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Expansion of global production in the automotive industry has made America's local plants increasingly racially varied but also more financially pressured. However, research on global firms under financial pressure that focuses on the workplace dynamics of managers and production workers of different races and nationalities remains limited. This article examines the organizational processes of masculinity enactment of three groups of men—Japanese managers, American managers, and American production workers—in a financially pressured Japanese auto-parts company. It describes how Japanese managers rationalized account manipulation as a profit recovery scheme and American workers validated this approach as being self-sacrificing and representative of heroic leadership; white American managers asserted their authority over engineers, women, and Japanese men by using intimidation and emasculation; and a production worker displayed his compensated masculinity by forcing his team to engage in hiding defective products. This article discusses the implications of these acts and their legitimization of unethical behaviors with the goal of increasing corporate profits from the perspectives of masculinities and of management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the experiences of diverse groups of migrants in a highly developed non-Western society: Japan. Using critical analysis of literature and semi-structural interview data with 50 Japanese nationals and 109 foreign migrants, it explores how Japan, which sees itself as a relatively racially homogeneous society, operates in response to increasing demands for migrants, and how the structures of the state and interactions of dominant and migrant groups affect migrants’ security. It shows the salience of glocal racial ideologies creating an uneven terrain of migration for migrants from different parts of the world. Specifically, the Japanese state grants work visas for highly-skilled and specialized labor migrants as it maintains that it only accepts highly-skilled labor migrants, while opening a side-door to recruit Japanese descendants and trainees from the Global South as low-skilled laborers. This bifurcated visa structure reinforces racial hierarchies, where those who are perceived to be from Western societies are deemed as superior foreigners, while those who are from non-Western societies are seen as strangers who are a potential threat to the country’s moral standards. This hierarchy shapes their level of human security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on 25 interviews with educated and employed never-married men in Japan, this article examines how the diminished social norm to marry by a certain age, never-married men’s beliefs regarding gender in marriage, and the value these men place on individual autonomy all contribute to a trend in late marriage. We argue that the diminished social pressure to marry and the changing age norm do further men’s ambivalence toward marriage by allowing them to rationalize their detachment from the idea of their future marriage, their aversion to the perceived gender constraints of marriage, and the emphasis they place on their autonomy. However, we also argue that the weakening of the social pressure to marry does not relate to changes in employed men’s gendered views of marriage, which remain traditional. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the workplace custom of working long hours has been known to exacerbate gender inequality, few have investigated the organizational mechanisms by which long working hours translate into and reinforce the power and status differences between men and women in the workplace. Drawing on 64 in-depth interviews with workers at financial and cosmetics companies in Japan, this article examines three circumstances in which a culture of long working hours is disadvantageous for women workers, and the consequences of those circumstances: (a) managers in Japanese firms, reinforcing gender stereotypes, prioritize work over personal and family lives; (b) non-career-track women experience depressed aspirations in relation to long working hours and young women express a wish to opt out due to the incompatibility of work with family life; and (c) workers who are mothers deal with extra unpaid family work, stress such as guilt from leaving work early, salary reduction and concerns over their limited chances for promotion. The article argues that the norm of working long hours not only exacerbates the structural inequality of gender but also shapes employed women's career paths into the dichotomized patterns of either emulating workplace masculinity or opting out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of masculinity have focused on the inequalities among different groups of men, yet they have failed to consider women’s roles in men’s engagement in various positions within hegemonic masculinity. Using life-history interviews with five interracial couples made up of Asian American men and white women, as well as five individuals who either were or had been involved in an Asian American man/white woman interracial couple, this article examines the cross-racial competition in which Asian American men employ multiple strategies to ascend the masculinity hierarchy by seeking white women’s validation of their manhood. Asian American men’s cross-racial competition utilizes four distinct processes: detesting white masculinities; approximating to white masculinities; eschewing white masculinities; and failing in the attempt to maneuver white masculinities. By analyzing these four processes, the author further addresses how the emerging Asian American masculinities that are constructed by Asian American men and white women in the context of intimate relationships challenge or reinforce the current orders of race, class, and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]