France, Japon, États-Unis : l'emploi en détail : essai de socio-économie comparative

This book begins with an enigma: there is almost twice as much commercial employment per capita in Japan as in France, two countries with similar standards of living. The authors show that unravelling this enigma can have a fairly general scope in terms of analysing the national determinants of employment in a sector of the economy. Their approach concerns national employment structures and strategies, and the greater or lesser capacity of a country and a sector of activity to create jobs. This book is therefore not just for those with a legitimate, but more specialised, interest in either commercial employment or Japan (or the United States, the second country to be compared) as mirrors of the French economy and society. It is a question of the way in which a society constructs its employment system in a branch of the economy (belonging here to the commercial tertiary sector), and of the contrast between distinct national models of the social construction of this employment. This contrast, rather like binocular vision, gives relief to each of the national situations. It makes us think about the range of possibilities. In addition to original empirical results on the characteristics of employment systems in France, Japan and the United States, this book proposes, from a theoretical and methodological point of view, an explicit socio-economic approach applied to comparative research on employment.