Comment: Stability and Change: Typifying ’Atypical’ Employment in Japan

Abstract

The restructuring of work is proceeding rapidly through a series of reforms and economic transformations that promise to alter both the industrial structure and the mix of employment arrangements. Comparative studies on the regulation of labour markets, employment policy and industrial relations have not adequately understood these changes despite an otherwise sophisticated development of theories and data on post-Fordism and employment regimes (e.g., Crouch and Streeck 1997). Thus, for example, the School of Comparative Political Economy (Kitschelt, Lange, Marks and Stephens, 1999) generally refers to work and social regulations designed for standard industrial work and a corresponding form of standard family life, underestimating the weight of the service sector economy in advanced capitalistic countries. Due to this 'industrialism bias', the heterogeneity in content of work, modes of work organization, ways of working, and gender employment structures within the service sector tend to be blind spots.