Abstract
Social organization in Japanese industry has been charactrized as a lifetime commitment, in which the employee works for one firm throughout his work life. Abegglon indicates that Japanese management and their workers hold a tightly reciprocal set of obligations in which the empolyee will not quit the company for the other industrial employment and the management will assure permanent employment. According to his conclusion Japanese industry is the case in which a traditional social organization can facilitate substantial progress in industrial achievement.
On the other hand, the theory of Max Weber suggests that rationalization is inevitable in the management of modern large scale organization. We are asking whether the present employment practices in Japan do or do not fit the theory of modern social organization. With the introduction of conceptual distinctions between lifetime commitment as role behavior, and two types of commitment to a firm : status enhancement and moral loyalty, we examine data from Japanese national labor statistics in interfirm mobility and data from our own research on employees' turn-over and attitudes to lifetime commitment in two Japanese factories in of a major electric appliance firm and a leading shipbuilding firm in the area of Osaka-Hyogo prefectures.
Our research findings are summarized as follows. National labor statistics show that among Japanese manufacturing establishments of all sizes, the annual separation rete ranged between 26 percent and 31 percent during the peroid 1963-1967. Even in the large firms (over 500 employees) the annual rate ranged between 19 percent and 23 percent during the same period. In addition, there is the cumulative separation rate for a cohort of employees who change firms during their work life. These data indicate there is substantial mobility, not only in-mobility, but also out-mobility, among the Japanese labor force.
Our field research data consisting of interviewing and questionnaire methods reveal 1) that the reciprocity of obligations between the Japanese employee and his company exists, but its symmetry is both less than and different from what Abegglen claims ; 2) employees who stay in one firm (lifetime commitment role behavior) often do so for reasons extraneous to both the status enhancement and moral loyality types of commitment, for example, worthwhileness of job, good human relations, economic security, etc. ; and 3) insofar as employees stay in one firm because they have lifetime commitment norms and values, these are much more likely to be of the status enhancement type than of the moral loyality type. For example, employees who profess lifetime commitment and who perceive others as also committed tend to be male, older, with more seniority, higher pay, rank and job classification all of which can be subsumed under status enhancement reasons.
Abegglen stresses dissimilarities between Japanese and American factory social organization. Our findings on factors making Japanese employees attached to their firms point primarily to socio-economic status enhancement, which is basically the same factor motivating American and Western employees to remain in their firms. We conclude that lifetime commitment behavior in Japanese workers are results of rational selection rather than conforming to traditional values.
