Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction -- Times of major transitions -- Postwar Japan -- gendering the workforce and diverging paths -- Professional aspirations and career options -- Positionality in a shifting field -- Structure of the book -- 2. Women and work in modern Japan -- Identity and the shaping of white-collar career trajectories -- Japan as a neoliberal economy -- critical perspectives on knowledge, power, and practice -- 3. Identity, family, and career -- Identity and selfhood -- Aspects of an aging society -- Low birth and high divorce rates -- Workforce participation of women and work-life integration -- 4. Pioneering female career tracks in Japan -- women in their sixties and above -- Nomura Mihoko and others -- the outliers -- Conclusion -- 5. The performative aspect of self-fulfilling prophecies -- women in their fifties -- Imagawa Tomiko and Kawamori Mieko -- the forerunners -- Conclusion. Contents note continued: 6. Through the labyrinth of their working lives -- women in their forties -- Fukuyama Noriko and others -- "last chance" anxieties -- Conclusion -- 7. Reevaluating the self -- women in their thirties -- Kishimoto Yoshie and Fukuda Reiko -- conflicting life choices -- Conclusion -- 8. Transitioning to a career -- women in their twenties -- Suzuki Masako and Nagata Yoko -- finding one's path in uncertain times -- Conclusion -- 9. Conclusion -- The "career woman" archetype -- Constant transitions -- Future prospects.
Summary:
"Since Japan's economic recession began in the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolutionary changes as greater numbers of women have sought to establish careers. Employment trends indicate that increasingly white-collar professional women are succeeding in breaking through the "glass ceiling", as digital technologies blur and redefine work in spatial, gendered, and ideological terms. This book examines what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in the contemporary neoliberal economy, and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. It analyses how professional women contest conventional notions of femininity in contemporary Japan and in turn, negotiate new gender roles and cultural assumptions about women, whilst reorganizing the Japanese workplace and wider socio-economic relationships. Further, the book explores how professional women create new social identities through the mutual conditioning of structure and self, and asks how women come to understand their experiences; how their actions change the gendering of the workforce; and how their lives shape the economic, political, social, and cultural landscapes of this post-industrial nation. Based on extensive fieldwork, Career Women in Contemporary Japan will have broad appeal across a range of disciplines including Japanese culture and society, gender and family studies, women's studies, anthropology, ethnology and sociology"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.