Tenkin and Career Management in a Changing Japan

Download or read book Tenkin and Career Management in a Changing Japan written by Noriko Fujita and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-09-16 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tenkin, or corporate transfers in the Japanese contexts, is a mandated practice. Workers have little discretion. If workers are dual-career couples with small children, how do they manage it? Tenkin and Career Management in a Changing Japan answers this question through qualitative interviews with human resource department managers in large firms and married, white-collar workers, and participant observation in social events. The research uncovered that the culturally normative, gendered nature of tenkin is produced and reproduced by Japanese firms’ capitalists’ logic and gendered family assumptions, while some firms attempted to advance diversification and inclusion, and the dual-career couples are also becoming the actors of tenkin through negotiation. The author discusses these dual-career couples’ agency (Ortner 2006) and argues that for structural change to happen in Japan, the essential concept of care should count in the discussion of career management for all workers.