Corporate Hegemony in Japanese Collaborative Management:A Case Study of Corporate Misconduct in Japan

Abstract

Japanese organizations have traditionally had strong relationships with their employees, which are recognized as a unique quality of Japanese organizational identities. In this article, I focus on corporate misconduct as related to organizational identity and corporate hegemony in Japanese collaborative management. An analysis of the cover-up scandal by the Japanese organization the Mitsubishi Motors Corporation (MMC) is presented to study this issue. Several important findings from this study are as follows : ⑴ discursive processes and knowledge formation created MMC employees who were disciplined in concertive control, ⑵ senior management did not directly commit the crime, but corporate hegemony led their employees to commit the misconduct via collaborative management, ⑶ the enhancement of collaboration commodifies the identity of the employees, and they begin to idolize the company, which is a byproduct of the capitalist system. I conclude that corporate misconduct is not an error of management, but it is a natural consequence of the current capitalistic management systems.