The Culture Of Japanese Management Essays - Employment, Recruitment

The Culture Of Japanese Management THE CULTURE OF JAPANESE MANAGEMENT The culture of Japanese management so famous in the West is generally limited to Japan's large corporations. These flagships of the Japanese economy provide their workers with excellent salaries and working conditions and secure employment. These companies and their employees are the business elite of Japan. A career with such a company was the dream of many young people in Japan, but only a select few attain these jobs. Qualification for employment is limited to the men and the few women who graduate from the top thirty colleges and universities in Japan. Placement and advancement of Japanese workers is heavily based on educational background. Students who do not gain admission to the most highly rated colleges only rarely have the chance to work for a large company. Instead, they have to seek positions in small and medium-sized firms that can not offer comparable benefits and prestige. The quality of one's education and, more important, the college attended, play decisive roles in a person's career (see, ch. 3). Few Japanese attend graduate school, and graduate training in business per se is rare. There are only a few business school programs in Japan. Companies provide their own training and show a strong preference for young men who can be trained in the company way. Interest in a person whose attitudes and work habits are shaped outside the company is low. When young men are preparing to graduate from college, they begin the search for a suitable employer. This process has been very difficult: there are only a few positions in the best government ministries, and quite often entry into a good firm is determined by competitive examination. The situation is becoming less competitive, with a gradual decrease in the number of candidates. New workers enter their companies as a group on April 1 each year. One of the prominent features of Japanese management is the practice of permanent employment (shushin koyo). Permanent employment covers the minority of the work force that work for the major companies. Management trainees, traditionally nearly all of whom were men, are recruited directly from colleges when they graduate in the late winter and, if they survive a six-month probationary period with the company, are expected to stay with the companies for their entire working careers. Employees are not dismissed thereafter on any grounds, except for serious breaches of ethics. Permanent employees are hired as generalists, not as specialists for specific positions. A new worker is not hired because of any special skill or experience; rather, the individual's intelligence, educational background, and personal attitudes and attributes are closely examined. On entering a Japanese corporation, the new employee will train from six to twelve months in each of the firm's major offices or divisions. Thus, within a few years a young employee will know every facet of company operations, knowledge which allows companies to be more productive. Another unique aspect of Japanese management is the system of promotion and reward. An important criterion is seniority. Seniority is determined by the year an employee's class enters the company. Career progression is highly predictable, regulated, and automatic. Compensation for young workers is quite low, but they accept low pay with the understanding that their pay will increase in regular increments and be quite high by retirement. Compensation consists of a wide range of tangible and intangible benefits, including housing assistance, inexpensive vacations, good recreational facilities, and, most important, the availability of low-cost loans for such expenses as housing and a new automobile. Regular pay is often augmented by generous semiannual bonuses. Members of the same graduating class usually start with similar salaries, and salary increases and promotions each year are generally uniform. The purpose is to maintain harmony and avoid stress and jealousy within the group. Individual evaluation, however, does occur. Early in workers' careers, by age thirty, distinctions are made in pay and job assignments. During the latter part of workers' careers, another weeding takes place, as only the best workers are selected for accelerated advancement into upper management. Those employees who fail to advance are forced to retire from the company in their midto -late fifties. Retirement does not necessarily mean a

The eNotes Blog The Life and Legacy of SylviaPlath

The Life and Legacy of SylviaPlath photo via vintag.es Sylvia Plath is one of the most iconic writers of the 20th century. For decades, her confessional style of writing has captivated readers with its raw emotion and prolific language. This October, Plath would have turned 86 years old. We thought there was no better way to start Plath’s birthday month than with a look back at the trials and triumphs of her brief life. Early Life Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her writing career began at the early age of eight after her father died from a long battle with diabetes. This event inspired Plath to use writing as an outlet for her grief. The earliest evidence of Plath’s published works are found around 1950 when she won several newspaper contests and published her first story, â€Å"And The Summer Will Not Come Again,† in Seventeen magazine. Plath went on to attend Smith College where she continued to pursue writing and became a student editor of Mademoiselle magazine. Despite her early success as a writer, Plath battled severe depression, making constant suicide attempts from the time she was twenty years old. Plath traveling in Venice | photo via 2.bp.blogspot.com Adulthood Published Poetry Upon graduating, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Fellowship. While there, she met and married the English poet Ted Hughes. The couple briefly moved back to Massachusetts where Plath continued her studies with poet Robert Lowell. Plath’s first collection of poems titled, The Colossus and Other Poems  was published in 1960. Plath and Hughes eventually moved back to England, where Plath gave birth to two children. After six years of marriage, Plath’s husband left her for another woman. Many of the poems Plath wrote during this time are compiled in her book Ariel. In 1963, Plath published an autobiographical novel titled The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. In the novel, Plath disguises her family and friends as fictional characters, which gave them no indication of the depression she was constantly experiencing. Plath with her daughter, Frieda and her son, Nicholas | photo via dailymail.co.uk Final Days   On the morning of February 11, 1963, Plath died by suicide in the kitchen of her London home. Her ex-husband, Ted Hughes, became her literary executor. He published several of her works annually, including Ariel in 1965. Hughes also went on to publish The Collected Poems, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath December 1959 | photo via 4.bp.blogspot.com Her Legacy   The greatest impact of Sylvia Plath’s life work comes with her legacy. She is a pioneer of her craft and has inspired countless artists to showcase vulnerability through their work. In many ways, Plath was ahead of her time. She recognized the societal expectations of a 1950s female but was not afraid to speak out against issues of patriarchy and domesticity. Plath was a voice not only for females but for individuals suffering from mental illness. She validated unacknowledged emotions that came from the ideologies indoctrinated into her generation. She transformed her own life experiences into universal ones that continue to resonate with readers to this day. Many individuals agree that The Bell Jar feels so timely decades after it was written, with Catherine LaSota from electricliterature.com explaining, â€Å"The disassembly of the patriarchy is a painfully slow process. I believe that the time in your life in which you read a book will affect your take on the book, and I can certainly say that I read The Bell Jar very aware of the current Trumpian political climate. Parts of the book read like a rallying cry for women to take charge, and in this way I found The Bell Jar to be quite empowering.† It’s difficult to say what Sylvia Plath could have accomplished beyond thirty. The themes Plath explores throughout her writing are the same topics in contemporary conversations, demonstrating the relevance and immortality of her work. I think we can only hope that Sylvia Plath would have found a sense of peace with her life and would have continued to share her words with the world. photo via vintag.es If you like Plath, check out these free texts on Owl Eyes: Dead Love by Elizabeth Siddal warns an innocent audience about the inevitable loss of love. Orchard by Hilda (H.D) Doolittle juxtaposes vibrant imagery with allusions to Puritan ideology. The Garden by Hilda (H.D) Doolittle is a vivid metaphor illustrating the oppressive forces of power. Worn Out by Elizabeth Siddal features a speaker battling the complexities of giving and receiving love. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is written as a woman’s secret diary as she’s locked in a room, forced into a â€Å"rest cure.†