Japanese Encounters by Eyal Ben-Ari

Author:Eyal Ben-Ari [Ben-Ari, Eyal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781351680080
Google: 0W5ADwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-11-27T03:32:27+00:00

Part III

Business, bodies and dialogues

Focusing on leisure frames characterizing workplaces, Chapters 7 and 8 chart out the internal dynamics of “free time” activities among co-workers. I place free time in quotation marks since I refer to times off work but during which many informal organizational ties are cultivated and intra-company competition takes place. These chapters may be read as a complement to the excellent studies of organizations that have come out of Japan for the past 40 of so years. In another, perhaps fascinating, way, they also go together with the earlier chapter on preschools describing how (female) caretakers go out for coffee to variously gossip, exchange information about the kindergarten, create workplace solidarity and enjoy themselves.

Of course, there is more here since all of the activities analyzed – drinking, golf, dining or karaoke – allow us to see the intentional uses to which frames are put: for example, they are excellent means for furthering one’s career or participating in office politics. No less important, they all contain potential for conflict management predicated on the internal structure of the events that through their unfolding allow the creation of trust needed to broach contested issues. Indeed, in a way similar to what Allison (1994, 1995) brilliantly shows, the drinking frame at a hostess bar is intentionally created not only to relieve tension, open up workers to each other and build human relations, but also to make individual employees feel valued, appreciated and somehow whole. In Allison’s case, this is done through the staged ritualistic self-confirmation in interactions coded primarily as both gendered and sexual. In addition, given the blurring of business and leisure in Japan, extending the kind of analysis found in these chapters may enable scholars to understand how contemporary companies and businesses are changing with the influx of temporary workers and changes in the labor market.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.