Content area
Full text
Women's Employment in Japan: The Experience of Part-Time Workers. By KAYE BROADBENT. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 168 pp. $114.95 (cloth).
Social scientists unfamiliar with employment relations in Japan are often struck by the rather unusual definition of part-time work used by the government and business enterprises. Reference to international labor statistics such as those published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development readily reveal that Japan stands out by virtue of the fact that a comparatively high proportion of parttime workers are female and likewise by the fact that a relatively high proportion of all female workers are classified as part-time workers. But, what these statistics do not reveal at face value is the complexity and in fact the multiplicity of the definitions of part-time work in Japan. The most important aspect of these definitions is that they rest so little on hours of work (in contrast to the definitions of part-time work utilized in other industrial and postindustrial societies) and so heavily instead on the status of the job relative to full-time, "regular" jobs. In addition, as Kaye Broadbent forcefully argues, part-time work is highly gendered in Japan not only by the nature of the incumbents of part-time jobs but by the construction of the definition of parttime itself.
In Women's Employment in Japan, Broadbent takes up the dual task of examining the Japanese government's and corporate world's gendered construction of part-time work as an employment category and exploring the ramifications of this for women's work experience. Despite the book's title, she focuses more heavily on the former purpose...