ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how dispatched workers, the Japanese term for agency temps, struggle to make sense of themselves, with reference to gender, age and class, in tenuous dual-employer employment relations. It deconstructs dominating political discourses and highlights the role of power in the social construction of reality. The chapter provides an intimate look at how flexibility and individuality are enacted among real people in concrete situations with a view to showing complex and often subtle negotiations in everyday practice. It explores heuristic comparisons between the production and consumption of powerful discourse that underlie the rise of temporary agency work (TAW) in post-bubble Japan. The fact that Tatsuya and Hiroshi had to endure unfair treatment and emotional stress indicates that gender plays a crucial role in experiencing TAW and that being a non-regular worker has significantly more adverse effects on the self-realisation of men than that of women.
