Japanese Blue Collar: The Changing Tradition.

The use of Japan for comparative sociology is now extremely fashionable. In industrial sociology, the fall-out from the bomb exploded by Abegglen in 1958 is still noticeable. There appears to be an ever-present demand for articles and books on the peculiarities of Japanese society and culture and 'life-time commitment' is firmly fixed in students' minds as the basis of Japanese institutions. Cole's book has many virtues, but the most outstanding is the fact that it takes the debate beyond generalities and into the details of wage structure, workerlabour union and worker-supervisor relationships in two contrasting plants, a die-cast factory in Tokyo and a car components factory in a rural area in Honshu. The two groups of workers showed sharp contrasts in degrees of independence, union and work group militancy and political attitudes. The contrast lay between the 'sophisticated urban workers' of the Tokyo plant with minds of their own and the 'rural recruits' of the car plant who 'tended to identify uncritically with the fortunes of their company'. It is developed in the book into an argument about the importance of the hammer of social change in Japan. 'The cynicism and scepticism of the urban, high-schooleducated and mobile Tokyo die-cast workers, their willingness to exercise civil rights, their willingness to oppose management, their "consumption fever", their competitiveness and their instrumental use of traditional relationships are characteristics that can hardly be described as tradition bound and they are increasingly common.' Cole emphasizes, however, with some perception that Marxist ideological attitudes among workers are symbiotically related to traditional views of managerial authority. One is unlikely to change without the other. Because of absolute authority in the shop assured by managers, union leaders need the 'moral armour' of