Japanese Firms’ Workforce and Cultures in Transition

Organizational culture is bound to an organization, and is even more tenacious than organizational structures, strategies, management practices, and other organizational phenomena. The reasons for this are that organizational members are affectively committed to their organizational culture, and that people consider getting their work done at their workplaces as customary. If a person attempts to change a traditionally accepted way of work bolstered by organizational culture, other members will endeavor to prevent such an attempt. Another reason for this is that organizational culture is largely affected by and closely associated with the national culture in which organizations are embedded, which is more stable and slower to change than organizational culture. Due to the tenacity of organizational culture, organizational cultures of Japanese companies are expected to not have considerably changed over the past two decades since the collapse of the Japanese bubble economy in the early 1990s, not to mention over the decade or so since the turn of the century, the focal period of this book.