Suchergebnisse

Lifetime employment is one of the most conspicuous features of contemporary large Japanese corporations. The employment practices of merchant houses in the Edo period (1603–1868) are sometimes proposed as one origin of such lifetime commitment. Little attention has been paid, however, to the connections between long-term employment in the Edo period and its practice in the twentieth century. This article examines how Edo employment practices were adapted to the environment of the early twentieth century within a new context of modern educational institutions and the need for professional managers.

La Porta et al. see common law as most favorable to corporate development and economic growth, but Japanese legislators explicitly based their system on German civil law. However, Japan's commercial code of 1899 omitted the GmbH (private company) form, which Guinnane et al. see as the jewel in the crown of Germany's organizational menu. Neither apparent "mistake" retarded Japan's adoption of the corporate form, because its commercial code offered flexible governance and liability options, implemented liberally. It was this liberal flexibility, not choice of legal family or hybrid corporate forms emphasized by previous writers, that drove corporatization forward in Japan and more widely. Surprisingly (given that Germany's superficially fuller organizational menu predated Japan's by many decades and the country was wealthier), by the 1930s Japan already had not only more corporations than Germany, but also morecommanditepartnerships (with some corporate characteristics). After the introduction of theyugen kaisha(private company) in 1940, corporate forms became nearly as widely used in Japan as in the United States, United Kingdom, or Switzerland.