Participative Management Practice and Work Humanisation in Japan

The potential for improving the quality of working life through increased shopfloor involvement in decision‐making, work redesign experiments, etc., is greater in Japan than in many Western countries because of various historical and cultural factors. Japan has many more examples of worker participation and work humanisation projects than most Western observers realise. The lack of widespread information about these developments is due to the few examples that are reported outside of Japan (in English) and to the difficulties of translating many of the Japanese publications into English. Due to the paucity of literature available in the West we thought it might be useful to examine a sample of the voluminous activities taking place in Japan in the quality of working life field.