Bozkurt Foreign Employers as Relief Routes (1) (1)

8/4/2019 Bozkurt Foreign Employers as Relief Routes (1) (1)

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/bozkurt-foreign-employers-as-relief-routes-1-1 1/29

Foreign Employers as Relief Routes:

Women, Multinational Corporationsand Managerial Careers in Japan gwao_503 1..29

Ödül Bozkurt*

This article argues that multinational corporations may provide criticalrelief routes for women workers’ progress in managerial careers in

national contexts where their career paths with domestic employers remainblocked by traditional and institutional practices. It illustrates this possi-bility through a study of two women managers at the local head office of aforeign-owned multinational retailer in Japan and their career trajectories.The alternative career paths through foreign employers are not withouttheir contingencies and constraints, and the article identifies the limita-tions of the transformative potential foreign employers could have in thelarger realm of women’s managerial employment in a restrictive contextsuch as Japan. Noting that globalization incorporates different groups ofworkers into the global economy with different costs and rewards, thearticle concludes by calling for a more nuanced understanding of women’semployment with multinationals and for further research that remainscognizant of the multiplicity of experiences in different contexts.

Keywords: multinational corporations, women in management, Japan,globalization

Introduction

This article argues that multinational corporations may provide criticalrelief routes for women workers’ progress in managerial careers in

national contexts where such career paths with domestic employers remain blocked by traditional and institutional practices. It illustrates this possibilitythrough the case study of a foreign-owned multinational retailer in Japan andthe career trajectories of two women managers in the company’s country

headquarters. Their histories highlight the critical turning points where

Address for correspondence: *Organisation, Work and Technology, Lancaster University,Lancaster, LA1 4YX UK: e-mail: [email protected]

Gender, Work and Organization.doi:10.1111/j.1468-0432.2009.00503.x

© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd



professional women’s careers with domestic employees tend to meet a deadend, and how employment with foreign multinationals may provide an alter-native path forward. Such paths, however, are not without their own contin-gencies and constraints. Recognizing these, the article contributes to a more

nuanced understanding of the way in which globalization in general andmultinational corporations in particular inform the employment and hencelife experiences of different groups of women workers at different intersec-tions of the national context and multinational corporate activity.

Despite the massive, growing and varied literature on the rise of multina-tional corporations (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1998; Dicken, 1998; Dunning, 1981,1993; Jensen, 2006) and global workplaces (O’Riain, 2000) on the one hand,and the gendered dimensions of globalization, on the other, there is still adearth of research on women’s employment with multinational corporations,

especially beyond a strategic paradigm. This is particularly true for women inmanagement and on whether multinationals can play a critical role in inform-ing or redefining their career prospects. Despite a long-standing debate onhow multinationals organize their employment practices (Perlmutter, 1969)or how their practices influence national employment systems (Rubery andGrimshaw, 2002) far less is known about how they inform and alter thecareers of different groups of workers, especially of highly skilled women.This article contributes to reframing the discussion by reversing directionfrom how women look from the perspective of the organizational imperatives

of multinationals to how multinationals look from the perspective of womenworkers with respect to their managerial careers. Japan provides a theoretically significant (Burawoy, 2000) context for such

an inquiry. The country’s much-studied national employment system has been typified, in addition to more lauded characteristics, by women’s lowlabour-force participation, their relegation to peripheral, temporary and mar-ginal positions in the workforce and their near-absence from managerialposts. As the coherence and resilience of the Japanese model and its employ-ment system are challenged by demographic and other pressures there may

be an impetus for substantial change in the gendered nature of employmentrelations in Japan. The well-educated female population of the country con-stitute obvious candidates for future workers and managers, compensatingfor the anticipated staffing shortages (Prideaux, 2007).1 Yet there is to date noevidence for the rapid and extensive feminization of Japanese management(Hanai, 2004; Kageyama, 2005). Despite Japanese firms’ increasingly publicclaims to have embraced diversity practices to entice more women workersinto their ranks (Kageyama, 2007; Kyodo News, 2008) the popularity lists ofpreferred employers by professional Japanese women are nearly monopo-

lized by foreign employers (Takahara, 2008). The cases discussed hereprovide insights as to why this may be the case and how employment withforeign multinationals fits into the career paths that professional womennavigate in the Japanese context.

2 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

Volume ** Number ** ** 2010 © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd



Globalization, multinational corporations and womenat work

In 1998 Acker identified globalization as one of the key challenges for studies

of gender and organization and extended an invitation to ‘open up ourthinking about gendered organizing’ (Acker, 1998, p. 202). Noting the verylarge literature on underprivileged women and globalization, she argued that‘once we take a global look, we can see other forms of capitalist organizationin which women are incorporated differently and in which gender has dif-ferent meanings’ (Acker, 1998, p. 202). Acker’s illustration underscored thevariability of relationships inside even one and the same organization, amultinational corporation:

Both gender and class patterns look very different depending upon wherewe locate the boundaries. Moreover, our judgments about the degree ofgender inequality in an organization can be strongly influenced by thesetting of boundaries. For example, the corporate center of Liz Claibornecould be gender integrated while high degrees of gender segregationexisted in the production factories. Globalizing our thinking, thus, takes usoutside the boundaries of what we have called organizations and makes itmore difficult to generalize — even about the gendering of capitalist orga-nizations. (Acker, 1998, p. 203)

To date, the call has only been partially answered. By and large, both popularand academic writing on women, work and multinational corporations havefocused on low or semi-skilled factory employment. In the earlier phase ofglobalization debates the neutral or positive tones of some discussions of thefemale workforce employed by multinationals in manufacturing echoedmodernization theory. Sassen (1988) argued that employment in foreign-owned factories in countries with low labour costs led to the ‘westernizationof women’ (Sassen, 1988, p. 114), and deemed this a welcome process save for

the ‘cultural distancing between the women and their communities of origin’(Sassen, 1988, p.118). By contrast, her contemporary, Aihwa Ong’s criticalstudy of Japanese corporations in Malaysia underscored how management’sdefinition of labour was both gendered and racialized, construing semi-skilled operations as ‘biologically suited to “the oriental girl,” ’ and requiringMalay workers of peasant backgrounds to adopt the appropriately ‘femininetraits’ (Ong, 1987, p. 152). In contemporary treatments of globalization, mul-tinational corporations are often held up to intense scrutiny for taking advan-tage of the nimble fingered manual labour of docile female workforces in

low-wage areas of the world, if not directly, then through their expansivenetworks of relationships with subcontractors (Cravey, 1998; Freeman, 2000;Elias, 2005, 2007; Kung, 1994; Mills, 2003; Pun, 2005; Salzinger, 2003). Elias,for example, argues that ‘the promotion of masculinist managerialism in

WOMEN, MULTINATIONALS AND MANAGERIAL CAREERS IN JAPAN 3

© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Volume ** Number ** ** 2010



global systems of production’ in fact very much ‘depends on the constructionof low-waged, controllable, feminized employment’ questioning the progres-siveness of multinational corporations (Elias, 2007, p. 7). Caraway (2007), inher study of the integration of Indonesian manufacturing in global markets,

notes that ‘foreign capital has the potential to alter national gender practices’(2007, p. 159), in the case of assembly-line work, often in the form of increasedfeminization to raise productivity (pp. 104–31). Such critical accounts offer acorrective to the self-promotional corporate branding activities by multina-tionals themselves, who frequently evoke female workforces in modernworkplaces as a core element of their effort to establish their credentials forcorporate social responsibility.

Much empirical attention has also been paid to women workers at theopposite end of the career hierarchy in multinationals; female managers. But

this body of work is heavily biased in line with the hierarchy of national statesin the global order, with an almost exclusive focus on women in the advancedwestern economies. Despite academic, political and strategic calls for change,the number of women in management remains low across all countries(Adler, 2002; Wirth, 2001) and the difficulties women experience in trying tofollow managerial careers persistent (Blair-Loy, 2003) even in the context ofadvanced capitalist countries. The multinationalization of major corporationscomplicates women’s managerial careers further through the demand forperpetual mobility and the importance of overseas appointments, into which

women’s recruitment has progressed at a ‘glacial’ pace (Tung, 2004, p. 243;PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2001; GMAC, 2003) Women are still often impli-cated in expatriation as trailing spouses (Kupka and Cathro, 2007), but sinceAdler’s early inquiry about women’s presence, success and motivations ininternational assignments (Adler, 1984a, 1984b, 1984c) the sub-field hasgrown into an enormous research area (Harris, 2006).2 While such researchposes important questions, it remains limited in the treatment of home andhost country locations as homogeneous totalities and a highly static andessentializing approach to understanding national and local contexts, mimi-

cking the rest of much of the massive scholarship on cross-cultural manage-ment built around Geert Hofstede’s (1980) conception of culture. By andlarge, this body of work has simply ignored local women, focusing on mobilewomen managers in isolation.

More recently, Frenkel (2008) has looked at the case of middle-class, highlyskilled, professional, managerial women workers outside the context ofadvanced capitalist core countries but against the backdrop of globalization.In her study of the negotiation of gender identities between the global andlocal gender orders, she notes how professional women in the Israeli hi-tech

industry resist the global pressures of prescribed, masculine behaviour thatdemands them to be surrogate men by retaining professional roles that aregendered in different ways. They ‘manage to create a limited space in whichto manoeuver their doing of gender and their self-classification’ (Frenkel,





2008, p. 371), by pointedly using work–life balance practices to aligntheir work lives with the traditional local perceptions of femininity andmotherhood.

While this is an important contribution in the way it incorporates under-

studied professional women into the debate on women, work and globaliza-tion, it is difficult to understand why traditional Israeli perceptions ofmotherhood and femininity should be any less a source of pressure andconstraint than global ones. This article agrees with Frenkel in that transna-tional social spaces (Pries, 2001; Morgan et al., 2003) at the intersection of theglobal and the local deserve investigation precisely because they carry thepotential to be spaces of negotiation of gendered professional roles, but dis-agrees with her in that it does not presuppose it is always in the realm of theglobal or global organizations that elements of pressure and confinement for

women at work are introduced.A provocative counterpoint to the kind of view espoused by Frenkel isoffered by Omvedt, who notes that transposed on a terrain of racist discrimi-nation, for example, the caste discrimination system in India, the self–interest-driven policies of merit of American corporations and their conceptualizationof diversity at the workplace could in fact constitute a progressive force,even if their basis remains problematic in other ways (Omvedt, 2003). Acker’sobservation that the organizing processes of ‘globalizing organizations’render the intersectionality between class, race/ethnicity and gender

complex in novel ways (Acker, 2006, p. 130) is informative here. Indeed, the‘inequality regimes’ (Acker, 2006, pp. 10–11) of affluent countries and devel-oping, less affluent countries stand to be altered in different ways through thework of transnational organizations. Insights from the idiosyncratic case of Japan, where gender inequality has proven to be an exceptionally resilientelement of the national inequality regime despite economic advancement, canhelp to fine-tune our understanding of the impact of global corporations onwomen’s employment by capturing a hitherto under-acknowledged instanceof the range of such impact.

Women’s employment and foreign employers in the Japanese context

The Japanese employment system in the post World War II war periodattracted intense attention from the rest of the world, as it was seen to becritical to Japan’s meteoric rise as an economic superpower. As westernscholarship sought the secrets of the Japanese miracle, the constituent ele-

ments of the Japanese model were investigated with great curiosity (Dore,1973, 1989). Lifelong employment, seniority-based pay, teamwork and con-tinuous improvement all became Japan’s conceptual exports to thinkingabout work organization. Attempts to cut-and-paste elements of this to other





contexts and the wisdom of such attempts made Japanization one of the mostimportant debates of the 1970s and 1980s.

Since the end of the 1980s, however, there has been far less talk of the Japanese miracle and far more of the reversal of fortune that led to the

bursting of the Japanese bubble. The lost decade of the 1990s saw the Japaneseeconomy falter and the ‘intense attraction, sense of awe and rather stunnedappreciation’ turned critical (Van Maanen, 2006, p. 281). What had beenlauded as a human resource management model to emulate ‘became a nega-tive model almost overnight’ (2006, p. 281). But a call to say sayanora tosalarymen (The Economist, 2008) may be premature. Some practices may have been abandoned only to ensure the continuity of others, particularly thelifetime employment of male white-collar workers (Morris et al., 2006), whohave been the core group enjoying the privileges of the traditional systems all

along (Matanle, 2003). Such privileged forms of employment have, in fact,only been possible at the expense of women, not only as an unintendedconsequence but as very much a part of the core logic of the model (Taylor,2006).

Indeed, severe gender inequality has long been the highly problematicstaple of Japanese employment practices. Tellingly, Ackers’ invitation to glo- balize our thinking in order to see how ‘gender is involved in different wayseven in capitalist organizations that appear to be very similar’ drew upon the Japanese example, noting the peripheral position of women in the labour

force (1998, p. 203). Facing active discrimination (Lam, 1992) in the labourmarket and ‘exploited as a buffer for economic cycles’ (Renshaw, 1999, p. 3),women in Japan have not only had low rates of labour force participation buthave been deeply peripheralized in employment. At the peak of Japaneseeconomic ascendance, most female employees of large corporations wereoffice ladies whose job was to serve tea to the male managers (Toshiko, 1983),with the often explicit expectation that they would retire upon marriage(Hiroshi, 1982). In 1990 Saso called the position of Japanese women in largecompanies ‘abysmal’ (Saso, 1990, p. 226), observing that ‘egalitarianism does

not extend to Japanese women’ (Saso, 1990, p. 224).Brinton has argued that Japan’s status as a leading world economic powerhas, in fact, systematically depended on the unpaid and under-rewardedlabour of women, both at home, as domestic workers and psychologicalsupport, and at the workplace, as workers in low-paying jobs with little or noserious career prospects (Brinton, 1993). Graham’s (2003) account of her ownexperience working for a large Japanese financial corporation a decade latershows that even women’s jobs with large, global Japanese companies con-tinue to be overwhelmingly in the less secure, lower prestige and lower pay

job categories. In this case, of those women who started out in the samecategory as men, from which one could advance to management, almost allhad quit within 2 years of being hired (2003, pp. 37–43). If women have fared badly at the Japanese workplace in general, they have fared even worse in





managerial careers. In 1999 women constituted around 40 per cent of theworkforce in Japan but less than 10 per cent of managers (Renshaw, 1999).This grants the country the dubious distinction of being ‘arguably exceptionalamong advanced industrial countries in the attitudinal and institutional con-

straints it imposes on its own women managers’ (Volkmar and Westbrook,2005, p. 465).Seeing this as an increasingly important problem, a series of governments

have attempted to remedy it through new legislation. Accordingly, the revi-sion of equal opportunity laws in the mid-1980s aimed to reduce discrimina-tion against women in employment and the Basic Law for a Gender EqualSociety, along with the revision of Labour Standards Law in 1999, purport-edly revamped these efforts. Yet the actual progress made in the time that haselapsed puts the effectiveness of the measures into serious doubt. The per-

centage of women in the overall labour force has risen from 33.06 in 1970 to40 in 2000 (Web Japan, 2008), but the nature and quality of women’s jobsremain hugely inferior in comparison with that of men.

A Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare survey found that although theproportion of women managers increased from 4.1 per cent to 6.7 per cent between 1992 and 2005, the respective proportions for women in junior,middle and senior management were 11.5 per cent, 5.3 per cent and 2.8 percent (as cited in Benson et al., 2007, p. 899). These figures may suggest apromise for substantial change as the cohorts of younger women stay and

move up in the workforce, especially if, as some commentators have argued,an increasing number of women are eager to break with the traditional Japanese ideology of ‘good wife, wise mother’ that leads them to withdrawfrom the labour market and to the home after marriage and motherhood(Roberts, 1994). However, Japan still very much remains a laggard amongadvanced capitalist countries in this respect, ranking at the bottom of the listof female board representation at Fortune Global 200 companies in a survey by the non-profit Corporate Women Directors International (Kageyama,2005).

The very terms of a recent survey on affirmative action reveals the bare-minimum terms of the gender equality debate vividly: 72.1 per cent of com-panies were ‘trying, or going to try, to prohibit male workers from callingwomen workers “our girls” ’, 61 per cent had ‘recently stopped or were goingto stop requiring uniforms only for female workers’; 80.3 per cent were‘trying, or were going to try, to share tasks such as making tea and cleaning’and 61.6 per cent were ‘trying, or were going to try, to teach managers toregard women as useful human assets’ (Japan Institute of Workers’ Evolu-tion, 2002, as reported in Benson et al., 2007, p. 899). Not only has the growth

in the number of women managers over the past decade been less thanintended by the policy initiatives, but the number of companies with a posi-tive action programme for the promotion of women has in fact decreasedfrom 40.6 per cent in 2000 to 21.4 in 2003 (MHLW, 2004). In short, despite





seemingly strong structural forces urging women’s greater participation inmanagement posts, and the increasingly public calls of support by policy-makers, little has changed.

In this context, the practices of foreign employers become particularly

significant for the managerial career aspirations of Japanese women. Notably,foreign employers have been critical in the careers of some the highest profile Japanese women in the corporate world (Kageyama, 2005) and have agrowing reputation for providing preferable working environments forwomen (Takahara, 2008). All the same, foreign multinationals in Japan remainunder-studied, especially as employers. Although much has been written on Japan and multinational corporations, almost all of it has entailed Japanesemultinationals elsewhere (Beechler and Bird, 1999; Bird et al., 1998; Delios andBjörkman, 2000), with negligible research on foreign multinationals in Japan.

In terms of sheer numbers this may be relatively justified, as direct employ-ment by foreign multinationals is not proportionally as high in Japan as inmany other advanced capitalist countries. However, there is evidence sug-gesting that, especially following the changes in the regulatory restrictions forentry in Japan’s service industry (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry[METI], 2008, p. 307), foreign firms’ economic activities in Japan is on theincrease (METI, 2008, p. 10). A Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industrysurvey found that the sales and capital investment of foreign affiliates in Japan ‘marked a record high’ in 2006 (METI, 2008, p. 1). The increase in the

number of workers employed by foreign affiliates was considerable for thisfiscal year, at nearly 6 per cent, but the longer term picture shows a still morestriking rise in employment by foreign employers in the country. The increasefrom around 240,000 employees in 1997 to over 550,000 in 2006 means that, ina decade, employment by foreign firms has grown by around 130 per cent(METI, 2008). Elsewhere, estimates for the numbers employed by foreignmultinationals in Japan are as high as just under one million workers, or alittle over 2 per cent of the country’s workforce (Ono, 2007, p. 269).

The significance of foreign employers in Japan goes beyond the numerical

data, as these organizations also matter as ideal types of a distinctly differenttype of employer with ‘low employment security, high wages, highly indi-vidualistic and autonomous work environment, evaluation and compensation based on output, clearly defined job functions, and gender egalitarian workenvironment’ (Ono, 2007, p. 268). While empirical inquiry into such assertionshas only recently started (Kiyota and Matsuura, 2006), popular representa-tions often portray foreign employers as agents of change, for example, inpushing along mid-career labour markets by ‘poaching staff from Japanesefirms, offering attractive benefits and better prospects for promotion on

merit’ (The Economist, 2007, p. 2). Nevertheless, large Japanese corporationscontinue to be the most desirable employees among graduates in annualsurveys, and those who do take up employment with foreign firms retainsomething of an exotic aura, depicted either as a group of ‘maverick Japanese’





or those who ‘either have misplaced loyalties or could not cope with the Japanese environment’ (Kang, 1990, p. 126, as reported in Ono, 2007, p. 275).

However, ‘a notable example of this’ is highly skilled women working forforeign employers (Ono, 2007, p. 275). The notion of this serendipitous fit is

not new. In 1988 Lansing and Ready pointed at it as a prescription for foreignemployers’ recruitment problems in Japan. Foreign employers could remedythe difficulty they experienced in hiring male Japanese workers by activelypursuing women, because the local employers were ‘reluctant to hire themeven if they may be better qualified than male graduates,’ and left a ‘largeuntapped pool of well-qualified people who may be willing to forego tradi-tional prejudices about foreign firms’ (Lansing and Ready, 1988, p. 112). Thesubsequent decades have, if anything, made qualified Japanese women aneven more widely and immediately recognized source of staff for foreign

employers. The available statistical evidence on foreign employers’ employ-ment of women managers supports this general impression and suggests thatthey are ahead of their Japanese counterparts in this area. The Japan Instituteof Labour found that the proportion of women among managers in foreignaffiliated companies in Japan was as high as 17 per cent, with almost a quarterof the companies having 20 per cent or more female management (JapanInstitute of Labour, 2001).

Although there are no direct data comparing the proportion of women inmanagement roles between foreign-owned or foreign-affiliated and domestic

Japanese employers, a survey in 2005 by the Japan Institute for Labour Policyand Training provides an informative picture at the aggregate level.3 Thesurvey finds that the average percentage of women managers in foreignemployers was 7.7. Comparing this with the figures attained from the 2003Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare survey of domestic private sectorcompanies, where the corresponding figure was 5.8 per cent, the authorsconclude that ‘a higher proportion of managers are women in foreign-affiliated companies than in Japanese companies’ (Japan Institute for LabourPolicy and Training, 2007, p. 11). Notably, the highest proportion of women in

managerial positions was found to be in branches of foreign companies at 12per cent. The survey also finds that the greater the foreign equity, the greaterthe number of new staff were hired in mid-career (JILPT, 2007, p. 13), whichsuggests that foreign employers provide more frequent opportunities forcareer moves between organizations, something that qualified women aremore likely to do, compared with their male counterparts, who more oftenenjoy lifetime employment (Lundberg, 2006; Ono, 2007).

It is worth noting that the disadvantaged position of women in fact con-stitutes a central theme in most early and contemporary writing on Japanese

multinational corporations abroad (Ong, 1987; Saso, 1990; Taylor, 2006; Wong,2005). It is therefore not surprising that recent research finds that manyqualified women in Japan do not share the general reluctance, especiallyoutside the core metropolitan areas, of Japanese graduates to work for foreign





employers and in fact would like to work for them (Lundberg, 2006, p. 11).Women employees themselves tend to rate foreign employers as being morecommitted and more competent than their local peers in pursuing diversitypolicies in general and gender equality in particular. A survey by the non-

profit organization Global Enhancement of Women’s Executive Leadership(GEWEL), carried out with 1178 male and female managers of foreign anddomestic employers in Japan, found a significantly greater commitment toand promotion of diversity and inclusion practices, gender being a corecomponent, in foreign companies compared with their domestic counter-parts. For example, while 19.5 per cent of managers in foreign employersconsidered their commitment to these issues was ‘very high,’ the correspond-ing number for those in Japanese companies was 4.6 per cent (GEWEL, 2008,p. 18).

The GEWEL survey repeats the long-standing tradition in the Japanesecontext of tying calls for the promotion of gender equality in management to business performance outcomes, noting the difference between managers inforeign and domestic firms in this regard (GEWEL, 2008, p. 18). The genericstrategic call for the involvement of greater numbers of women in manage-ment; that is, that women can be a valuable resource that is relatively easy(and, often cost effective) to bring into the corporate organization, has been acore theme in governmental inquiries into gender equality in employment aswell (METI Study Group on Gender Equality, 2003). A concern stemming

from women’s career paths and progress, rather than addressing organiza-tional dilemmas, reverses the direction of this thinking. Instead of what Japanese women can provide to foreign employers, questions can be raisedabout what foreign employers offer highly skilled women in Japan, and withwhat caveats. This article attempts to do that, and to provide some prelimi-nary answers.

The case of RetailJapan — research setting and methodology

This article builds its proposals on the case of RetailJapan4 and the careers oftwo women managers at the company’s headquarters. RetailJapan is thecountry’s fourth largest retailer employing nearly 50,000 workers in its port-folio of nearly 400 stores comprising supermarkets, shopping centres anddepartment stores. RetailJapan was a fully domestic corporation until 2002,when a leading US-based multinational retailer acquired a minority stake inthe company and formed a joint venture. Three years later the multinational became a majority stakeholder and by the end of 2007 it owned 95 per cent of

RetailJapan, making it the largest and most significant foreign player in thenotoriously tough Japanese retailing sector.In 2006 foreign companies in retail accounted for only about 4 per cent of

the total workforce employed by foreign employers in Japan, but the sector





also saw the greatest rate of increase in the number of employees of all firms,with a whopping 33.3 per cent rise (to 45,000) in one year alone (METI, 2006,p. 19). While it is still a limited field of foreign employment, retailing istherefore an area where the growth of this practice is most striking. The entry

or attempted entry of a number of foreign-owned multinationals into Japanese retailing after the 1990s, following first the relaxation, then theelimination of the Japanese Large Scale Retail Law in 2000 (Aoyama andSchwarz, 2006, p. 286) is widely seen as a major element in the transformationof the sector. The overall impact of opening up the sector to outside inves-tors is far from determined (Matsuura and Motohashi, 2005), but withRetailJapan, now the sector includes a major foreign employer.

RetailJapan was initially approached as part of a research project about thediffusion of employment practices in multinational retailers, following an

extensive study of the retailer owned by the same group in the UK. Themonth-long study included interviews with four high-ranked managers atthe company headquarters (three of whom were interviewed over two ses-sions), the training manager in charge of the national management trainingprogramme, the consultants delivering the training programme and the mostrecent returnee from the international management development programmein the USA. As such, the interviewees included managers across the span ofmanagerial ranks, from those among the top dozen or so decision-makers inthe organization to relatively junior managers in the first decade of their

post-university careers. Only one interviewee was an expatriate; all the otherswere Japanese locals. The inclusion of multiple actors in the study allowed foran understanding of the recent changes in and the strategy of the organiza-tion from multiple perspectives. The data collection also involved observa-tions at the management training sessions as a formal guest and duringunobtrusive visits to six different stores in various locations in the Tokyoregion.

Women in management was not a central part of the initial inquiry but,rather, it was a theme that emerged very quickly and saliently in the field,

voluntarily brought up by all the informants on repeated occasions. The HRmanager and executive vice president of the company, a repatriate who hadreturned to Japan after 20 years with a Japanese multinational in the USA,emphasized the presence of women in executive positions at the companyheadquarters as among the most important differences between RetailJapanand its domestic counterparts, as well as a being distinguishing feature offoreign employers in general, without being asked about the topic. Anothervice president, a Canadian expatriate, discussed gender roles at work as themost striking and important cultural difference that he had had to adapt to,

but interpreted the presence of professional female colleagues at RetailJapan’shead office as the beginning of a fundamental change in Japanese employ-ment that was, in his opinion, to spread rapidly in the near future. The recentreturnee of the global management development programme in the USA





listed gender roles as being among the most significant differences in hiswork experience between the Japanese and US contexts, talking about hisfemale colleagues in the training programme, including a colleague fromMexico with whom he subsequently managed a store in Texas. The women in

managerial posts in the headquarters of the company, with high levels ofvisibility, authority and decision-making power were therefore very much aproud element in the presentation of self (Goffman, 1959) by RetailJapan andits managers, both male and female and both local and foreign, in their effortsto distinguish the company from its domestic competitors.

RetailJapan’s figures of women in management seem to support theseanecdotal claims. In fact, gender became a category used to keep track ofnumbers of managerial workers at various ranks only in 2007, as part of a newinitiative under foreign ownership. The targeted initiative for promoting

women across all managerial ranks showed significant changes by the end of2008. For the only managerial category for which figures were available in 2006,the very top level of management had only one female member among the 14managers at the level of senior vice president or above, while this numberincreased to three as the group shrank to 11 by 2008, meaning that theproportion of women in RetailJapan’s top level management went from 7.1 percent to 27.3 per cent. The real numbers remained small for these highest levelmanagement posts, but the proportionate gains across all categories, takentogether, does strongly support RetailJapan’s public claim that their pro-

gramme on the development of female colleagues has at least got off to asuccessful start. Following the establishment of a formal council (comprised ofseven female employees across various ranks) for managing the female mana-gerial development programme in 2008, the proportion of women at the vicepresident level has gone up from 16 per cent to 20 per cent, those at the seniordirector level from 2 per cent to 7 per cent, and at the manager level from 11 to14 per cent. The single category in which their efforts most clearly failed was atthe store manager level, at which only four out of the 393 posts were filled bywomen by the end of 2008.

Policies around succession planning and talent management also appear tohave made a significant difference in the inclusion of women. The proportionof female successors identified for positions at the level of director, althoughstill seen as less than satisfactory, increased in the intended direction, from 6.9per cent to 8.5 per cent over the previous two years. Those deemed to havehigh potential for posts ranging from non-managerial staff to vice presidentwent from 8.3 per cent to 19.5 per cent over the same period. Although thesingle highest percentage of women in any group was among non-managerialstaff, underscoring the fact that the most promise shown by women seemed

to be at the relatively low ranks of the organizational hierarchy, given the verylow starting points this also retains the possibility of greater numbers ofwomen eligible for selection across the full range of managerial jobs in thefuture.





The two women whose career histories are analysed here, Mariko and Aki,were at the time of research, the Vice President of General Merchandising andthe Director of Human Development, respectively. As vice president, Marikowas one of two women, out of a total of 12 managers in posts at a similar level,

with only 12 others in the next category up the hierarchy, and as such amongthe very top decision-makers of the company. Aki was one of six femalemanagers at the director level, out of a total of 85.

These two high-ranking women managers were exceptional not only because of the country location but also in terms of the sector where theyworked. Retail employment is notoriously gendered around the world, as‘retailing is dominated by women and managed by men’ (Howe et al., 1992, p.192). On the one hand, the traditional nature of Japanese retailing, with itsdeeply embedded local ties with mostly small, traditional suppliers and its

massive reliance on women workers for shop-floor services makes it an evenmore unlikely site for managerial career prospects for women. On the otherhand, as compared with some other sectors, the retail sector in Japan hashosted some of the most visible efforts to promote women’s managerialcareers. For example, one of the two case studies that Yuasa (2008) presents inher very recent discussion of initiatives to promote women’s managerialcareers in the country is based on a regional supermarket chain (Yuasa, 2008,pp. 82–84). The case study company, Max, was the recipient of an award fromthe Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2004 for its achievement in

increasing its recruitment of female university graduates and its ‘acceleratedgender-equal placements’. This exemplary domestic retailer’s track recordwith promoting women’s participation in management is useful for puttingRetailJapan’s initiatives in context, even though exactly comparable data fortheir activities is not available. While Max boasted its greatest level of success(up to 40 per cent) in promoting women workers in the stores to shop sectionmanager level, RetailJapan’s performance in this area was not available forreview. However, it is worth noting that in Max, too, women store managerswere extremely rare — in fact, the number had dropped from only two in 2000

to zero by 2004, in the midst of the concerted effort for gender equality.RetailJapan’s poor figures for female store managers at worst reflect thecompany’s failure to do any better than was possible for an outstandingdomestic counterpart. What highlights the role that RetailJapan — and byextrapolation, large foreign employers — can play in transforming the careeralternatives for women in management in the retailing sector is the concertedeffort at the organization’s headquarters. While Max’s gender equality drivesaw only ‘three junior managers and two middle managers’ at the headoffice, arguably the organizational location where the most significant

decision-making powers are concentrated, the review above of RetailJapan’sappointments, particularly after the inclusion initiatives, suggest that theopportunities provided by this large multinational for women to pursuemanagerial careers were both proportionally higher than is typical in





Aki graduated from university in 1987 with a degree in sociology andMariko in 1993 with a degree in economics. They both went to reputableuniversities in Tokyo, although not to those widely regarded as the mostelite in the notoriously stratified pecking order of Japanese universities,

degrees from which determine success well beyond graduation (Ono, 2001;Wakabayashi and Graen, 1984) Aki attended a university that is well-knownfor its strength in the social sciences, but was not in its most prestigiousprogramme. Mariko attended a private university in the Tokyo region, a typeof higher education institution that is generally seen to be less desirable forable students than national universities and at which tuition costs more(Akabayashi, 2006), which suggests relative affluence on part of her family. Asfemale university students they were even more exceptional among theircohorts than women would be today, as female participation in tertiary edu-

cation in Japan has gone up from 23 per cent in 1991 to 54 per cent in 2006(UNESCO, 2006), and the job market for women was even more precarious atthe time they sought jobs. The economic downturn had further impaired thealready low chances of female employment — only three-quarters of femaleuniversity graduates were able to secure any kind of employment in 1993(Renshaw, 1999) and nearly all of these would have been part-time. Sharing thepredicament of blocked access to the top tiers of the Japanese graduate jobmarket, they took two alternative directions. Mariko chose to enter the labourmarket where she could, at the lower to middle end of the prestige range, with

a domestic retailer, while Aki chose to bypass it temporarily by exiting Japanaltogether.The aggregate picture was and continues to be biased against women with

university education well before graduation. Firstly, the prestige and statusdifference between science versus non-science programmes and secondly, aperhaps even more decisive difference between elite versus non-elite highereducation institutions (Ishida, 1993) mean that a far greater number of menthan women hold the types of diploma that are sought after by the mostdesirable employers. Despite increased numbers of women in higher educa-

tion, this imbalance has not fundamentally changed over time. Approachinggraduation, Aki and Mariko’s peers targeted jobs in high-status sectors, par-ticularly with large, well-established Japanese corporations. Finding a job was becoming exceedingly competitive. Mariko originally wanted to become a journalist, a high-prestige job in Japan, and applied to over a dozen employ-ers. She landed multiple interviews with newspapers and even televisionstations, some of which had famous women fronting their public images. Yetnone of these led to actual offers. The odds would have been mountainouslystacked against her: even a decade later women held only 7.5 per cent of all

positions in newspaper companies, only 1.4 per cent of these as reporters,while for private broadcasting companies the corresponding numbers were18.5 per cent and 0.4 per cent (Renshaw, 1999). Foreign employers were veryfew and hardly visible to new graduates. Some foreign multinationals such as





IBM or Apple had a certain cachet as employers due to their popularity asconsumer brands, but they were still very new and were regarded as idio-syncratic, niche employers. Aki claimed that even these few exceptions losttheir lustre at the time she was to enter the job market, since ‘after the bubble

economy the students became (even) more conservative’. Not only were jobswith the highly desirable large Japanese companies difficult to get, Aki com-mented; ‘a female [was] just there for’ but could only complete her commentnon-verbally, with a shrug.

Aki consequently felt the ‘need to distinguish herself’ from the rest of thelarge number of highly qualified graduates and decided to pursue a master’sdegree in media and communications in California. She believed that theoverseas experience and English proficiency in particular could be instru-mental in helping her to acquire such distinction. Upon completion of her

master’s degree, she was pleasantly surprised to find the US job market farmore open to highly qualified young women than she had felt it had been in Japan, and she was immediately able to secure a ‘challenging job’ with a majorglobal consultancy firm. So satisfied she was with the post that she stayed onfor an unplanned four years. The global scope of the work carried out by thisemployer eventually allowed her to arrange her first foray back into Japanthrough a project assignment. While this appointment provided an opportu-nity to Aki to reweigh her options in Japan, it also helped her realize thatthe number of foreign firms and the number of jobs with these firms had

increased, promising a viable plan to return. Her overseas experience,coupled with her understanding of the Japanese context and employmentpractices, had not necessarily led her back to the bigger Japanese employersas she very initially anticipated, but rather, had made her a highly desirablecandidate for numerous foreign employers. She quickly took up a post witha multinational human resources consultancy. Foreign employers not onlygave Aki the chance to first test drive and then transfer her career back to Japan, they also provided her further job opportunities. She worked for aUK-based mobile telecommunications multinational for 3 years until its take-

over by a domestic firm, and a major US-based online retailer for anotherthree, prior to RetailJapan. Contacts made in each job and the social networksestablished among the relatively small workforce of foreign employers in Japan proved pivotal in each of these further career moves.

Her gender was central to Aki’s account of building her career aroundforeign employers. She strongly preferred them over Japanese firms becausein her experience they ‘do not have discrimination’ and ‘can provide betteropportunities for [us] females’. Foreign employers are also attractive forfinancial reasons but, contrary to popular impressions, not because of higher

salaries. Rather, they are financially more desirable because ‘women arenot disadvantaged in terms of pay’. That foreign employers do not emphasizeand reward seniority in the rigid way their domestic counterparts dofurther redresses the gender imbalance in managerial careers, with positive





consequencesforwomenmanagers,whoareclusteredinyoungercohorts.Akiconsequently remained hesitant about prospects of career advancement withtraditional big Japanese firms since, even if they publicly talked about theirefforts for increased numbers of women managers, as a human resources

manager she had noted that there were ‘hardly any Japanese female execu-tives’ in their ranks.While Aki had the financial means to suspend her entry into the Japanese

job market by a sojourn overseas, Mariko, graduating in 1987, had felt strongpressure that ‘she must begin to earn a living’. After her repeated attempts tofind a job in journalism failed, she took up a job with RetailJapan, a fullydomestic company at the time, because she simply ‘needed some kind ofinsurance to get a job’. This was not the field she really wanted to work in, andthe rewards in the sector were inferior to those in fields like finance or

engineering — but she simply had to settle. She claimed that the retailer‘seemed like an equalization between men and women’, a stance that appearscounterintuitive, given the highly local nature of the business and the visiblymale-manager dominated nature of retail work in stores in Japan. WhatMariko meant was, not being as high-powered or high-prestige as othersectors like manufacturing or finance, for men with comparable backgroundsto hers retailing was not nearly as attractive. In other words, according toMariko, she could at least secure a job in retailing because the competitionwith men was not as fierce as in other sectors.

Like all university graduate new hires, Mariko spent her first year with theretailer working at a store before being moved to the head office. But althoughthe move sounds as if it might have involved gaining greater responsibility, itactually meant being assigned to a project about new store launches whereMariko’s work was largely clerical rather than managerial. She had beenworkinginaseriesofsimilarpostswithoutasignificantchangeinherstatusforalmost a decade when she felt that she should ‘continue to add to her creden-tials’, and registered in a private business school in Tokyo for a postgraduatedegree in management. She did receive some support from her employer

financially and interms oftime off for this,but wasgivennoclear indication thatgaining a further degree would translate into career advancement.Although Mariko felt that she had ‘learned a lot’ with RetailJapan, it was

also clear to her that her advancement opportunities were severely limitedand she felt she had to go outside her employing organization to further hercredentials and facilitate her career progress. Her effort to push the bound-aries of her career development by enrolling in a postgraduate degree did notprovide advancement opportunities with her employer at the time, but didindirectly open up an unforeseen avenue of progress. Through one of her

instructors, she was contacted by a foreign employer for the first time. Thiswas a major French supermarket chain that started operations in Japan in 2000and the first foreign retailer to make the attempt. Setting up multiple green-field sites starting in the Tokyo region, the company needed to recruit and





train staff for all positions from scratch. In Mariko’s case, the retailer initiallysought to find staff proficient in English, especially for managerial head-officeroles, but since the traditional retailing sector in Japan would not typicallyhave attracted people with this ability there simply were not enough people

to meet their needs. She attributed the fact that she, too, was approacheddespite her ‘not so good English’ at the time as a result of the foreign retailer’surgent need for experienced staff who ‘knew the business’, especially the wayit was done in the famously lucrative but notoriously difficult Japanese retail-ing sector. Mariko had over ten years of experience in the sector at this pointand hence the local knowledge that was so acutely required by businesses inthis highly context-sensitive sector.

Mariko at first explained her choice to leave RetailJapan and take upemployment with an untested foreign employer by referring to her person-

ality — as being ‘the kind’ of person who ‘likes to try different things’. Inunpacking this notion it was revealed that she meant various things by ‘dif-ferent things’. Firstly, this was an opportunity to work for a much biggercompany; the French retailer was the second largest in the world in its sector,while her first employer was ‘fifth in Japan and so 40th or 50th in the world’.Mariko was eager to find out ‘what makes them the number 2’. Secondly, itallowed her to make a critical move from back office administration to mer-chandising, which was generally agreed to be necessary to be deemed trulyknowledgeable about retailing. Although role rotation in RetailJapan was

supposed to make managers multi-skilled, as a woman she had been shut outof this rotation and could not count on being included in the future. In otherwords, the ‘different things’ she wanted to try out with the foreign employerwere nothing short of a relief route towards a managerial role. The prospectsseemed all concrete enough, as the all-expatriate senior management teamwere all on fixed-term appointments and were to leave Japan within a fewyears’ time, when they handed over responsibility to locals recruits.

In fact, Mariko ended up spending only two years with the Frenchretailer, but she experienced a radical growth in her managerial responsi-

bilities and hence of experience in this comparatively short time. In her view,‘the most important’ thing she picked up from working with a foreignemployer was ‘a kind of communication with a different culture and differ-ent background’. But she also had an opportunity to hone her skills in‘different ways of doing things’ in the more technical sense, such as specifictechniques in retailing commonplace in the western European context butnew to Japan. She also found an opportunity to expand her network to beyond her university friends and colleagues at RetailJapan, since theFrench retailer had recruited others from other domestic retailers and from

various foreign multinationals. As with Aki, this initial experience with aforeign employer placed Mariko in a small group of Japanese managers ableto work in ‘foreign’ environments, opening opportunities for furtheremployment demanding such flexibility.





In a telling twist, her mid-career re-routing through the French retailerpaved the way for Mariko’s return to RetailJapan at a far higher rank than shewould have thought possible during her previous tenure there. After theUS-based multinational acquired 30 per cent of the company, the new,

American-Japanese management sought new staff to implement changes andMariko was personally invited back by the company president. Leaving oneemployer and being asked to come back was a ‘really rare case’, but so werethe circumstances. Once back, Mariko was put on the committee that teasedout the details of the joint venture, her hard-earned ease in speaking Englishevery day at work and, even more importantly, her competence in working ina multinational environment proving to be crucial assets. As the foreignownership of RetailJapan increased, Mariko’s opportunities for career devel-opment further broadened in scope. Although she was too senior and con-

siderably older than the intended target group of a global managementdevelopment programme in the US headquarters of the company, the expa-triate team made the case that her career development as a woman had beenhindered in Japan and she was sent on the year-long diploma programme.During that year Mariko attended a range of classes with other participantsfrom various other countries and worked for a buyer. She picked up a newrange of technical skills and was able to establish a network of global contactsat the head office and across multiple country locations. She got to know awide range of suppliers and buyers and felt she gained much ‘visibility’ in the

company at large. On all grounds, the overseas appointment has consolidatedMariko’s managerial credentials further. It has also allowed her to develop anunderstanding that ‘as a woman she can work as a top level manager’, and, just as significantly, globally. At the time of the interview she remained keento eventually take up an overseas appointment in other country sites of thecompany’s global network, and was confident about her chances to achievethis career goal.

Limited relief — contingencies and constraints

For Mariko and Aki foreign employers in Japan have provided critical oppor-tunities for pursuing managerial careers. Both women talked about foreignemployers’ ‘different approach to women workers’ and their ‘attention togender equality’ and diversity at the workplace as having opened up avenuesthat simply were not available to them with domestic employers. While thesenarratives and the first-hand reporting of real-life experiences can easily be

held up to demonstrate the best that foreign employers have to offer incontexts that are confining for women’s career development, implicit in themare also hints at the constraints over and the limitations of the relief routes inquestion.





Firstly, the alternative paths offered to women by foreign employers in Japan remain severely restricted in terms of size. This limitation is twofold.On the one hand, as long as foreign employers continue to be dwarfed bydomestic organizations, they cannot provide nearly sufficient volumes of

relief routes for the radically increased number of women with universitydegrees. On the other hand, as small employers they tend to undertake alimited scope of activities that nowhere near matches the depth and rangeof occupational development opportunities found in large Japanese compa-nies. Thus, although Aki was able to secure a string of jobs with foreignemployers with relative ease, finding jobs in the specific fields of expertiseshe wanted to focus on always remained a challenge. Sometimes, like Retail- Japan, foreign employers are part of something bigger than their Japaneserivals. Mariko talked about having been driven to the ‘risky decision’ to

take up work with the French retailer by the prospects of gaining experi-ence with the world’s second largest retailer, for example. After its acqui-sition by the American retailer, RetailJapan may not be bigger than itscompetitors on Japanese soil, but through its organizational network, itreaches far wider. If Mariko can in fact follow up on her current careerambitions of taking on overseas appointments, a career development sonotoriously unavailable to women in Japanese corporations, the restrictionsof being located in Japan may well be amply superseded by the opportu-nities for mobility in the transnational social space of the corporation.

However, even if such opportunities for overseas appointments becomeavailable, they will do so with the well-researched complications these par-ticularly involve for women. In Japan, both the size of typical foreignemployer and the job market with foreign employers as a whole remain buta fraction of those with the large domestic players.

A second and interrelated reason why managerial careers with foreignemployers may not entirely compensate for being shut out of comparablecareers with domestic firms has to do with the relative standing of foreignmultinationals and their tenuous prestige in this context. Here, even the most

highly esteemed foreign multinationals are, despite cries of change, oftenweak or weaker players in the recruitment game. ‘Lack of visibility, prolif-eration of short-term employment contracts, the higher likelihood of exit, andthe aggressive poaching behavior’ associated with foreign employers discour-age candidates from seeking employment with them (Ono, 2007, p. 270), letalone preferring it to working for domestic corporations. Twenty years onafter Lansing and Ready’s business advice, foreign employers still largelyrecruit women because they are at a disadvantage in the local job market —for them, women’s underrepresentation in managerial careers is serendipi-

tous. Consequently, despite foreign employers’ popularity among women,rankings, including the ones Aki annually reviews in trying to chart Retail- Japan’s recruitment strategies, continue to show that ‘Japanese graduateswant to work for Japanese companies’. As long as large domestic companies





remain the most respected and sought-after employers, the pairing up ofhighly educated women with foreign multinationals could amount to simplythe elective affinity of outsiders. If women take up these jobs primarily because they have ‘less to lose’ (Iwao, 1993, p. 169), they do so at their own

risk. Such risks are high. Mariko hesitated about taking up the job with theFrench retailer as she thought it involved greater job insecurity and, indeed,the retailer ended its operations and left Japan within 5 years of its arrival. Atleast one of Aki’s moves between foreign employers was driven by a suddenchange in the ownership of her company. In Aki’s words, foreign firms do notface ‘the same levels of public scrutiny’ for keeping their work and workersin Japan and are not as ‘socially responsible’. While experience with oneforeign employer seems to facilitate subsequent employment with otherforeign firms, it may make it increasingly difficult to secure employment with

domestic employers, whose commitment to lifelong employment, despite allthe talk of change and transformation, so far remains robust (Morris et al.,2006).

Thirdly, the role foreign employers can play in truly redefining prospects ofwomen’s greater participation in managerial careers is ultimately tied to theway in which their practices interact with and influence practices in otherinstitutional spheres (Acker, 1998, p. 196). There is a rapid transformation ofthe notion in Japan that ‘the ordained role of women is to put marriage andfamily before all other obligations’(Lansing and Ready, 1988, p. 124) and

Mariko, for example, might have found it far less possible to take on anoverseas post if she were not single and without care responsibilities. But thefact that managerial careers are compatible with being single, rather thanmotherhood, in terms of supporting institutions in the country remains prob-lematic for both foreign employer and local employee alike. Furthermore,however well appreciated the alternative paths provided by foreign employ-ers may be, their overall impact will remain limited if the sorts of practicesthat make them desirable do not spread to their domestic counterparts and business partners. Not only is it questionable whether foreign employers’

practices remain distinct from domestic ones in the long term (Edwards et al.,2007; Ferner, 1997; Kostova and Roth, 2002, among many others), but it isfurther doubtful that Japanese corporations would turn to foreign multina-tionals in any large scale in search of examples of ‘best practice’ in an areawhere local practices remain so entrenched.

Finally, the real litmus test for whether foreign employers in general andRetailJapan in particular can provide viable, sustainable and popular reliefroutes for a significant number of women involves how they organize thechannels of upward mobility in their own ranks. It may be a step forward

to recruit highly skilled women to management posts at the head office andprovide channels of career progress there and beyond. Yet, particularly inthe retailing sector in Japan, any claims to gender equalization would haveto tackle the highly gendered segregation of career tracks at the store level





and the grossly disproportionate rewards of employment, including careerprogress, for male and female workers over the life course. RetailJapan pub-licly claims both the ambition to fundamentally reorganize the way its inter-nal labour market works, and the plan to make it possible, for the first time,

to transition from shop-floor jobs to managerial roles. Yet the actual imple-mentation of such ambitions is yet to be carried out, and the chain only hasabout five or six women among its nearly 400 store managers. Mariko andAki, having offered a gendered reading of their own career histories, alsodiscussed the current arrangement as in definite need of change. But untilthis happens, they risk remaining among the privileged few members of avastly underprivileged group of women in Japanese retailing.

These are, furthermore, merely the contingencies and constraints for whatkind of relief routes RetailJapan can provide to women in Japan. Women in

this specific inequality regime (Acker, 2006) experience gender disadvantagesin employment, although in variable forms and to variable extent dependingon their class position, but they are, all the same, located in a national eco-nomic context that is integrated into the global economy in a privilegedmode. What multinational employers provide women through employmentin nations that constitute the weaker links of global capitalism may not, asmuch aforementioned research has shown, be similar routes of relief. Yet amore complete and refined understanding of the gendered outcomes of mul-tinationals’ employment practices around the world requires that we consider

the full range of contexts.

Conclusion

This article has focused on the career histories of two women managers at thehead office of a foreign-owned multinational retailer in Japan to argue thatforeign employers can become surrogate relief routes in contexts wherewomen’s career paths into managerial employment remain otherwise

blocked. It has also identified the contingencies in and constraints on theoverall transformative potential that foreign employers could have in thelarger realm of women’s managerial employment in such restrictive environ-ments. The cases of Aki and Mariko are just one — or, rather, two — of themany possible configurations at the intersection of multinational corpora-tions, women and employment. They illustrate how, in certain contexts andunder certain conditions, the relationship between multinational corporationsand certain groups of women workers can lead to certain types of experi-ences. As illustrations, they help in reframing discussion and generating

further questions, rather than providing definitive answers.As important as it is to counter hyper-celebratory rhetoric on globalizationin general and multinational corporations in particular by pointing out thelimitations of the opportunities they offer women workers, it is also essential





to recognize the multiplicity of experiences potentially accessible to womenwho work for multinational corporations. Multinationals engage with localcontexts in too many varied ways to make universal, standardized statementsabout the relationship between them and the women employed by them

credible. Through its illustrative empirical study looking at cases of highlyskilled, managerial women outside the advanced capitalist western context,this article has challenged the possibility of such universally applicable state-ments regarding the nature, quality and the reality of employment opportu-nities that multinational corporations offer female workers.

Globalization is a multi-stranded set of processes rather than a unitary oneand entails highly variable outcomes for different groups of workers.Research on multinationals, women and work in the era of ‘the global shift’(Dicken, 1998) would do best to move forward with the insight that global-

ization incorporates different groups into the global economy with differentcosts and rewards (Hoogvelt, 1997). This recognition goes beyond claimingthat a transnational capitalist class (Sklair, 1995, 1998, 2001) in command ofmultinational corporations gains at the expense of others (Robinson, 2004;Robinson and Harris, 2000). Rather, multinational corporations and theirentanglement in the world of employment have variable impacts on differentconstituencies in global labour markets. Women as such do not constitute onesingle homogenous constituency and, following Acker (1998) nor do even thewomen who are employed by one and the same multinational organization.

Different forms of employment with multinational corporations, in differentlocations, against the backdrop of different national institutions and employ-ment systems, within the context of different sectors and the gendered inter-section of these spheres, yield different outcomes. All merit scholarlyattention for both empirical and theoretical reasons.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Alexander Mohr for his comments on anearlier version of this article and Professor Jeremy Clegg for his generoussupport that enabled fieldwork in Japan.

Notes

1. This is particularly true in the Japanese case, since migration, the other majorsource other advanced capitalist economies have relied on to compensate for

labour shortages, is exceptionally complicated in the country that has negligibleexperience with it and where the nation remains very homogenous.

2. Extensive streams of research on women and overseas assignments include theirsuccess rates as compared to men (Adler, 1987; Caliguiri and Cascio, 1998;





Caliguiri and Tung, 1999), individual motivations (Hill and Tillery, 1992; Loweet al., 1999); family issues, especially in terms of work–life balance (Fukuda andChu, 1994; Harvey, 1985) or dual career couples (Harvey and Wiese, 1998; Linehan,2002; Punnett, 1997); reception by host country nationals (Adler, 1987; Napier andTaylor, 2002) and the organizational processes that result in low numbers ofwomen expatriates (Varma and Stroh, 2001).

3. The survey used data from 272 Japanese branches of foreign companies andcompanies with at least one-third foreign capitalization. The 100 per cent foreign-owned companies constituted the majority among respondents at 61.3 per cent.

4. All names of companies and individuals have been changed to ensure anonymity.

References

Acker, J. (1998) The future of gender and organizations: connections and boundaries.Gender Work & Organization, 5,4, 195–206.

Acker, J. (2006) Class Questions, Feminist Answers. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Adler, N. (1984a) Women in international management: where are they? California

Management Review, 26,4, 78–98.Adler, N. (1984b) Expecting international success: female managers overseas. Columbia

Journal of World Business,19,3, 79–85.Adler, N. (1984c) Women do not want international careers, and other myths about

international management. Organizational Dynamics, 13,2, 66–79.Adler, N. (1987) Pacific basin managers: a gaijin, not a woman. Human Resource

Management, 26,2, 169–92.Adler, N. (2002) Global managers: no longer men alone. International Journal of HumanResource Management,13,5, 743–60.

Akabayashi, H. (2006) Private universities and government policy in Japan, Interna-tional Higher Education. No: 42. Available online at http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/Number42/p17_Akabayashi.htm last accessed 30November 2009.

Aoyama, Y. and Schwarz, G. (2006) The myth of Wal-Martization: retail globalizationand local competition in Japan and Germany. In Brunn, S.D. (ed.) Wal-Mart World:The World’s Biggest Corporation in the Global Economy, pp. 275–92. New York andLondon: Routledge.

Bartlett, C.A. and Ghoshal, S. (1998) Managing across Borders: The Transnational Solu-tion. 2nd edn. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Beechler, S. and Bird, A. (1999) Japanese Multinationals Abroad: Individual and Organi-zational Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Benson, J., Yuasa, M. and Debroux, P. (2007) The prospect of gender diversity in Japanese employment. The International Journal of Human Resource Management,18,5, 890–907.

Bertaux, D. and Thompson, P. (1997) Pathways to Social Class. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Bird, A., Taylor, S. and Beechler, S. (1998) A typology of international human resource

management in Japanese multinational corporations: organizational implications. Human Resource Management, 37,2, 159–72.

Blair-Loy, M. (2003) Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives.Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

Brinton, M.C. (1993) Women and the Economic Miracle: Gender and Work in Postwar Japan.Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.





Burawoy, M. (2000). Introduction. In Burawoy, M., Blum, J.A., George, S., Gille, Z.,Gowan, T., Haney, L., Klawiter, M., Lopez, S.H., O’Riain, S. and Thayer, M. (eds)Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World,pp. 1–7. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Caliguiri, P.M. and Cascio, W.F. (1998) Can we send her there: maximizing the success

of western women on global assignments. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 33,4, 394–416.

Caliguiri, P.M. and Tung, R.L. (1999) Comparing the success of male and femaleexpatriates from a US-based multinational company. International Journal of HumanResource Management, 10,5, 763–82.

Caraway, T.L. (2007) Assembling Women: The Feminization of Global Manufacturing.Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.

Cravey, A.J. (1998) Women and Work in Mexico’s Maquiladoras. Lanham, M.D: Rowman& Littlefield.

Delios, A. and Björkman, I. (2000) Expatriate staffing in foreign subsidiaries of Japanese multinational corporations in the PRC and the United States. Interna-

tional Journal of Human Resource Management, 11,2, 278–93.Dicken, P. (1998) Global Shift: Transforming the World Economy. New York and London:

Guildford Press.Dore, R. (1973) British Factory, Japanese Factory. Berkeley, CA: University of California

Press.Dore, R. (1989) How the Japanese Learn to Work. London: Routledge.Dunning, J.H. (1981) International Production and the Multinational Enterprise. London:

Allen and Unwin.Dunning, J.H. (1993) Multinational Enterprises and the Global Economy. Reading, MA:

Addison Wesley.Edwards, T., Colling, T. and Ferner, A. (2007) Conceptual approaches to the transfer of

employment practices in multinational companies: an integrated approach. HumanResource Management Journal, 17,3, 201–17.

Elias, J. (2005) The gendered political economy of control and resistance on the shopfloor of the multinational firm: a case-study from Malaysia. New Political Economy,10,2, 203–22.

Elias, J. (2007) Hegemonic masculinities, the multinational corporation, and the devel-opmental state: constructing gender in ‘progressive’ firms. Men and Masculinities,20,10, 1–17.

Ferner, A. (1997) Country of origin effects and HRM in multinational companies. Human Resource Management Journal, 7,1, 19–37.

Freeman. C. (2000) High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy. Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press.Frenkel, M. (2008) Reprogramming femininity? The construction of gender identities

in the Israeli hi-tech industry between global and local gender orders. Gender, Work& Organization, 15,4, 352–74.

Fukuda, K. and Chu, P. (1994) Wrestling with expatriate family problems: Japaneseexperiences in East Asia. International Studies of Management and Organizations, 24,3,36–47.

GEWEL (2008) Awareness and attitude towards diversity and inclusion amongmiddle managers — research results 2007. Available http://www.gewel.org/e/diversity080722.pdf last accessed 30 November 2009.

GMAC (2003) Global Relocation Trends 2002 Survey Report. Warren, NJ: GMACGlobal Relocation Services (now Brookfield Global Relocation Services), NationalForeign Trade Council, and Society for Human Resource Management GlobalForum.





Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: DoubledayAnchor.

Graham, F. (2003) Inside the Japanese Company. London: Routledge Curzon.Hanai, K. (2004) Lifting women’s job status. The Japan Times Online. 26 July. Available

online http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20040726kh.html at last accessed

30 November 2009.Harris, H. (2006) Issues facing women on international assignments: a review ofthe research. In Stahl, G.K. and Björkman, I. (eds) Handbook of Research in Inter-national Human Resource Management, pp. 265–82. Cheltenham, MA: EdwardElgar.

Harvey, M. (1985) The executive family: an overlooked variable in international assign-ments. Columbia Journal of World Business, 20,1, 84–92.

Harvey, M. and Wiese, D. (1998) Global dual-career couple mentoring: a phase modelapproach. Human Resource Planning, 21,2, 33–48.

Hill, C.J. and Tillery, K.R. (1992) What do male/female perceptions of an international business career suggest about recruitment policies? SAM Advanced Management

Journal, 57,4, 10–14.Hiroshi, T. (1982) Working women in business corporations: the management view-

point. Japan Quarterly, 29,3, 319–23.Hofstede, G. (1980) Culture’s Consequences, International Differences in Work-Related

Values. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.Hoogvelt, A. (1997) Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy

of Development. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Howe, W.S., Couch, D., Ervine, W.C.H., Davidson, F.P., Kirby, D.A. and Sparks, L.

(1992) Retailing Management. London: Macmillan.Ishida, H. (1993) Social Mobility in Contemporary Japan. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Uni-

versity Press.Iwao, S. (1993) The Japanese Women. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training (JILPT) (2007) 2005 Survey results oflabour-management relations, human resource management and working condi-tions in foreign affiliated companies in Japan- JILPT Report 2007 No: 4. Availableonline at http://www.jil.go.jp/english/reports/documents/jilpt-reports/no4.pdflast accessed 29 November 2009.

Japan Institute of Labour (2001) Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare Survey —Survey results of labour-management relations in foreign affiliated companies in

Japan (7th). Available online at http://www.jil.go.jp/english/laborinfo/library/documents/sr_survey1.pdf last accessed 29 November 2009.

Jensen, N.M. (2006) Nation-states and the Multinational Corporation: A PoliticalEconomy of Foreign Direct Investment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Kageyama, Y. (2005) Japan Inc. still makes little room on the board for women. The

Japan Times Online. 13 January. Available online at http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20050113a5.html last accessed 29 November 2009.

Kageyama, Y. (2007) Nissan diversity drive seen as invitation to talented women. The Japan Times Online. 14 July. Available online at http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi- bin/nb20070714a2.html last accessed 29 November 2009.

Kang, T.W. (1990) Gaishi: The Foreign Company in Japan. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle.Kiyota, K. and Matsuura, T. (2006) Employment of MNEs in Japan: New Evidence. RIETI

Discussion Paper Series 06-E-014. Available online at http://www.rieti.go.jp/jp/

publications/dp/06e014.pdf last accessed 23 November 2009.Kostova, T. and Roth, K. (2002) Adoption of an organizational practice by the sub-sidiaries of multinational corporations: institutional and relational effects. Academyof Management Journal, 45,1, 215–33.





Kung, L. (1994) Factory Women in Taiwan. New York: Columbia University Press.Kupka, B. and Cathro, V. (2007) Desperate housewives – social and professional

isolation of German expatriated spouses. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 18,6, 951–68.

Kyodo News (2008) Resona to increase women execs. The Japan Times Online, 5 March.

Available online at http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/nb20080305a5.html lastaccessed 29 November 2009.Lam, A. (1992) Women and Equal Employment Opportunities in Japan. Oxford: Nissan

Institute of Japanese Studies.Lansing, P. and Ready, K. (1988) Hiring women managers in Japan: an alternative for

foreign employers. California Management Review, 30, 3, 112–27.Linehan, M. (2002) Senior female international managers: breaking the glass border.

Women in Management Review, 14,7, 264–72.Lowe, K., Downes M. and Kroek, K. (1999) The impact of gender and location on the

willingness to accept overseas assignments. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 10,2, 223–34.

Lundberg, C. (2006) Job training in Japan: An incentive to increase foreign direct invest-ment? Japan Institute of Labour, Policy and Training (JILPT). Available online athttp://www.jil.go.jp/profile/documents/Lundberg.pdf last accessed 23 Novem-

ber 2009.Matanle, P.C.D. (2003) Japanese Capitalism and Modernity in a Global Era: Re-fabricating

Lifetime Employment Relations. London: Routledge Curzon.Matsuura, T. and Motohashi K. (2005) Market dynamics and productivity in the

Japanese retail industry in the late 1990s. RIETI Discussion Paper Series. Availableonline at http://www.rieti.go.jp/jp/publications/dp/05e001.pdf last accessed 23November 2009.

Mills, M.B. (2003) Gender inequality in the global labour force. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32, 41–62.

Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) Study group on gender equality.(2003) Report of the Study Group on Gender Equality: Women’s Activities andEnterprise Operating Results. Tokyo: METI.

Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) (2006) Main points of the prelimi-nary report on the 2006 basic survey of Japanese business structure and activities(Survey of June 2006). Available online at http://www.meti.go.jp/english/statistics/tyo/kikatu/pdf/h2c1s1ie.pdf last accessed 30 November 2009

Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) (2008) The 41st survey of trends in business activities of foreign affiliates. Available online at http://www.meti.go.

jp/english/statistics/tyo/gaisikei/pdf/h2c200je.pdf last accessed 23 November2009.Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare (MHLW) (2004) Result of 2003 Basic Statistical

Survey on Employment and Management of Women Workers. Available online athttp://www.mhlw.go.jp/houdou/2004/07/h0723-2.html last accessed 29 Novem-

ber 2009.Morgan, M., Kelly, W., Sharpe, D. and Whitley, R. (2003) Global managers and

Japanese multinationals. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 14,3,389–407.

Morris, J., Hassard, J. and McCann, L. (2006) New organizational forms, humanresource management and structural convergence? A study of Japanese organiza-

tions. Organization Studies, 27,10, 1485–511.Napier, N.K. and Taylor, S. (2002) Experiences of women professionals abroad: com-parisons across Japan, China and Turkey. International Journal of Human Resource

Management, 13,5, 837–51.





Omvedt, G. (2003) Mythologies of merit. Available online at http://www.countercurrents.org/dalit-omvedt290803.htm Last accessed 30 November2009.

Ong, A. (1987) Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia .Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Ono, H. (2001) Who goes to college? Features of institutional tracking in Japanesehigher education. American Journal of Education, 109,2, 161–95.Ono, H. (2007) Careers in foreign-owned firms in Japan. American Sociological Review,

72, 267–90.O’Riain, S. (2000) Net-working for a living: Irish software developers in the global

workplace. In Burawoy, M., Blum, J.A., George, S., Gille, Z., Gowan, T., Haney, L.,Klawiter, M., Lopez, S.H., O’Riain, S. and Thayer, M. (eds) Global Ethnography:Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a Postmodern World, pp. 175–202. Berkeleyand Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Perlmutter, H.V. (1969) The tortuous evolution of the multinational corporation (adrama in three acts). Columbia Journal of World Business, January–February, 9–18.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (2001) International Assignments: European Policy and Practice:Key trends 1999/2000. London: PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Prideaux, E. (2007) Major workforce disruptions looming over Japan. The JapanTimes Online. 1 Jan. Available online http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070101a3.html last accessed 29 November 2009.

Pries, L. (2001) The approach of transnational social spaces: responding to new con-figurations of the social and spatial. In Pries, L. (ed.) NewTransnational Social Spaces:International Migration and Transnational Companies in the Early Twenty-FirstCentury, pp. 3–33. London and New York: Routledge.

Pun, N. (2005) Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham,NC: Duke University Press.

Punnett, J.B. (1997) Towards effective management of expatriate spouses. Journal of World Business, 32,3, 243–57.

Renshaw, J.R. (1999) Kimono in the Boardroom: The Invisible Evolution of Japanese Women Managers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Roberts, G.S. (1994) Staying on the Line: Blue-Collar Women in Contemporary Japan.Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Robinson, W.I. (2004) A Theory of Global Capitalism. Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Robinson, W.I. and Harris, J. (2000) Towards a global ruling class? Globalization andthe transnational capitalist class. Science and Society, 64,1, 11–54.

Rubery, J. and Grimshaw, D. (2002) The Organization of Employment: An InternationalPerspective. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Salzinger, L. (2003) Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories.

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Saso, M. (1990) Women in the Japanese Workplace. London: Hilary Shipman.Sassen, S. (1988) The Mobility of Labor and Capital. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Sklair, L. (1995) Sociology of the Global System, 2nd edn. Baltimore, MD: The Johns

Hopkins University Press.Sklair, L. (1998) The transnationalist capitalist class and global capitalism: the case of

the tobacco industry. Political Power and Social Theory, 12, 3–43.

Sklair, L. (2001) The Transnational Capitalist Class. Oxford: Blackwell.Takahara, K. (2008) P&G, IBM most ‘woman-friendly’. The Japan Times Online. April 5.Available online at http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20080405a5.html lastaccessed 29 November 2009.





Taylor, B.W.K. (2006) A feminist critique of Japanization: employment and work inconsumer electronics. Gender Work & Organization, 13,4, 317–37.

The Economist (2007) Still work to be done. 29 November. Available online at http://www.economist.com/node/10169940 last accessed 29 November 2009.

The Economist (2008) Sayanora salaryman. 3 January. Available online at http://

www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10424391 last accessed8 May 2008.Toshiko, F. (1983) Women in the labour force. Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Vol. 8.

261–69.Tung, R. (2004) Female expatriates: the model global manager. Organizational Dyna-

mics, 33,3, 243–53.UNESCO (2006) Education in Japan. Unesco Institute for Statistics in Brief . Available

online at http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/document.aspx?ReportId=121&IF_Language=eng&BR_Country=3920 last accessed 30 November2009.

Van Maanen, J. (2006) Rediscovering Japan: some thoughts on change and continuity

in traditional Japanese careers. Career Development International, 11,4, 280–92.Varma, A. and Stroh, L.K. (2001) Different perspectives on selection for international

assignments: the impact of LMX and gender. Cross-cultural Management, 8,3–4,85–97.

Volkmar, J.A. and Westbrook, K.L. (2005) Does a decade make a difference? A secondlook at western women working in Japan. Women in Management Review, 20,7–8,464–77.

Wakabayashi, M. and Graen, G.B. (1984) The Japanese career progress study: a 7-yearfollow-up. Journal of Applied Psychology, 69,4, 603–14.

Web Japan (2008) Japan fact sheet — women’s issues: changing roles in a changing society .Available online at http://web-japan.org/factsheet/pdf/38WomensIssues.pdf lastaccessed 22 April 2008.

Wirth, L. (2001) Breaking through the Glass Ceiling. Geneva: International Labour Office.Wong, M.M.L. (2005) Subtextual gendering processes: a study of Japanese retail firms

in Hong Kong. Human Relations, 58,2, 249–76.Yuasa, M. (2008) The changing face of women managers in Japan. In Rowley, C. and

Yukongdi, V. (eds) The Changing Face of Women Managers in Asia, pp. 68–95. Londonand New York: Routledge.


Bozkurt Foreign Employers as Relief Routes (1) (1)

Documents

Transcript of Bozkurt Foreign Employers as Relief Routes (1) (1)