According to this view, Japanese management has unique features: lifetime commitment of workers to the firm, the length-of-service reward system, and enterprise unionism as a partner in the fiim. These features, which one could legitimalely describe as integral elements of Industrial relations, Imply that workers are immobile and committed to their employer’s implicit guarantee of employment throughout their working careers, that wages are determined not by skill but by length of service and age, and that unions are easily controlled arid cooperative with management.
Also Implicit in this image is the notion that Japanese society has some anthropological peculiarities that emphasize homogeneity, groupism, harmony, and a consensual nature of people. In other words, Japanese management and workers are seen as a basically homogenous group of people within an enterprise who cooperate harmoniously as if they were members of the same family.
This stereotype has been criticized by serious industrial relations scholars who have pointed out some facts about the Japanese employment system that It is governed not by traditional culture but by market forces, that there is ample evidence of elements of conflict in Japanese workshops, and that the implicit employment guarantee for older and long-service workers is found more typically in American and European firm than in their Japanese counterparts.
Nevertheless, the stereotype persists in spite of all the empirical criticism, and recently it appears to have gained more popularity among foreigners as well as the Japanese themselves — but with a new connotation. The new implication is that the recent performance of the Japanese economy is ‘proof’ that Japanese-style management is highly conducive to productivity improvements since it effectivity involves and motivates employees to work toward corporate goals by taking advantage of the employees commitment to the firm and their harmonious cooperation within work groups.
Responding to current worries over decreasing productivity in Western countries, some even go so far as to propose that Japanese-style management be adopted as a new management technique.
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