Multinational work environments challenge the coping capabilities of employees with additional culture-related stressors above and beyond those usually found at the workplace. This paper examines the differential effects of perceived team leader / member similarity, their actual national similarity, and the mutual overlap in personal values on the coping potential of team members in a multinational work team setting, with a special focus on the Japanese context. An analysis of the data provided by 365 dyads of multinational team leaders and members in mixed Japanese/non-Japanese work teams revealed that the coping abilities of team members who shared the leader’s country of origin (surface level national similarity) were not significantly higher than those of team members who came from a different country. Conversely, the actual overlap in personal values endorsed by a team’s leader and each individual team member emerged as a robust predictor for that team member’s coping potential, both directly and indirectly through generalized similarity perceptions. This highlights that in order to understand why some multinational work teams work out in the long run and others do not, an overly strong focus on surface characteristics of their composition (e.g., national or ethnic diversity) may not be an optimal approach. In many cases, the actual determinants may be the perceived and experienced match or mismatch between the deep-level psychological characteristics (e.g., shared personal values) of team members and their leaders.

In Germany and Japan, like in most OECD countries, the equal pay for equal work principle and other regulations related to equal treatment have been strengthened recently through reforms. These have been justified and promoted as measures to address gender wage gaps as well as discriminatory practices regarding non-standard workers. Yet, observers remain sceptical as to whether these reforms will be effective. Previous research has argued that Germany and Japan as “socially conservative welfare states” (Gottfried and O’Reilly 2002) face particular institutional and value-related obstacles for achieving equal treatment in practice. This paper argues that, while these factors remain important, gaps between policy output and persisting inequalities are increasingly the result of a strategically motivated politics of balancing. Policymakers in both countries use existing institutions such as collective bargaining and labour-management consultations to balance conflicting policy goals, i.e. improving equal treatment and maintaining employment flexibility, which crucially relies on differentiated treatment of workers by, for example, distinguishing between standard and non-standard workers. By resorting to strategies of balancing policymakers hope to console both objectives while mitigating the political risks of controversial structural reform.

Unser Newsletter Nummer 57 ist erschienen. In dieser Ausgabe finden Sie folgende Themen:

DIJ Social Science Study Group: Politik und Ministerialbürokratie in Japan: Wendungen in einer turbulenten Beziehung
Arnaud Grivaud, Wissenschaftler am French National Institute of Asian Language and Civilisation (INALCO), sprach im Rahmen einer DIJ Social Science Study Group im Januar über das bedeutende, aber oft auch turbulente Verhältnis zwischen Politikern und Bürokraten in Japan.

China, Japan und der Kampf um ‚Asien‘
Chinas jüngste Wiederentdeckung der Seidenstraße erneuert den Anspruch des sogenannten Reichs der Mitte wieder als solches anerkannt zu werden. Kern dieses letztlich globalen Anspruches ist Chinas Position in Asien.

Der Umzug des Tsukiji-Großmarktes
Der Tsukiji-Großmarkt liegt mitten in Tokyo und ist mit einem Umsatz von 428 Milliarden Yen im Jahr 2017 der größte Markt für Meeresfrüchte weltweit. Seine Thunfischauktionen geben den Weltmarktpreis vor, es werden aber auch Gemüse, Obst, Eier, Hühnerfleisch und verarbeitete Lebensmittel gehandelt. Der Markt existiert seit der Edo-Zeit und befindet sich seit 1935 auf dem heutigen Gelände. Nach jahrzehntelangem politischen Ringen soll er nun endgültig in einen modernen Neubau nach Toyosu verlagert werden.

Inbound Tourismus – Japans neuer Wachstumsmarkt
Japan erlebt seit 2012 einen regelrechten Touristenboom. Mehr als 28 Millionen Touristen besuchten das Land in 2017, viermal so viele wie 2011.

Environmental disasters or other large-scale disruptive events often trigger the emergence of social movements demanding social and/or political change. This study investigates mobilization processes at the meso level of the Japanese anti-nuclear movement after the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami waves on March 11, 2011. To capture such meso level movement dynamics – which so far have played only a minor role in research on social movement mobilization – the study presents an analytical model based on premises from political process theory, network theory, and relational sociology. This model is then applied to the case of the Japanese anti-nuclear movement after Fukushima by looking at the relational dynamics of two coalitional movement networks engaged in advocacy-related activities in Tōkyō.

Die aktuelle Ausgabe befasst sich mit diesen Themen:

Internationale Konferenz am DIJ: Diversität in der Arbeitswelt
Vom 30. November bis 1. Dezember 2017 veranstaltete das DIJ mit Förderung der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung die Konferenz „From Flexible Rigidities to Embracing Diversity? – Work-Related Diversity and its Implications in Japan and Beyond“.

Lokale Anti-Atom-Bewegungen in Japan
Die Errichtung von Atomkraftwerken ist stets eine äußerst kontroverse Angelegenheit, insbesondere in den betroffenen Kommunen selbst.

Japans ländlicher Raum – Herausforderungen und Bewältigungsstrategien
Japans demographische Entwicklung stellt sich in den Regionen außerhalb der Ballungszentren teilweise sehr dramatisch dar.

Untergraben Ungleichheiten auf dem Arbeitsmarkt den Rückhalt für Demokratie?
Ein Workshop im Oktober 2017 untersuchte, inwiefern sich Ungleichheiten auf dem Arbeitsmarkt auf die Politik auswirken.

Ausländische Beschäftigte in Japan
Seit der globalen Finanzkrise nimmt die Zahl der ausländischen Beschäftigten in Japan wieder zu.

Der DIJ Newsletter ist auf Deutsch und Englisch verfügbar. Er wird als Download-Variante sowie in Print angeboten.

This virtual special issue is dedicated to contemporary studies exploring a Japan beyond the country’s metropolitan areas. Over the past decades, rural Japan nearly vanished from the Western research agenda, as urban Japan had come to dominate the attention of most social scientists studying contemporary Japan. Particularly the cityscape of Tokyo, the epitome of the Asian mega-city, has shaped the popular cultural imagination of Japan from abroad to an extent that the countryside, if seen at all, acquires all qualities of a museum or cultural repository of the past. Yet it should not be forgotten that millions of Japanese continue to live in quite different social spaces, such as hamlets, villages, or rural towns in mountainous and coastal areas. Even though urbanization, consumption and media usage have left their imprint on everyday life, social values and behavior rules in even the most remote part of the country, there is ample reason to take the urban-rural divide as a meaningful line of distinction between the two structurally different and inherently distinct spheres of city and countryside.

This virtual special issue has been compiled as a reminder of the significance that life and living in regional Japan is having for an adequate understanding of contemporary Japan, the changing faces of the “rural imaginary” (Schnell 2005) and the plurality of lifeways in late-modern society.

Career concerns of managers function as an important control mechanism in the context of corporate governance. They bear important motivating and disciplining effects. In Japan, where – in the absence of a well-functioning external market – management careers have been generally restricted to in-house promotions, career concerns also result in efforts by middle management to exert control over and influence top management decisions as they impact their career perspectives.

Takaaki Eguchi’s paper explains the background and implications of such internal control mechanisms in Japan and points to their limitations in recent years given the increasing need for a stronger top management function. Reviewing relevant empirical research, Franz Waldenberger shows that managerial careers in Germany have long been embedded in an external market.

Die Themen der aktuellen Ausgabe beinhalten unter anderem einen ausführlichen Bericht über das Deutsch-Japanische Symposium zu Klimaschutz und regionaler Entwicklung, welches in Zusammenarbeit mit der Deutschen Botschaft Tokyo und der School of International Liberal Studies (SILS) der Waseda University veranstaltet wurde.

Darüber hinaus berichten wir aber natürlich auch über weitere DIJ-Veranstaltungen aus jüngster Vergangenheit, stellen Ihnen unsere neusten Publikationen vor und begrüßen einen neuen Mitarbeiter.

Der DIJ Newsletter ist wie immer verfügbar in einer PDF- und Print-Variante.