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.