[Upcoming Seminar] Post-Toyotist Affect: Japanese Workers Working On Neoliberal Reforms

Title: Post-Toyotist Affect: Japanese Workers Working On Neoliberal Reforms
Speaker: Nana GAGNÉ (Assistant Professor, Department of Japanese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Date and time: 10 February 2017, 1:00p.m.-2:30p.m.
Venue: Room 115, Humanities Building, New Asia College, CUHK

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This paper analyzes how Japanese state and corporations promoted neoliberal restructuring and how employees on the ground responded and reflected upon such changes. Gagne shows how neoliberal reforms have aimed to produce greater flexibility for corporations and to promote a specific mode of control – “self-management” – among employees. However, instead of rationalizing and legitimizing risk and becoming self-regulating ‘enterprising selves’, many employees have turned inward and become increasingly risk averse in their work lives. As a result, economic restructuring has produced a new kind of “alienation” —neoliberalism as ex-communication— characterized by the expulsion of employees from the safety nets of corporate welfare as well as the breakdown of corporate community, against the backdrop of the emergence of a post-Toyotist affect.

Nana Gagne is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Japanese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She works on gender, sexuality, work, capitalism, as well as reproductive technologies in Japan and the US.

All interested are welcome!