Constructing Difference: The Making of Gendered Subcultures in a Japanese Automobile Assembly Plant

Abstract

Using participant observation, this article explores the social forces giving rise to workers' culture in a Japanese automobile assembly plant. Most theories share the problematic assumption that workers' culture is homogeneous, obscuring the emergence of, and interplay between, subcultures. Subcultures encourage male and female workers to see themselves in opposition to the other and to articulate narrowly constructed gender subjectivities that conform to factory discipline in a changing post-Fordist work place. The analysis suggests the need to examine both sides of the class and gender divide in order to understand fully the labour process and the formation of organisational culture.