This book was originally conceived as a follow-on from our comparative study of neo-corporatism (Inagami et al., 1994, in Japanese). The study looked at strains in national systems of labour–management–government interest intermediation, and whether these were (a) collapsing in an era of disorganized capitalism, or perhaps (b) being transformed by the growth of ‘micro-corporatism’ – company-level partnerships between management and labour, supported by weaker forms of national concertation.

Japan, of course, was well known for its co-operative enterprise-based industrial and employment relations, but it appeared to be going against the global trend of retreating national level concertation with the emergence of a weak form of national-level corporatism. If (b) were the case, Japan would not be the anomaly it first appeared.

At the same time, however, we recognized that Japan's co-operative enterprise-based industrial and employment relations – or the community dimensions of its firms – were coming under increasing strain, from a variety of sources. This book was intended to explore these strains, how they were being addressed, and hopefully to predict the outcome. Our working title was ‘Japan's community firms: reform or collapse?’ We believed the answer was ‘reform,’ and that ‘collapse’ prophets were relying on anecdotes and ‘see, Japanese practices were strange after all’ schadenfreude. And our question applied to the communitarian aspects of Japanese companies, not the companies themselves.