Office Ladies and Salaried Men
Regular price
€32.50
A01=Yuko Ogasawara
acts of resistance
Author_Yuko Ogasawara
authority
business
business culture
Category=JBFA
Category=JBSF
Category=JHBL
Category=JHM
Category=KNXN
Category=KNXU
corporate practices
dead end jobs
demeaning
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnography
favor
flowers of the workplace
gender politics
gender studies
gossip
japan
japanese corporations
japanese culture
japanese society
labor
labor market
labor relations
large corporations
male power
office ladies
participant observation
popularity poll
power structures
public gift giving
resistance
sociology
women and business
women and men
women and work
work
work refusal
Product details
- ISBN 9780520210448
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jun 1998
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In large corporations in Japan, much of the clerical work is carried out by young women known as 'office ladies' (OLs) or 'flowers of the workplace' Largely nameless, OLs serve tea to the men and type and file their reports. They are exempt from the traditional lifetime employment and have few opportunities for promotion. In this engaging ethnography, Yuko Ogasawara exposes the ways that these women resist men's power, and why the men, despite their exclusive command of authority, often subject themselves to the women's control. Ogasawara, a Japanese sociologist trained in the United States, skillfully mines perceptive participant-observation analyses and numerous interviews to outline the tensions and humiliations of OL work. She details the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that OLs who are frustrated by demeaning, dead-end jobs thwart their managers and subvert the power structure to their advantage. Using gossip, outright work refusal, and public gift-giving as manipulative strategies, they can ultimately make or break the careers of the men.
This intimate and absorbing analysis illustrates how the relationships between women and work, and women and men, are far more complex than the previous literature has shown.
Yuko Ogasawara is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Edogawa University.
