The Business of Leisure, the Leisure of Business

This chapter explores the shifting yet resilient meanings and motivations of participating in corporate outings for workers in twenty-first-century Japan. It centers on hostess clubs that show how spaces continue to represent both the culture of care and business relationships in corporate Japan and the mediation of gender ideologies for workers facing the new pressures of neoliberalizing workplaces. It also draws on the participant observation of three hostess clubs in Ginza, such as the expensive Club Ai, the international club Class A, and the midrange Club Sumire. The chapter follows the narratives and experiences of salarymen and hostesses after work in the contexts of increasingly competitive economic conditions. It narrows spheres of corporate welfare and changing norms of gender and family in twenty-first-century Japan.

Employee Benefits and Paternalistic Work Regimes. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Company Welfare in Italy

This article examines the changing role of employee benefits in work regimes in light of the controversies associated with paternalism. We review historical (industrial, scientific, bureaucratic and sophisticated) and recent (libertarian) variants of paternalism, and then define its contemporary developments by matching two terms long considered antithetical, ‘market paternalism’. We argue that this neologism best captures the emerging features of work regimes, in particular the recent popularity of company welfare, by appreciating the marketization of employee benefits and the measures of fiscal, possibly corporate, welfare that support it. Evidence to substantiate this argument comes from an overview of historical forms of paternalism and current company welfare schemes in Italy.