Asian Studies - East Asia - Japan, Japan - International Business, Japanese History - General & Miscellaneous, National Characteristics - Asia

Working for a Japanese company

Name: Working for a Japanese company
Author: Robert M. March
ISBN: 9784770015334

by March, Robert M.

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Overview

Robert March, author of The Japanese Negotiator, now critically examines the Japanese multinational company from the perspective of its non-Japanese employees in the United States, Japan and abroad. Against a background of growing Japanese Investment overseas and simultaneously increasing concern about the qualifications of some Japanese companies as good employers abroad, March examines, through the actual experiences of their foreign employees, how the vastly different ideas of the Japanese about good management practice, corporate culture, harmony in the workplace, interpersonal communication, employment conditions, decision-making power for non-Japanese, and manager-subordinate relationships often lead to many real problems in the workplace, and sometimes escalate into an ultimate polarization between Japanese and non-Japanese personnel. Using the successful approach of his earlier book (which Savvy Magazine called "an indispensable guide to the ins and outs of Japanese commerce"), March uses revealing testimony from foreign employees in Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Asia to show how the Japanese really manage and direct their foreign employees, as well as to expose the roots of tension, misunderstanding, confusion, frustration and antagonism in the multinational Japanese company. A longtime student of Japanese corporate behavior who himself has many years of first-hand experience working for the Japanese in Japan and abroad, March in Working For A Japanese Company presents a comprehensive study of what it is really like to work for the Japanese - and the first guide to evaluating Japanese companies as employers. His skillful use of verbatim interview materials is combined with the interpretive approach of a cultural anthropologist who is completely at home in a business environment. Reading Working for a Japanese Company will transform your assumptions about Japanese companies and Japanese managers themselves. This essential w

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Editorials

David Rouse

There has been a recent spate of books about what it's like to work for a Japanese company. Many of these have ominous-sounding titles like "Invasion of the Salarymen" (Praeger, 1992) or "The Rising Sun on Main Street" (International Information Associates, 1990). March, an Australian management consultant working in Japan, acknowledges cultural differences between East and West and offers suggestions for dealing with those differences in the workplace. His real-life examples, gathered from his 13 years of observing "interpersonal dynamics in the multicultural working environment," are amusing, instructive, and well chosen. March avoids playing to fears and observes that even though the British, Germans, Dutch, and Canadians each invest more in the U.S. and employ more U.S. workers, much less attention and concern have been devoted to their role here. He also covers the problems foreign managers face when assigned to work in Japan and those that Japanese managers face abroad.