Search -
The Wages of Affluence : Labor and Management in Postwar Japan
The Wages of Affluence Labor and Management in Postwar Japan Author:Andrew Gordon Andrew Gordon goes to the core of the Japanese enterprise system, the workplace, and reveals a complex history of contest and confrontation. The Japanese model produced a dynamic economy that owed as much to coercion as to happy consensus. The book draws on examples across Japanese industry, but focuses in depth on iron and steelR... more »12;an industry at the center of the country's economic recovery and high-speed growth. Beginning with the Occupation reforms and their influence on the workplace, Gordon shows how working people had to compromise institutions of self-determination in pursuit of economic affluence. He also rebuts hasty predictions that Japanese industrial relations are about to be dramatically transformed in the American free-market image. "This is a major achievement, and confirms Andrew Gordon's place as a truly outstanding scholar of Japanese labor history … Those wishing to understand the post-war remaking of Japan's political economy and society will find much of value in this book." —D. H. Whittaker, Business History "A pathbreaking work … [It] is also an uncommonly timely book, offering historical perspectives on many dimensions of Japan's tortured course in the 1990s … A compelling, illuminating study that deserves the greatest possible readership." —William M. Tsutsui, Monumenta Nipponica« less