Kimono in the Boardroom: The Invisible Evolution of Japanese Women Managers

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She explored family backgrounds, personal characteristics, socialization, professional experiences, and corporate cultures. This book presents her sometimes surprising discoveries. Renshaw completes the picture by surveying the history of Japanese women in management and discussing the even newer phenomenon of Japanese women who own their own businesses. An eye-opening work for managers of international firms and scholars of business and women's studies, Kimono in the Boardroom reveals the potential of the rising female managerial class to profoundly change the male-dominated culture of modern Japan.

Today's Japanese Woman 2.

Editorial Reviews

Growing Up Japanese and Female 3. A Man's World 5. The Search for Japanese Women Managers 6. Paths to Management 7. A Redefinition of Power and Leadership 8.

Kimono in the Boardroom - Jean R. Renshaw - Oxford University Press

Samurai and Women Warriors 9. Moving Shoji Screens to Include Women A Search for Identity The Men in Their Lives Renshaw is a management consultant specializing in international management. She has a special interest in the role of women in management and has studied women managers in the South Pacific, Japan, Korea, and the United States as a Fulbright Hayes Research Scholar.

Her consulting work -- from a cross-cultural perspective -- has been with corporations, small businesses, government, and educational and nonprofit organizations. She has written for Asian and Western publications about the emergence of women managers in Japan and the rest of Asia. Making liberal use of the exotic image of feudal Japan, Renshaw sustains the analogy between modern managers and the samurai class of the medieval period when she explains the paths by which women seek the exclusively male-defined world of business: As marginalized people, Japanese women managers, respond to their circumstances by engaging in a range of coping behaviours adopting, adapting, and transforming which mask the reality of their power from male peers, from society in general, from other women seeking access to the upper echelons of management, and even from the women managers themselves p.

Kimono in the Boardroom is a timely study. However, as an academic work it stumbles in a number of critical areas. The most fundamental is, perhaps, its uncomfortable and unresolved treatment of audience.

Exactly to whom Renshaw intends to read her work is unclear. It hovers awkwardly between serious academic scholarship and the popular journalism that is more commonly consumed by the quasi-to-uninformed Japanophilic and Japanophobic reading public. Because the reviewer is an academic speaking to a largely academic readership, and because certain aspects of the work are explicitly structured as scholarship, the reviewer has chosen to frame her commentary accordingly.

Kimono in the Boardroom is a bold transgression of the quite arbitrary boundaries separating the humanities, the social sciences, and applied business administration. Such work requires no mere familiarity with the relevant secondary literatures; rather it requires a real fluency across the total range of related fields. In the opening chapter of the work, Ms.

Renshaw minimizes the importance of statistical sampling in the following way: The interviews were conducted in English with a Japanese speaker at hand to clarify if necessary. While this approach introduced the danger of a biased sample, it also had advantages.

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It is common for scholars in the humanities to demonstrate their discomfort generally disguised as contempt for the social sciences by drawing the weapon most easily drawn, cocked and fired: Based upon these contacts, she then expanded her informant pool through series of cascading personal introductions.

Women said they seemed to learn second languages more easily than their brothers, and research substantiates this tendency for girls. That Renshaw concludes that Japanese women managers share similar family cultures and formative childhood experiences should surprise no one. After all, she interviewed people who were friends and colleagues. The only surprise is that despite her apparent awareness of the dangers inherent in statistical sampling, Renshaw failed throughout the text to match her analysis to the extremely narrow scope of her data.

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Secondly, Renshaw neglects to rationalize her statistical material with a cogent definition of the manager. The Japanese women interviewed for this book meet the definitions of manager as they successfully direct organizations, carry on business within the national and international economy, and handle affairs of state, of corporations, of small home businesses, and of families p.

She does not investigate the standards which produced these data, or offer even the briefest commentary upon whether or not or to what degree they reflect Japanese managers as defined in the study. Small home businesses are, for the most part, absent in her qualitative analysis because so many of her interviews seem to have been conducted with executives in national, international, or multinational firms. She breezily minimizes this problem by claiming that Japanese scholarship interviewees tend to speak more frankly in English than in Japanese p.

Kimono in the Boardroom: The Invisible Evolution of Japanese Women Managers

She does not question the meaningfulness of such frankness, nor does she problemetize Japanese self-representation to a foreign interlocutor. Finally, Renshaw seems completely unaware of the fact that the problem of translation is not whether or not her informants can understand her, but whether or not she can understand as well as correctly interpret their utterances in English. She seems unfamiliar with current secondary scholarship on Japanese history, the changing roles of Japanese women, and abundant anthropological and sociological studies of Japanese culture.

She repeatedly and inaccurately interprets national mythology as historical fact. The temple at Ise is still honored as the temple of the supreme goddess, Amaterasu …. In the West,… collective societal memory of feminine goddesses had been buried and denied…. In the Japanese memory bank, there is more recent knowledge of women as leaders.

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