The sparse literature on management organizations in Japan

A number of organizations represent the interests of employers. It is our impression that the academic research on management organizations has been limited compared with that on labor organizations. Some time ago Aonuma (1965) analyzed the socioeconomic background of senior management in Japan's large firms. Mannari (1974) followed with a similar study but did not comment or build upon Aonuma's findings. This style of research was later picked up by Koike and Watanabe (1979), who stirred a vigorous debate on how open Japan's large firms were to making managers out of graduates from Japan's less prestigious universities (see Iwauchi 1980 and Takeuchi and Aso 1981). In this fact there is a certain paradox. On the one hand, there are many faculties of business studies (kei-ie gakubu) in Japan, but no faculty of labor studies (rodo gakubu). At the same time there is a sociology of labor (rodo shakaigaku), but no sociology of management (kei-ei shakaigaku). Over twenty years ago Hazama (1981) commented on this and pushed to establish a sociology of management. His view was that the study of industrial relations required both a sociology of labor and a sociology of management as subdisciplines.