular mode of self-governance by making company goals and personal goals mesh—by linking work responsibility to the individual’s project of the self through making a responsible and ethical self that would be accountable to the work process.

The ethical construction of the self was also linked to productivity and efficiency. In June 1991, the company appointed a new task force focusing on employees’ business manners that produced and distributed a brochure to teach the aesthetics and ethics of everyday conduct and sociality, including how to use honorifics and how to bow appropriately according to the relative rank of the person one greets. In February 1992, the company hired a business consulting firm to conduct the first “climate survey” (
kigyō fūdo chōsa
), which purported to identify the company’s culture or the composite of its organizational and psychological characteristics. A lengthy questionnaire specifically tailored for MJL was administered to all the full-time employees, soliciting detailed demographic, personal, and attitudinal information.
The
results and analysis of the survey were reported back to the employees in a video presentation.

From the management’s point of view, as I was told, the quality improvement teams, task forces, and the survey were, together, meant to create a sense of unity as a business organization and thus boost the morale of the workers. It was part of management’s broader effort to comply with EEOL and achieve gender equity. But it is important to ask why such managerial initiatives came to be thought of as necessary in the early 1990s for the first time in the company’s history. These programs—perhaps far beyond their intention of community building and corporate identity making, not to mention increasing worker productivity—occasioned a self-making project in which the employee’s awareness was brought directly to him- or herself and to his or her relationship with others. These self-making techniques were designed to turn the individual worker into an agent who recognizes the self as a project in which he or she must invest, and they encourage the employee to understand his or her labor as a concrete object that he or she can control.