Corporate Restructuring: Converging World Pattern or Societally Specific Embeddedness?

Abstract

Recently the term “corporate restructuring’ has been used to signify a series of strategies to relieve corporate cost burdens. In the American context, corporate restructuring has been synonymous with widespread layoffs and worker terminations as a prevailing strategy. Japanese and German firms, in contrast, use alternative employment adjustment measures with worker termination used as a last resort. Close examination indicates Japanese corporations exhibit organizing principles based on an elaborate sequence of employment adjustment responses to prolonged recession. Further, this article identifies the institutional relations that permit Japanese firms to resist terminating regular employees as a response to recession. Finally, we contend that societal accounting conventions mediate these institutional configurations and employment adjustments to economic recession. These Japanese organizing principles are not universal but represent a societal accounting scheme sustained by overlapping and crosscutting corporate, government, and social institutions.

A Clash of Capitalisms: Foreign Shareholders and Corporate Restructuring in 1990s Japan

“…Strong norms against downsizing persisted throughout the postwar era (Usui and Colignon 1996). Both management and labor acknowledged that permanent employment was one cornerstone of the rapid and stable growth of the Japanese economy, a belief that found support in the research of academics seeking to explain the "Japanese miracle" (Aoki 1990;Dore 1973).…”

‘My Brilliant Career’? New Organizational Forms and Changing Managerial Careers in Japan, the UK, and USA

“…Authors have discussed widely the emergence of new organizational boundaries arising out of volume reductions and vertical disintegration, notably through sectoral case studies (Batt, 1996; Budros, 1999; Ezzamel et al., 2004; Farrell and Morris, 2012; Littler and Innes, 2004; MacDuffie, 1996; Scott et al., 1996). Although Japanese firms appear to be more reluctant downsizers, Usui and Colignon (1996), Ahmadjian and Robinson (2001), and McCann et al. (2010) have nevertheless reported widespread headcount reductions among large firms from the 1990s onwards, with both managers and blue‐collar workers being affected.…”

Flexibility in Japanese internal labour markets: The introduction of performance-related pay

“…Both factors have proven highly relevant in the case of Japanese employment practices. Compliance with lifetime employment has, for instance, been crucial in recruiting first-class employees (Usui & Colignon, 1996). Moreover, the relevance of institutional interlock is illustrated by the discussion of the internal labour market as a complement to the organisation of work in the previous section.…”