戦後日本の<企業・労働・産業>の諸問題

抄録

After the 2nd World War industrial sociology started to study the social structure and function of the work place as the smallest unit of the enterprise, adopting the so-called human relations approach under the influence of industrial sociology in USA. Since then industrial sociology has enlarged the scope of study from the micro-level to the macro-level, i.e. enterprise organizations, trades unions, industrial relations and the industrial society as a whole.
Since 1955 Japan has exprienced the rapid economic development. It was thought at home and abroad that Japanese enterprises played an important role in the development. Japanese type of management has been long considered as an irrational type of management, compared with European and American management. However, the fact that Japanese management obtained exellent results changed the former viewpoint toward Japanese type of management. There have been a lot of discussions on Japanese type of management. For the time being, Japanese management has been adapted both for the institutional aspects, i.e. labour market, trades unions, governmental policies, culture of the society, and for the cultural patterns inside the organization, i.e. the seniority system, the consensual system of decision-making, the QC-circle activities, etc. However, the main characteristics of Japanse management will change if the fundametal belief toward managemental authority, aging of the personnel structure, internationalizing of the enterprise activities, etc. take place in the future.
Labour problems are relevant to the following sphares : working life and workers' consciousness, labour unions, and industrial relations. Considering working life, the study of quality of working life (QWL), or humanization of labour that commenced in Europe and partly launched into the socialistic countries has been recently worthy of our notice.
Finally there will be an important problem of investigating the impact of the recent technological change on our society. The influences of innovation called ME (mechanical electronics) revolution are found, not only in the sphare of production (factory automation) and office work (office automation), but also in the sphare of sales (using points of sales), mass-communication, administration, education, medical treatment, home (home automation), etc. Thus we will have to study the wide-ranging impact on the society. For that purpose it will be necessary that each discipline within sociology cooperates.