From Employment Security to Managerial Precarity: Japan’s Changing Welfare-Work Nexus and its Impacts on Mid-career Workers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the postwar period, Japanese workers came to symbolize the economic and cultural prosperity of Japan. In return for their hard work, they were rewarded with life-time employment and various fringe benefits. This postwar social contract of "corporate welfarism" minimized the social risks and personal career uncertainties of a fluid labour market. However, nearly 30 years of economic recession and neo-liberal reforms have undermined the postwar model of corporate welfarism. Structural and management reforms have been invoked to reengineer Japan's corporate practices and to "flexibilize" the workforce, thereby "freeing" employees while offloading social risks of economic uncertainties to individual workers. As a result, these Japanese workers are caught between the slippage of the older corporate ideology of corporate welfarism premised on long-term employment, and the rise of the new global ideology of neo-liberalism premised on labour mobility, in the process exposing them to new social risks and conditions of uncertainty. By focusing on mid-career and experienced workers whose expectations of long-term employment were directly affected by restructuring, this article sheds light on the various forms of "precarious employment mechanisms" that have been used to cut personnel costs while avoiding outright dismissal. Drawing from different cases of informants who have been subjected to various forms of restructuring, this article highlights the decoupling of Japan's welfare and employment systems and examines the mechanisms and experiences of "in-house unemployment" for employees in an increasingly hollowed-out corporate welfare society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".