Office Ladies and Salaried Men: Power, Gender, and Work in Japanese Companies. - Review - book review

Administrative Science Quarterly,  March, 2000  by Alison Davis-Blake

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Yuko Ogasawara. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. 221 PP. $45.00, cloth; $15.95, paper.

This book provides a detailed and compelling account of the relationships between two groups that are critical to the operation of large Japanese firms: "office ladies" and "salaried men." Office ladies are women hired to perform relatively simple clerical and office work. They are hired immediately after graduation from high school, junior college, or university and have no expectation of receiving promotions. They are typically in their twenties and leave their jobs upon marriage or childbirth. Salaried men are men hired after graduation from university who are then trained to become managers. They enjoy the well-documented benefits provided by large Japanese employers, including lifetime employment, numerous opportunities for cross-functional training, and regular opportunities for promotion. Since Japan enacted equal employment opportunity legislation in 1986, women are eligible for these managerial track jobs, but, by 1995, only 6 percent of first-level managerial positions and less than 1 percent of top management positions in large Japanese firms were filled by women.

Salaried men typically have a wide range of duties, and they are highly dependent on office ladies to provide the clerical and administrative support that is essential to performing those duties effectively. This book examines how the balance of power between office ladies and salaried men is created and maintained. A theme that runs throughout the book is that although an analysis of formal power structures suggests that salaried men should wield a great deal of power in their relationships with office ladies, operationally office ladies exert substantial power over salaried men.

The book is based on two sources of data: (1) the author's six months of participant observation as a temporary clerical worker at the Tokyo headquarters of a large bank and (2) the author's interviews with 40 office men, 1 0 wives of office men, and 30 office ladies. All of the interviewees were associated with large (over 1,000-person) firms, and most were associated with super-large (over 10,000-person) firms, however, and it is not clear that the findings reported in the book apply to small or medium-sized firms. The author notes that both formal organizational structures and the accompanying social order are much more flexible in small firms than in large firms.

The book is divided into six chapters plus an introduction. The introduction and the first two chapters are the weakest parts of the book. In the introduction, the author describes several different research questions that motivated the book. These are scattered throughout the chapter, thus, it is difficult to get a clear sense of the book's purpose at the outset. After reading the entire book, my sense was that the book's purpose was to reconcile two conflicting bodies of literature about gender in Japanese firms: (1) a literature based in analyses of organizational structures and personnel systems that has concluded that office ladies are powerless and (2) a literature with more ethnographic origins that has concluded that office ladies in fact exercise a great deal of power over the men they serve. The author does, in fact, do an excellent job of reconciling these two schools of thought; however, it would have been helpful to have a clear discussion of the book's purpose at the outset.

The first chapter provides some descriptive information about the typical duties and careers of office ladies and salaried men. The second chapter discusses the question of why office ladies do not adopt some form of collective organization to change the limitations on career opportunities, promotions, and earnings that they face. The author attributes this lack of organization to two causes. First, there are very strong status hierarchies among office ladies (based on organizational tenure, section tenure, age, and educational background) that make it very difficult for them to recognize their common interests. Second, because office ladies expect to exit the firm after marriage, they are not particularly motivated to use voice to change the system (Hirschman, 1970). The author makes a clear and well-documented case for the effects of these factors but overlooks another important cause of this lack of organization: Japanese firms have a long history of enterprise unions and have few exemplars of workers usin g collective bargaining to change basic organizational structures. The omission of structural constraints on organizing is curious, given that the remainder of the book pays careful attention to the interplay between the structural features of firms and the concerns of individuals.

Chapters 3-6 are the most important contribution of the book. These chapters discuss three basic ways that office ladies gain control over their work environment and the salaried men who are formally their superiors: office gossip (this can ruin a man's reputation and his chances for promotion), giving gifts of candy and flowers (the number and quality of these gifts signal to each man how well he is meeting the office ladies' expectations about "appropriate" treatment of office ladies), and resisting work, by acts ranging from failing to take initiative to delaying work to outright refusal to perform work. In these chapters, the author does an excellent job of demonstrating how the formal organizational structures that, in theory, should constrain the behavior of women and not of men actually end up having the opposite effect.