| My dissertation examines how the past two decades of large-scale economic recession and increasing globalization in Japan have affected Japanese institutions and individual Japanese white-collar businessmen---"salarymen." Combining sociological interviews, narratives, and ethnographic fieldwork, my research used an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the relationship between identity, gender, life-course, and ideology within the workplace, leisure spaces, and community activities in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area. By disaggregating real social actors from the broad and dominant category of "salarymen," this dissertation analyzes how structural changes under neoliberalism affect the ways salarymen actively reconfigure their identities and practices and critically examines the impact of and engagement with the dominant ideology of "salarymen" under contemporary post-Bubble economic and demographic change.;The ideology of neoliberalism was not just a globally enforced market-centered ideology but it was actively promoted by Japanese corporations to "reengineer" the older Japanese corporate practices. However, the end result of neoliberal ideology in the form of the performance-based merit system and corporate restructuring has produced far more diverse receptions and reactions, some of which further aggravated culturally embedded notions of "individualism" and "competition.";By examining the experiences and interpretations of salarymen historically and across work and leisure, this dissertation challenges the old critique of ideology as unilaterally coercive and repressive, in the process revealing how the "clash" of powerful ideologies like neoliberalism and the New Middle Class offer a space for reflection and explicit framings for individuals' self-fashioning. As a result, even as the ideology of the New Middle Class has been challenged by its clash with neoliberalism, the inclusive qualities lying behind the ideology have persisted within the even more inclusive discourse of middleness/mainstream among individual salarymen. By personally re-working and re-creating their subjectivities through new articulations of work and recreation salarymen are crafting new objectives for their lives while maneuvering through dominant ideologies, in the process revealing a more resilient consciousness built on the cultural idea(l) of "middleness/mainstreaming" or "participating in mass culture/society" that transcends simple socioeconomic models of class and that construct and bind individuals as members of a particular "democracy" and "society" (shakai) under late modernity. |
