Membership-Style vs. Job-Style Employment: The Relationship between Traditional Employment Practices and the Academic Ability of Recent Graduates in Japan

• In Event: Comparative Perspectives on Access, Diversity, and Employment Outcomes in Higher Education: Insights from China, the U.S., and Japan

Proposal

This research study investigates two different fields in Japan: the labor market and university education. In Japan’s labor market, employment can be classified into two styles—Membership-gata koyo (Membership-style employment) and Job-gata koyo (Job-style employment) (Hamaguchi 2009). Membership-style employment, often described as the traditional Japanese approach, has been the dominant employment style in Japan since World War II when it was first introduced as a post-war reconstruction strategy (Onishi 2023; Shintani 2023). This employment system is characterized by several conventional practices that make Japanese employment distinctive, such as workers’ lifetime commitment to their companies as well as periodic job rotation and promotion within the same company (Abegglen 1958; Mitani 1999). Japan’s rapid economic growth since the mid-1970s was in large part attributed to this unique employment system. However, after Japan’s bubble economy collapsed in the late 1980s to early 1990s, economists began ascribing the country’s prolonged economic downfall to membership-style employment system (Okina et al. 2001; Hamaguchi 2021). Nowadays, membership-style employment is criticized as socially unsustainable due to its problematic and unethical assumption of the unlimited labor of young men, excluding other populations in the labor market, including female, elderly, and part-time workers (Hamaguchi 2021). Moreover, the top-down organizational structure of membership-style employment hinders workers’ autonomy for their job ladder or the social value of advanced degrees (Ushiogi 1997; Tsuru 2019). As an alternative to this conventional approach, job-style employment, which focuses on workers’ expertise and performance-based advancement, has recently been introduced from the Western labor market to the Japanese one (Onishi 2023). The growing controversy over the optimum employment style for Japanese society in the 21st century has become one of the key factors regarding the school-to-work transition in Japan (OECD 2021).

On the other hand, increasing attention has been given to the decline in undergraduate students’ academic abilities in Japan. After the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy in 1990, drastic changes in Japan’s social structure exacerbated the decline in university students’ academic abilities (Nishikawa 2012). In the recent decade, universities have been called “the summer vacation for life” in Japan (He 2019). “Sandwiched between high school and work, university functions as a four-year respite,” where students can recharge themselves after stressful cramming at high school and before pledging a lifetime contract for work (He 2019). In the Japan Institute of Lifelong Learning’s Survey Report on the Current State of Freshmen Education at University in 2006, 83.5 percent of the 291 public and private Japanese universities surveyed reported declining academic ability among university students (Nishikawa 2012). In light of these economic and societal changes, remedial education—freshmen seminars to make up for students’ unsatisfactory academic progress—became increasingly important in Japanese universities. The establishment of the Japan Society for Remedial Education in 2005 and the Japan Society for First-Year Education in 2008 signified this growing attention to remedial education. The frequent establishment of such organizations in the past few decades illustrates the urgent social need for remedial measures to improve university students’ academic abilities.

This study explores the unique complexity of the school-to-work transition in Japan, focusing on the recent graduates who went through membership-style employment—hereinafter referred to as membership-style recent graduates—and recent graduates who went through job-style employment—hereinafter referred to as job-style recent graduates. To establish a robust theoretical understanding of the research problem, my theoretical framework incorporates university massification, signaling theory, and human capital theory (Spence 1973; Becker 1975; Trow 2005; Igami 2010). Regarding the academic culmination, where the academic ability reaches one’s peak, my theoretical framework suggests how the academic culmination of membership-style recent graduates might be at the point of university entrance where they finally get out of high school cramming education and earn a promising affiliation to universities, while it might be at the end of university for job-style recent graduates where they complete their degrees and get prepared for optimum recruitment with their accumulated expertise. Conducting Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analysis on the data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 2013, I analyzed the following research question; whether and to what extent do the academic abilities of recent graduates in Japan differ by their employment style? The results indicate that university graduates’ academic ability is statistically significantly lower for the membership-style recent graduates relative to the job-style recent graduates for all three proficiency domains—literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving in technology-rich environments. Particularly, the coefficient for problem-solving in technology-rich environments, which is usually not part of the formal education curriculum, was significantly larger than those for literacy and numeracy. Although there could be various factors affecting this result, workplaces with job-style employment systems may tend to look for more technology-driven positions that require certificates or specialized knowledge and experiences (Banda 2014). Nowadays, the significance of technological integration in workplaces is rising day by day. Thus, job-style employment, which is common among smaller-sized enterprises, may have more adaptability to such contemporary technological changes, compared to membership-style employment that is typically adopted by traditional large firms (Warhurst et al. 2017). Therefore, students who go for job-style employment might have higher proficiency in technology, resulting in job-style recent graduates’ higher scores in the domain of problem-solving in technology-rich environments.

The contemporary changes in the 21st century, including globalization accelerated by rapid technological advancement, are the key factors that have affected the paradigm shift in the Japanese labor market as well as conventional practices and norms for employment in Japan. To contribute to our exploration of education in this rapidly developing digital society in the 21st century, my research findings stimulate further debate on Japan’s optimum employment system and the social value of higher education in the 21st century.

Author

• Minami Yamauchi, Stanford Graduate School of Education