The third sector is stock listed corporations jointly established by local government and private investment.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the financial differences of business performance between the third sector and pure private firms, and the effects of investing ratio upon the performance of the third sector. Based upon the financial data of 178 private firms and 176 third sector which belong eight industries, four fact findings are obtained as follows. 1) There is not clear distinction o financial characteristics between private firms and the third sector. 2) There is not clear relationship between investing ratio and business performance of the third sector. 3) However, third sector with over 25% investing ratio has higher personnel expenses per person. 4) The third sector with higher net equity ratio has higher profitability.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate:(1) to what extent the Japanese employment practices such as lifetime employment and seniority-based personnel management systems are practiced among small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and (2) how employment practices in SMEs will evolve faced with the present transitional period in the Japanese industrial society. The results, based on sample of 638 employees and 252 employers, revealed that at the present stage both SME employees and employers had the intention to maintain lifetime employment despite the high mobility labor market surrounding SMEs, while they did not give much support to the seniority systems as a whole. Moreover, the results also suggested that the different type of employment practices might be undertaken depending on the firm size, industry and business conditions among SMEs.

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Dispositional approach, a viewpoint which accounts for employees' behavior in the organization by their own personality, is one of the recent trends in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. In the present study, we focused on the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) as a significant scale of measuring disposition and yielded its test characteristics, utilizing Item Response Theory (IRT). Using 395 respondents, questionnaire survey was conducted which included TCI and Anticipatory Organizational Socialization Scale (AOSS). Results showed that there was unique correlation among the sub-scales of TCI and AOSS and that test characteristics of TCI sub-scales gained by IRT analyses were valid but needed further item analysis. Implications for applying TCI to newcomers selection and personnel assessment and future directions were discussed.

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Motivation theorists have a common view that a person is motivated when he or she has some interaction with its environment. Essence of this view is a kind of dichotomous framework, which emphasizes separation between a person and its environment.
The author of this paper proposes another framework of person-environment interaction. Its essence is the importance of the internal model of environment a person has in mind when he or she is motivated through interaction with environment. This new framework is needed particularly when we focus on motivational aspects of people who work with each other as a network organization because they have to work not only autonomously but also collaboratively.
This paper shows a theoretical constructs of the above framework, especially on intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, it reports a case study conducted in a pharmaceutical company to examine the empirical value of the new framework.

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It is generally said that Japanese companies are weak in handling the unexpected events. By the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake of 1996, the main plant of Sumitomo Electronic Industry (SEI) was severely damaged. Most of logistic lines and telecommunication systems were disordered. In spite of the chaos, it successfully managed the disorders of information and created a new information network through the office electronic network system (J-NET). As the result, almost eighty percent of the operating function of SEI was recovered within only two weeks. During this crisis, the board decided to delegate most of its authority of decision making to the front. This paper presents a result of analyzing nearly 320 electronic logs of J-NET in a six week period following the earthquake. Analyses show that employees exchanged their internal models of the actual situation of the company through the J-NET. Moreover, the cohesiveness of the employees became stronger under the crisis.

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