Intragenerational Mobility Between Regular and Non-regular Employment Sectors in Japan: From the Viewpoint of the Theory of Mobility Regime

This chapter examines intragenerational mobility between the regular and non-regular employment sectors in Japan by analyzing the dataset of the 2015 Social Stratification and Social Mobility National Survey from the viewpoint of the theory of mobility regime. The Japanese mobility regime comprises Japanese employment practices, the Japanese welfare-employment regime, and the male-single-breadwinner model. This regime places male regular workers at the core of the labor market while pushing female non-regular workers to its periphery, and suppresses job turnover. However, it is believed that globalization, the shift to a service industry, and neoliberal labor policies have weakened the regime. From these theoretical perspectives, I analyzed the job histories of the survey’s respondents by using discrete-time logit models while selecting for gender. The main finding of the analysis is that the prevailing regime is changing, but not necessarily weakening. Movement from regular to non-regular employment sector is more likely to occur at the time of this study than it has been historically, while movement from non-regular to regular employment is less likely.