Neoliberalism at work: Corporate reforms, subjectivity, and post-Toyotist affect in Japan

Abstract

This article analyzes how the Japanese state and corporations promoted neoliberal restructuring and how employees responded to and reflected upon such changes. I show how neoliberal reforms have aimed to produce greater flexibility for corporations and promote a specific mode of control—“self-management”—among employees. However, rather than rationalizing and legitimizing risk and becoming self-regulating “enterprising selves,” many employees displayed a reflexive and reactive subjectivity that eschewed such neoliberal values. The reaction of many individuals to reforms in Japan can best be understood as “silent resistance” through a combination of discrete competition, turning inward, and stronger desires for stability and security. Economic restructuring thus produced a new kind of “alienation” characterized by narrowing corporate welfare and the breakdown of corporate community. At the same time, employees’ critical reflections reveal a post-Toyotist affect marked by retrenched desires for security and control under the changing national and global economy. Rather than a new, unprecedented subjectivation, the Japanese case of risk-aversive reflexive reaction reveals how existing cultural complexes produce different forms of subjectivity in response to reforms. Further, this nuances our understandings of how the kinds of subjectivities that emerge via the diverse processes of neoliberalization are always contingent upon the multiscalar historical and cultural contexts of work, responsibility, and risk.

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“…Competition is one of the key ideologies that promotes (neoliberal) capitalism, primarily through organization (or imposition) of markets (Carrier 1997), although, according to neoliberal doctrine, the markets need to be actively regulated in order to render competition ‘beneficial’ and ‘fair’ (Hayek, quoted in Gershon 2011: 541). Opening up places to markets does not necessarily create atomized individualistic subjects focused on efficiency, performance, and self‐improvement (Ferguson 2010; Okura Gagné 2020), but it certainly creates new situations in which people subjected (or drawn) to the market need to negotiate between the demands of the competitive market and the demands of ‘moral economies’ (J.C. Scott 1976) in which they continue to be immersed. Considering competition as a ‘structural relationship among competitors’ (Colloredo‐Mansfeld 2002: 113) is therefore useful: it complicates the view of markets as collections of individualized subjects compelled to compete amongst each other for the sole sake of profit.…”

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“…This work has largely been inspired by Foucault (1982Foucault ( , 1991 and his attention to the relationship between subjectivity and structure, rather than Bateson. In everything from state-sponsored and corporate sporting events (Besnier et al 2018;Walker 2013) to labor regimes (Gershon 2011;Okura Gagné 2020;Urciuoli 2008) and knowledge economies (Chong 2020), competition is increasingly identifi ed as the subjectifying force that shapes collectives of atomized, self-centered individuals.…”

“…The anthropologies of work and neoliberalism critique neoliberal visions of competition as a universalizing mechanism that encourages subjects to imagine themselves as a "bundle of skills" (Urciuoli 2008: 215) that must be constantly and refl exively improved, and to act rationally in a shared yet agonistic pursuit of maximal fi nancial profi t (Gershon 2011;Mirowski 2013;Rose 1996). Recent ethnography has emphasized the damaging effects of competition as a technique of neoliberal governance and subjectivation (Chong 2020;Li 2007;Okura Gagné 2020;Tooley 2017), one that atomizes subjects, corrodes solidarity, and reproduces established hierarchies of wealth and power. The prevalence of this critique has, however, sidelined attention to competition in its own right as an object of ethnographic comparison.…”