Reducing long working hours has been a high priority in the agenda to improve work conditions in Japan.  Towards this aim, the government has introduced legislation and policy measures, and corporations have modified their human resource policies to help employees strike better work-life balance.  Yet, working hours in Japan have remained virtually unchanged since the 1990s.  In this talk, I argue that the true causes of long working hours lie not in the “observable” barriers such as compensation schemes, public policy and law, but rather are embedded in “unobservable” or “unmeasurable” attributes such as social norms and work conventions.  Understanding this problem better requires an approach that accounts for both economic principles (which focus on monetary rewards and incentives) and sociological perspectives which pay closer attention to the social-institutional context.  I argue that long working hours in Japan stem from the institutional complementarities of the Japanese employment system and the cultural particularities underlying it.  I discuss the role of the input-driven society, work conventions that rely on signaling, internal labor market structure, group consciousness and hierarchy, ambiguous job functions, and the traditional gender division of labor.  I close by proposing measures to reduce working hours that follow from my analysis.

 

Hiroshi Ono (Ph.D. Sociology, University of Chicago) is Professor of Human Resource Management at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University and Affiliated Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University.  His research interests include economic sociology, work and labor markets, and happiness.  He has extensive international experience, having held professional and academic positions in the U.S., Japan and Sweden.  His work has won a number of awards such as the Best Paper Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter Top 20 Paper Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research.  He is the author of the book, Redistributing Happiness:  How Social Policies Shape Life Satisfaction (with Kristen Schultz Lee, 2016).  His papers have appeared in the American Sociological Review, Journal of Japanese and International Economies, Social Forces, Social Science Quarterly and Social Science Research, among others.

Following a century of violent anti-religious campaigns, China is now filled with new temples, churches and mosques--as well as cults, sects and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Driving this explosion of faith is uncertainty--over what it means to be Chinese, and how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality a century ago and is still searching for new guideposts. Ian Johnson lived for extended periods with underground church members, rural Daoists and Buddhist pilgrims. Throughout his career in journalism and in his new book Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (Pantheon/Knopf in the United States and Penguin in the U.K., both April 2017), Johnson has distilled these experiences into a cycle of festivals, births, deaths, detentions and struggle—a great awakening of faith that is shaping the soul of the world’s newest superpower. This panel discussion, featuring a keynote speech delivered by Johnson, will explore the resurgence of religion and value systems in China.

Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao will be available for sale. 

Panelists:

 

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer focusing on society, religion, and history and 2016 Shorenstein Journalism Awardee. He works out of Beijing and Berlin, where he also teaches and advises academic journals and think tanks.

Johnson has spent over half of the past thirty years in the Greater China region, first as a student in Beijing from 1984 to 1985, and then in Taipei from 1986 to 1988. He later worked as a newspaper correspondent in China, from 1994 to 1996 with Baltimore's The Sun, and from 1997 to 2001 with The Wall Street Journal, where he covered macro-economics, China's WTO accession and social issues. In 2009, Johnson returned to China, where he writes features and essays for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and other publications. He teaches undergraduates at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies, and also runs a fellowship program there. In addition, he formally advises a variety of academic journals and think tanks on China, such as the Journal of Asian Studies, the Berlin-based think tank Merics, and New York University's Center for Religion and Media. 

 

Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations, Asia Society is a long-time China observer, author, journalist, and former Dean and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism.

Schell is the author of fifteen books, ten of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes. His most recent books are: Wealth and Power, China’s Long March to the 21st Century; Virtual Tibet; The China Reader: The Reform Years; and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders. He has written widely for many magazine and newspapers, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Time, The New Republic, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, the China Quarterly, and The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

 

Xueguang Zhou, Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development; Professor of Sociology, Stanford University

One of Zhou's current research projects is a study of the rise of the bureaucratic state in China. He works with students and colleagues to conduct participatory observations of government behaviors in the areas of environmental regulation enforcement, in policy implementation, in bureaucratic bargaining, and in incentive designs. He also studies patterns of career mobility and personnel flow among different government offices to understand intra-organizational relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy.

His recent publications examine the role of bureaucracy in public goods provision in rural China (Modern China, 2011); interactions among peasants, markets, and capital (China Quarterly, 2011); access to financial resources in Chinese enterprises (Chinese Sociological Review, 2011, with Lulu Li); multiple logics in village elections (Social Sciences in China, 2010, with Ai Yun); and collusion among local governments in policy implementation (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2011, with Ai Yun and Lian Hong; and Modern China, 2010).

 

About the Award:

The Shorenstein Journalism Award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, honors a journalist not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way that work has helped American readers to understand the complexities of Asia. The award, established in 2002, was named after Walter H. Shorenstein, the philanthropist, activist, and businessman who endowed two institutions that are focused respectively on Asia and on the press: the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

In 2011, Shorenstein APARC re-envisioned the award in recognition of the fact that Asia has served as a crucible for the role of the press in democratization in places such as South Korea, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia. It has also figured greatly in the emergence of social media and citizen journalism. New tests of the role of the media are emerging in China, Vietnam, and other authoritarian societies in Asia. Will the Internet be a catalyst for change, or can it also be a carrier of new forms of cyber nationalism and an instrument of authoritarian control? How are Asia’s journalists responding to that challenge?

The venue of this event has been moved to the Okimoto Conference room.

Dr. Ruger, a leading scholar of global and domestic health policy and public health, will speak about global and national health inequities, drawing from her research in Asia --including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Vietnam -- and Africa. With training in political economy, health policy, international relations, comparative social research and law, Dr. Ruger crosses disciplines to reexamine the principles and values that underlie health policy and public health and apply these principles empirically.  She created the health capability paradigm, challenging existing approaches and illuminating optimal health policies and she has developed an empirical approach to evaluate public health programs and health policies as they measure up to that paradigm.  Dr. Ruger’s scholarship has critically scrutinized the existing global health architecture in order to identify more effective global health policy responses linking public policy and law to global health theory at the global and national levels.  Dr. Ruger studies critical health policy and public health problems such as the equity and efficiency of health system access, financing, resource allocation, policy reform and the social determinants of health.  Her forthcoming book, Global Health Justice and Governance (OUP, in press), advances a theory of global health justice and governance called provincial globalism.

Dr. Ruger received a bachelor’s degree in the honors program in political economy from the University of California-Berkeley, master’s degrees from Oxford University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Yale University, a doctoral degree from Harvard University, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard's Center for Population and Development. Dr. Ruger has authored over 100 publications and is internationally recognized for her leadership and work, which has been cited by the United Nations, World Bank, World Health Organization and United States Government.  She has been Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator on awards from the National Institutes of Health, Fogarty International Center, Hewlett Foundation, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Global Health Justice and Governance (OUP, in press).

Other papers:

1. Coping with Health Care Expenses Among Poor Households: Evidence from a Rural Commune in Vietnam: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1435832

2. Impact of Health Insurance on Health Care Treatment and Cost in Vietnam: A Health Capability Approach to Financial Protection: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1515733

3. Effect of Health Expenses on Household Capabilities and Resource Allocation in a Rural Commune in Vietnam: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1435820

4. The Changing Donor Landscape in Health Sector Aid to Vietnam: A Qualitative Case Study: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953615001719

5. An Alternative Framework for Analyzing Financial Protection in Health: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2139693