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Tenkin and Career Management in a Changing Japan

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Tenkin, or corporate transfers in the Japanese contexts, is distinctive by its compulsory nature and embeddedness in society. Tenkin is a mandated practice. Workers have little discretion. If workers are dual-career couples with small children, how do they manage such a mandated employment practice? Tenkin and Career Management in a Changing Japan attempts to answer this question through qualitative interviews with human resource department managers in seven large firms and with 46 married, white-collar workers, including six men, and participant observation in several social events. The research uncovered that the culturally normative, gendered nature of tenkin is produced and reproduced by contemporary Japanese firms' capitalists' logic and gendered family assumptions. That said, it also revealed that some firms attempted to advance diversification and inclusion in their workplaces. The dual-career couples are also becoming the actors of tenkin through practices of negotiation in their workplaces and homes. The author discusses that these dual-career couples' lives echo the concept of agency by Sherry Ortner (2006) and argues that for structural change to happen in Japan, the essential concept of care should be brought to the table in the discussion of career management for all workers.
Noriko Fujita is assistant professor in the College for Humanities at Tamagawa University.
Acknowledgments Introduction: Tenkin as the Subject Chapter 1: The Practice Taken for Granted Chapter 2: Development and Changes in the Practice? Chapter 3: Young Workers and Salariiman Chapter 4: Dual-career Couples Living Apart Chapter 5: Dual-career Couples Collaborating Conclusion: Career Management in Contemporary Japan Appendix A: The Firms Interviewed by the Author Appendix B: The Individuals Interviewed by the Author Bibliography About the Author
This is the first thorough study of one of the key practices in the Japanese corporate world. Large companies move their employees through regular, required job transfers, and Fujita, with rich ethnographic interviewing and shrewd analysis, shows its profound effects, especially on women's efforts to balance work demands and life aspirations. A major contribution to Japan studies and business anthropology. -- William Kelly, Yale University
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