A recent increase in temporary employment is mainly related to corporative strategy to cope with growing uncertainty and to cut costs by using “undervalued” labor force. In the long run, however, the strategy might have a negative impact on incentives for employers, human capital accumulation, and innovations within firms. Employers should create various types of regular workers, introduce seniority-based wage and termination payment for temporary workers, and rebuild trusting relationships, all of which leads to internalizing the negative impacts from the growing temporary employment.

The traditional internal labor markets of Japanese firms are characterized by long-term employment, internal skill development, and evaluation and pay systems based on skill development for permanent employees.
However, for the last 20 years, Japanese firms progressively changed their internal labor markets by modifying not only the structure of human resource management of permanent employees but also the structure of boundary of labor markets for permanent and non-permanent employees. As a result, the internal labor markets of Japanese firms have formed several types which were different from the traditional one.
The internal labor markets of Japanese firms are currently in the transition process, and they will shift to an evolutionary structure by combining the limited long-term employment for permanent employees with the segmented non-permanent workers in the future.

This paper examines the dynamics of an intracompany labor market in Japan from a transaction cost approach and attempts to establish the “three-layered labor market model,” consisting of an external, an intermediate, and an internal labor market. The existence of qualitative utilized part-time employees and semi-regular employees in the intermediate labor market helps maintain equilibrium between regular employees and non-regular employees.
It is necessary for management that the employment pattern should be shifted from fixed-term contracts to non-fixed term ones, in case that the three-layered labor market model is positioned in the upper-right corner of the employment boundary, with the firmsʼ high demand on relation-specific investment from employees and the high degree of task uncertainty.

Many researches on Human Resource Management (HRM) have been conducted from the perspective of organizational human competiveness in the past. This research introduces several ideas from such related disciplines as economics and sociology. The research incorporates theoretical models of “flexible cooperation management,” based on “organizational flexibility” and “individual responsible behavior,” as an additional concept in the analysis of HRM. As a result, the research explores the Japanese HRM system from a new theoretical viewpoint.

This paper explores the significance and role of an evaluation that effectively promotes R&D process in the trial-and-error search due to an insufficient causality between a structure and a function. The result of the case study illustrates that deliberate “evaluation scheme”―an existing evaluation concept combined with a new evaluation plan―has screened a number of alternatives at the early stage to help search inexperienced areas, leading to find an optimal solution.

This paper analyzes the effect of marketable technology on corporate profitability by focusing on the economic nature of R&D. The result of the empirical analysis with the largest enterprises in Japanese electric machinery industry as an example demonstrates that the profitability is negatively correlated to the patent dereliction rate. This result indicates that improving the economic nature of R&D is crucial to increasing profitability.

This paper discusses determinative factors on employee satisfaction with an inter-organizational job rotation (“Shukko” or “Tenseki”) from the viewpoint of information exchange. In an inter-organizational job rotation, insufficient amount of information on an employeeʼs abilities and skills as well as that of a new job requirement and organizations is exchanged, which tends to create employee dissatisfaction. However, the job rotation can enhance employee satisfaction by having enough job information and employeeʼs information exchanged. This suggests that the company where an employee previously worked should play an agent role for both the employee and the new company by transmitting each otherʼ s necessary information.