著者

佐野 正彦

出版者

日本教育政策学会

雑誌

日本教育政策学会年報

巻号頁・発行日

no.4, pp.38-55, 1997-06-25

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Generally speaking, in Europe and the United States, when an employer recruits new and young employees without a higher educational background, they hardly think much of their academic achievement. By contrast, in Japan, even in occupational selection for blue-collar workers, an employer puts emphasis on academic background and achievement, regardless of knowledge and skills related to a certain job. So why, only in Japan, is meritocratic occupational selection strictly applied to all occupational stratification including blue-collar workers? The reason is to be found in the peculiar usage of the labour force in Japanese enterprises. One is deskilling of labour. In factories, as a result of pursuing profit from the division of labour, the skilled manual labour process has been divided to numerous simple units. Now labour in factories is made up of many simple jobs that everyone can do, and at any time any other employee can take over the job of his predecessor. Therefore, a new high school graduate isn't required to have any particular skill. In the labour market, there are no circumstances where a new graduate with vocational education or training in school can enjoy an advantage. He also is mainly evaluated on the basis of his academic achievement. The other is the necessity of Japanese enterprises to secure some core workers as foremen who can adjust themselves to frequent changes caused by technological innovation and to a variety of requirements from the enterprise. They adopt ability-oriented personnel management where a great number of employees are recruited each year, and then within a short term the majority who don't have perseverance to do hard and monotonous work are excluded from the enterprise. Moreover, only the minority of workers who have high flexibility is left as core workers and promoted from rank in the shop. High potentiality and broad trainability is regarded as important traits for personnel management. In order to secure candidates to be core workers in advance, therefore, Japanese enterprises need to adopt strict meritocratic occupational selection when they recruit new employees. These circumstances of Japanese enterprises have strengthened the schools' function in the selection and allocation of manpower, and to establish the system of meritocratic competition in schools.