Paper short abstract:

This paper is an ethnographic study of the precarious work conditions of women managers in Japan, due to gender role expectations, exploitative corporate practices permitted by Japan's antiquated labor laws such as nominal management, and ineffective labor unions to protect their interest.

Paper long abstract:

An unprecedented number of Japanese women may have had the opportunity to pursue management-tracked careers in recent decades, but women managers remain a small minority still, are paid considerably less than male managers, and have limited authority to influence corporate decisions.

Women managers' working conditions have worsened in recent decades in the increasingly flexible work environment. In addition to being persistently treated as cheap, flexible labor resource to meet Japan's economic contingencies, they are also to deal with a wide range of exploitative corporate practices such as nominal management - permitted by Japan's antiquated labor laws - which undermines their position as corporate executives.

With labor unions in Japan remaining ineffective to this day in providing these workers with a means to seek redress, many woman managers are ironically compelled to appealing to enacting the gender roles expected of women to cope with their ambivalent identity and sense of self-worth.

Despite a plethora of studies on precarious labour, extensive focus has been made on the dire conditions of unskilled worker, while little attention has been given to considering how the processes of change under the neoliberal regime has also rendered the jobs of corporate managers as insecure, unstable and precarious.

This paper draws on ethnographic data gathered from personal interviews to examine the dynamic interplay of gender and affect in shaping the precarious work conditions in a corporate environment. It extends anthropological discussions on the notion of precarity by incorporating managerial work and gender to elucidate the expansive influence of institutional structures on individuals' susceptibility to corporate exploitation and ideological manipulation.