Common misconceptions about Japan begin with the notion that it is a “small” country (it's actually lager than Great Britain, Germany or Italy) and end with pronouncements that the Japanese think differently and have different values-they do things differently because that's the way they are.
Steven Reed takes on the task of demystifying Japanese culture and behavior. Through examples that are familiar to an American audience and his own personal encounters with the Japanese, he argues that the apparent oddity of Japanese behavior flows quite naturally from certain objective conditions that are different from those in the United States.
Mystical allegations about national character are less useful for understanding a foreign culture than a close look at specific situations and conditions. Two aspects of the Japanese economy have particularly baffled Americans: that Japanese workers have “permanent employment” and that the Japanese government cooperates with big business. Reed explains these phenomena in common sense terms. He shows how they developed historically, why they continue, and why they helped produce economic growth. He concludes that these practices are not as different from what happens in the United States as they may appear.
This volume constitutes an achievement nowhere duplicated in the three related and critical areas of education, work, and manpower policy. It is the mature production of over a dozen years of research-endeavors by the dean of manpower studies.
In Part I Eli Ginzberg warns against simplistic reliance on prevailing models—economic, psychological, or political. There is only tenuous evidence that enormous expenditure leads to increased social benefit. Rather, we need a more appropriate framework for analyzing human resources, and we ought to be skeptical of a theory that predicates an underlying rationalism for much, if not all, human behavior. Specifically, the author doubts that education can be a substitute for the family, cure poverty or racism, assure an individual a job, give a person a decent income, or control crime and delinquency. What it can do is help students acquire basic skills and thereby help them to live and manage their lives better. The author suggests that we ought to set realistic goals for our schools and insist on accountability.
Part II turns to work and its discontents. Ginzberg examines the changing role of women, the position of blue-collar workers, labor reforms suggested in America and abroad, and the place of the work ethic.
Part III focuses mostly on public employment policy, which can improve the manpower system but can only be a minor instrument for promoting economic growth, redistributing income, shifting consumer demand to public services, or eliminating substandard jobs. The discussion will be eagerly read by those seeking to generate jobs for the unemployed.
From the traditional craft hiring hall to the Web site Monster.com, a multitude of institutions exist to facilitate the matching of workers with firms. The diversity of such Labor Market Intermediaries (LMIs) encompasses criminal records providers, public employment offices, labor unions, temporary help agencies, and centralized medical residency matches. Studies of Labor Market Intermediation analyzes how these third-party actors intercede where workers and firms meet, thereby aiding, impeding, and, in some cases, exploiting the matching process.
By building a conceptual foundation for analyzing the roles that these understudied economic actors serve in the labor market, this volume develops both a qualitative and quantitative sense of their significance to market operation and worker welfare. Cross-national in scope, Studies of Labor Market Intermediation is distinctive in coalescing research on a set of market institutions that are typically treated as isolated entities, thus setting a research agenda for analyzing the changing shape of employment in an era of rapid globalization and technological change.
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