Human Resource Management in Japanese Firms Undergoing Transition: A Hierarchical Approach

The human resource management (HRM) in Japan, considered often as exotic one, tends to be interpreted through the formalized languages by the neoinstitutionalistschools which loosen the most rigid hypotheses, while fundamentally faithful to the neoclassical paradigm. In this way, we can get a more general (and universal) explanation about the HRM, but we don't necessarily succeed in distinguishing the general and the specific features. The economicliterature developed by an economist as Aoki does not constitute an exception. His "cooperative" model of HRM, supposed to be at work in Japan, appears problematic : focused on the stylisation of a factory workplace, his model lacks a total vision of division of labour and doesn't show how the different categories of workers do really establish the cooperation in the firm. Based on the empirical (monographic) researches which have been done by the author, this paper attempts to develop a comprehensive approach to the Japanese-style HRM. This approach allows to underline the various logics of action which the agents develop in interaction with their institutional environment, to "contextualize" the notions such as the internal labour market or the rank hierarchy which are generally considered as universal and finally to give the relative picture to the Japanese model of HRM, both from a cross-national point of view (comparison between France and Japan) and from the point of view of its evolution.