Work, Money and Drinking: The Friendship Networks of Women Managers in Contemporary Japan

Event details
Speaker : Ms Ho Swee Lin
               University of Oxford
Date      : Friday, 16 January 2009
Time      : 2:30pm - 4:00pm
Venue    : AS4/03-28 (JS Meeting Room)

Abstract

My doctoral research examines the friendship networks of Japanese women with professional careers as site for re-conceptualizing new understandings of friendship, gender identity, modernity, money and work.  Based on fieldwork spanning over a 6-year period (2002-7), this study explores the innovative ways in which an under-researched category of Japanese women – in the 35-55 age group – turn to informal social networks to deal with the various challenges they faced during Japan's economic recession in the early 1990s.  Despite a surge in the number of white-collar female workers since the late 1970s, women managers are still a minority, constituting less than 10 percent of all managerial positions in large Japanese corporations today, and their lives and experiences are still under-documented.

This study thus offers new insights into understanding the shifting meanings of femininity in relation to work and family since the pinnacle of Japan's economic success in the 1980s.  As well as combining the instrumental values of social networking with the affective aspects of intimate friendship, the women managers also structure the use of language, time, space and money in their after-work drinking gatherings as collective expressions and affirmation of new ideas about independence and equality that significantly depart from the conventional ways in which women's friendships and social activities have been depicted in Japan.  They stress the importance of work and work identities instead of social identities tied to domesticity, situate their activities spatially and temporally between the realms of work and the home in commercial establishments in the public sphere, and mobilize economic capital to establish new gender identities based on cosmopolitan ideas, the social relationships of the women in this study thus demonstrate radical shifts in the interpretations of the public/private boundaries and of female agency in post-industrial Japan.

About the speaker

Ho Swee Lin has recently completed her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford in January 2009, and will be extending an existing research – funded by the Korea Foundation Fellowship – on the production and distribution and consumption processes of Korean popular media in South Korea and Japan.  She recently published the article “Private Love in Public Space: Japan's Love Hotels and the Transformation of Intimacy” in the Asian Studies Journal.  Her research interests include global capital flows and changing forms of labor, transformations of the family, social formations of gender, emerging intimate economies in Asia, and global flows of cultural forms and changing social worlds in Asia.