Conclusions

At this point, I wish to express my gratitude to the generosity of the women and men at JCars who made this ethnography possible. In this book about their world, I examined the changes to women’s status in workplaces and workers’ awareness and needs that have been reshaped by the transition of socio-cultural values, which in turn impacted the way management maintained their ideal workplace community. My fieldwork was an opportune and unusual time to capture the structural shifts of the 1990s, in labor markets and employment practices in businesses, and in cultural changes in wider society affecting working life. The timing of my fieldwork from February 1998 to February 1999 allowed me to contribute new empirical data on the implementation of the revised 1997 Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL), enforced April 1999; and on the social and work related consequences of installing IT infrastructure at JCars in the late summer of 1997. I also drew on other rare topics from which to theorize workplace social relations: symbolic and spatial practices. An unexpected topic that emerged during fieldwork has been the place of disabled people in white-collar offices, and the wider employment practices with respect to disability in Japanese businesses.