a east asian studies, university of sheffield, sheffield, uK; b Department of Japanese studies, national university of singapore, singapore, singapore ABSTRACT This article analyses a new and, by international comparison, distinct recruitment trend -the systematic hiring of foreign fresh university graduates (FFGs) into Japanese multinational enterprises' (MNEs) operations in Japan. Our explorative research, which is based on interviews with HR managers and FFGs, offers three major findings related to international HR development methods. Firstly, the inpatriate literature has identified the roles of foreign (subsidiary) staff as knowledge conduits and boundary-spanners between headquarters and subsidiaries. While such objectives do not drive Japan's FFG hiring trend, we find similar challenges in terms of the absorptive capacities of headquarters. Secondly, following a Varieties-of-Capitalism perspective, we argue that FFG hiring is an institutional answer to the particularities of Japan's employment system. Aiming at internationalizing headquarters from within, it contributes to resolving the internationalization conundrum of Japanese MNEs, but rather than overcoming the existing ethnocentric HR model it accommodates this orientation. Thirdly, we advance the general HR literature by proposing a new framework that addresses the viability of international personnel development methods in dependence of the workforce diversity and distinctiveness of employment practices in headquarters. We locate FFG hiring, inpatriation and self-initiated assignments within this framework.
China's economy is emerging rapidly and foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) are playing an important role in this process. MNCs no longer view China just as a place for cheap production, but increasingly as a marketplace. This has led to increased interest in how to manage local white-collar employees and this article addresses this issue with regard to Japanese MNCs. Based on a qualitative exploration of the perceptions of local employees, the article develops a series of proposals in regard to the underlying factors and problems of human resource management (HRM) by Japanese MNCs in China. Local employees describe the management style of Japanese corporations as highly ethnocentric and despite Japanese management having been portrayed as an overall good fit for fastdeveloping economies, local employees voice discontent over several points, ranging from seating arrangements to incentive structures. This situation can be explained by an incomplete transfer of Japanese business practices, the heavy reliance on expatriate managers, and with the presence of multiple modes of competing management styles in the current rapidly developing Chinese economy.
Japan's major companies, aiming to diversify their human resources, have in recent years begun to systematically recruit non-Japanese graduates from universities in Japan, but increasingly also from overseas, for permanent positions in Japan. This article locates this development within the study of migration. Utilizing data from an interview study with brokers, HR departments and young foreign employees, it follows recent calls to look at the meso-level of migration. Looking at brokers in qualified labor migration and positioning them equally in a triangular relationship between employers and migrants, this article contributes to the growing discourse on brokers and migration that has so far focused on low-skilled, often temporary migration from a broker-migrant perspective. Based on the Japanese case, our research makes two contributions to the migration literature. Firstly, we show how following the call to investigate the changing roles of brokers along the stages of initiation, take-off, maturity and decline of a migration trend, does indeed contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of a migration system. Secondly, we demonstrate that brokers play a particularly important role in qualified labor migration and propose that the level of broker engagement depends on the degree of distinctiveness of employment systems.
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