3 - Competing models for understanding work in Japan

Summary

Toward an appreciation of competing models

The sociology of both work and industrial relations is multidisciplinary and multiparadigmatic. Introductory textbooks in those traditions often begin by describing several competing paradigms. Deery, Plowman, and Fisher's Australian Industrial Relations (1981), for example, identifies four distinct approaches to industrial relations: the unity approach, the pluralist approach, the Marxist approach, and the systems approach. In writings about work in Japan the delineations are slightly different, as indicated in the preceding chapter, but at least four major frameworks stand out. Although a single paradigm seldom covers all aspects of work, taken together a fairly comprehensive grasp of the major issues is attained. This volume presents four perspectives, and then looks at the contributions of four major writers on work in Japan.

The conflict approach

In the early 1900s some Japanese came to be interested in socialism and other ideologies that focused on social inequality and advocated social change to alter the relations of production. Peasant uprisings and other disturbances in pre-Meiji Japan occurred sporadically and were easily put down by a very centralized system that controlled the instruments of repression. New ideologies in Europe, including Marxism, presented Japanese dissidents with a new and more systematic vocabulary for expressing concerns about inequality. Anarchism attracted a following, and journalists exposed horrific working conditions and other inequities. The spread of democratic socialism and the formation of the Japan Communist Party in 1921 further emboldened those holding such views.