ABSTRACT
Remember Japanese management, with its emphasis on the total inclusion of people in the company and long-term, even lifetime, employment, and the corollary idea that employees were important stakeholders in enterprises with claims equivalent in their importance to those of shareholders (e.g., Aoki, 1988)? Or to go even farther back, remember the welfare capitalism practiced by some large employers in the first three decades of the twentieth century? Many employers believed then that companies should take care of their employees and therefore offered benefits including company housing, paid vacations, healthcare, pensions, and, as in the case of Ford Motor Company, help from a “sociological department” in
setting up a household, saving and investing money, and keeping employees away from alcohol and hustlers (Lacey, 1986, pp. 131-134). Employers provided assistance to their workforce both out of a sense of civic duty and moral obligation-Henry Ford, for instance, claimed to be interested in building men, not just cars-and also as a way of potentially avoiding unionization efforts and more intrusive government intervention in the employment relationship (e.g., Jacoby, 1997).
