Global Production,Local Racialized Masculinities: Profit Pressure and Risk-taking Acts in a Japanese Auto-parts Company in the United States

Deverticalization

Deverticalization refers to the automakers’ contracting out or outsourcing production to the suppliers. Automakers have shifted their role from being the producers of automobiles to being the assemblers and coordinators of the global supply chain, in which a great many suppliers not only supply the parts but also take significant responsibility for assembling, in large part, the automobiles (Rothstein 2005). The automakers, under cost-reduction pressures, have increasingly divested themselves of, or outsourced many of, their manufacturing processes to the suppliers. Suppliers are pressured to provide automakers with better quality products and with better services including research, design, delivery, and even assembly. While some “global mega suppliers” have grown and now dominate the auto industry (Humphrey 2000), most suppliers remain under intense pressure from the automakers to reduce costs and compete with other suppliers; thus, these suppliers themselves resort to mergers and acquisitions or further outsource production to even lower-cost suppliers (Carlson 2006). Automakers’ outsourcing for the sake of squeezing suppliers is seen as an important business strategy, more so in America than in other countries (Carlson 2006).

Financialization and Manufacturing Industries

Outsourcing production to save on labor and management costs has become increasingly common in American manufacturing. It reflects a corporate shift called “financialization” (Van der Zwan 2014). Corporate management in US firms has shifted its strategy from that of long-term production planning to that of short-term profit-driven investment in order to raise stock value. Shareholder value has become the main guiding principle behind corporate behavior, and the redistribution of wealth and power in the form of increased executive compensation has become a critical goal (Van der Zwan 2014, 102). Cutting labor and management costs has become a common means to raise shareholder values. Thus, many manufacturers, under pressure to raise shareholder returns and save on labor costs, have increasingly relied on offshore production. The imperative of raising short-term profits has furthered the rise of cost-reduction-based management by eliminating jobs and outsourcing production and activities related to research and development.

Lean Production and the Workplace

Post-Fordism is a “flexible” and “decentered” form of managerial control over production workers. It has increased the workload per worker and has accelerated the pace of production because workers are expected to manage themselves to conduct multiple fast-paced tasks with little supervision (Gottfried and Graham 1993). Lean production is a major mode of production relations in post-Fordism. It refers to a large set of cost-cutting management methods including cutting staff, eliminating waste in machine setup time, ensuring suppliers’ just-in-time delivery of the exact number of supplies required, and making team members themselves responsible for quality improvement. Rothstein’s (2016) study of auto plants found that American workers viewed “keeping up the pace of production, achieving that fifty-five seconds of labor for each minute as critical to the plant’s survival,” while “lower standards” when workers couldn’t keep up with the intense pace is also common.

Research has found that workers resist lean production. Silver (2003, 42) argued that “lean production methods have actually increased the vulnerability of capital to destruction in the glow of production and increased workplace bargaining power.” Lean production’s emphasis on self-management and team cooperation often enables workers to manipulate rules and management for their own benefit (Gottfried and Graham 1993; Vallas 2003). Regardless of the great emphasis on the elimination of waste, the lean production system does not guarantee a firm’s profitability (Lewis 2006). If lean production does not lead to profits, financially uncertain circumstances may further intensify the profit pressures and make a workplace susceptible to various disruptions including workers’ engagement in risk-taking acts.

Masculinities of Managers and Production Workers

Enhancing power and eliciting deference from other men, or dominating other men, by “strategically adapt[ing] to the realities of resources availability, individual skill, [and] local culture,” are central to men’s masculinity acts (Schrock and Schwallbe 2009, 281, 285). Hegemonic masculinity legitimizes certain groups of men’s dominance over women and other groups of men (Connell 1998). In the current global economy, characterized by large multinational corporations and a neoliberal ideology, Connell (1998) defined the notion of “transnational business masculinity” as a hegemonic form of manhood (p. 16), in which white Western executives of multinational corporations display such traits as aggressiveness, ruthlessness, and competitiveness and exercise their hegemony over other forms of manhood with “egocentrism, very conditional loyalties, and a declining sense of responsibility for others.” However, this concept of transnational business masculinity is “monolithic, lacking multiple types and processes of legitimation” (Elias and Beasley 2009, 282), reflecting “the highly top down nature of viewing globalization” (p. 283), even though the gendered globalization process, in the local context, is less singular, less one-way, and more complex than in Connell’s account (p. 288). Thus, in order to understand the dynamic interactions of nationally and socially different groups of men and masculinities and consequential harms in local contexts, it is necessary to examine the elements of hierarchy, including class, race, xenophobia and racism, ethnicity, nationalism, and religion, on such processes (Hearn and Pringle 2006, 8).

Men’s masculine conduct in the workplace differs dramatically based on their social class and jobs. Managers often claim their power through financial and economic virility, focusing on the values of conquest, competition, individualism, and risk-taking for profit. In the financial industry, ruthlessness and the willingness to handle financial risk for the sake of earning profits are seen as essential to manhood (McDowell 1997, 172–74). Because the financial industry is dominated by the cutthroat narrative of “greed is good,” men’s economic virility, characterized by aggression, competitiveness, individualism, and moral flexibility, is rewarded, and men who exhibit these tendencies are seen as ideal workers (Griffin 2016, 182). With the rise of neoliberalism, free markets, and deregulation, acts of conquest and control become critical elements of managerial masculinity (Knights and Tullberg 2012, 399). Risk-taking manhood, forcing oneself to control uncertainty and insecurity to achieve profit goals, is glamorized as being heroic (Griffin 2012; Knights and Tullberg 2014). Some would argue that this type of masculinity, which places a high value on neoliberalism and free market deregulation, caused the global financial crisis (Knights and Tullberg 2012). Profit-driven, risk-taking masculinity may be seen as more important than other forms of masculinity, such as technical ability or safety oversight, because the corporate values of “strength” and “aggression,” to “conquer” the profit crisis, overlap with the elements of hegemonic masculinity. In the Challenger incident in 1986, management focused on profits rather than on technical issues and concerns for human safety and dismissed the engineers who insisted on the importance of technical competence and infallibility (Messerschmidt 2014).

Working-class men in blue-collar jobs, by contrast, focus on their physical virility, insisting on their bodily strength and toughness at work. In the underground coal mining industry (Wicks 2002), in which management–worker relations are often based on intimidation and bullying, men rely on their masculine identity, characterized by the willingness to risk their own physical safety, endure strenuous conditions, and take responsibility as patriarchal breadwinners. Workers in the UK offshore oil industry, which has been known to emphasize production over safety, sometimes conceal accidents and near misses in order to not be seen as less manly or be blamed by management (Collinson 1999). Confrontations with authority figures/managers and attainment of control over production are critical to their identity, allowing them to gain a sense of autonomy as workers and develop solidarity with peers (Messerschmidt 1993).

A man who is denied hegemonic status may compensate for his lack of it by rejecting his subordination in the hierarchy, by emulating hegemonic masculinity, or by modeling “compensatory manhood” (Schrock and Schwallbe 2009, 284). According to Schrock and Schwallbe (2009), “Instead of trying to control others, these men try to show that they cannot be controlled” (p. 285). Acts of denial and compensation to gain power may take various forms. Slowing production and restricting production increase their masculine sense of control (Collinson 1992, 127; Messerschmidt 1993, 128). Shop-floor workers sometimes engage in theft (of materials, tools, batteries, and gasoline) to liberate themselves from authority and gain the power to control (Messerschmidt 1993, 128–30; Collinson 1992, 139). Zhang’s (2015) study of auto production plants in China (p. 140) found that “[t]heft and pilferage were common tactics workers used to express their discontent.” In her observation, the workers intentionally and commonly engaged in pilferage in order to vent their “smoldering resentment” over the fast-paced work of lean production, low wages, and frequent layoffs. These acts may also be a marker of rejection of their subordination to authority. Researchers have argued about the characteristics of class-specific masculinities in the workplace, yet class-based masculinities are also shaped by racial and cultural differences.

Masculinities in America

In the age of mass production in the auto industry, autoworkers, who had once proudly identified themselves as craftsmen, had their “sense of dignity and manhood” undermined by “the aggressive supervision of work” (Meyer 2016, 32). In the late twentieth century, post-Fordism and lean production further deprived these men of their power over production and of their sense of masculinity (Gottfried and Graham 1993). In response to increasing managerial control, they remasculinized themselves through regressive shop-floor behaviors and devaluation of women (Meyer 1999, 118–19). White–black segregation was common, in which white men, threatened by blacks, pushed them into “the man-killing positions in the foundry” and “demeaning janitorial work” (Meyer 2016, 165–67). In addition, women workers were constantly seen as a threat by white men in American automotive plants. White male autoworkers constantly monitored women’s dress codes and behavioral morals even as late as the post–World War II era (Meyer 2016, 146).

Blue-collar white men signify hegemonic manhood in America’s national imagery. They continue to represent America’s national identity and the branding of America in the public imagination (Banet-Weiser 2014). Blue-collar masculinity, characterized by the value of rugged individualism, the icon of the self-made man, and the ethic of hard work, continues to be associated with America’s liberal exceptionalism and the historical legacy of the American frontier and is seen as playing a key role in America’s future recovery (Banet-Weiser 2014). Toughness, aggression, and violence have been central to American masculinity, with the image of the cowboy continuing to serve as “the embodiment of the American spirit,” who “moves in a world of men, in which daring, bravery, and skill are constantly tested” and “lives by his physical strength and rational calculation” (Kimmel 2005, 94).

However, regardless of this cultural prerogative, white blue-collar men in America continue to face a large loss of economic power. Kimmel (2013, 13–14) points out that middle-class and working-class white American men sometimes feel resentment, emasculation, and humiliation when they cannot enjoy the economic prosperity and privileges they believe they deserve and when they see themselves face the erosion of their livelihood. With the economic decline, “instead of questioning the rules, they want to eliminate the other players.…They fall back upon those same traditional notions of manhood—physical strength, self-control, power…as if the solution to their problem were simply ‘more’ masculinity” (p. 15). White working-class men’s aggrieved sense of entitlement with regard to the American Dream and their belief that they are “the true heirs of the real America…as native-born, white American men” (Kimmel 2013, 254) are sources of their resentment against women and non-white immigrants, whom they claim have displaced them in their jobs. Thus, the declining privileges of white manhood lead these men to rely on nativism, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-feminism. For example, they stereotype men of color either as hypermasculine or hypomasculine and thus “illegitimate pretenders to the throne of masculinity” (Kimmell 2013, 257).

“[T]he entitlement and privileged sense that you are special, [that] the world is there for you to take,” leads to the formation of hierarchies, creating both a sense of acceptance and feelings of anxiety among different groups of men. The men with more entitlement may validate the membership of the newer men only after forcing them to prove their masculinity. This is common in such American fraternal organizations as military boot camps, military schools, and athletic teams, where peers legitimize each other’s membership through tests of masculinity (Kimmel 2008). Young college students force new members in a fraternity to conform to the authority of the older men and legitimize the membership of new men through such rituals as hazing and bullying (Kimmel 2008). Hazing is a ritual in which one earns membership by engaging in homoerotic and often degrading behaviors (p. 113). Bullying is a punishment for one’s nonconformity to the hierarchy, and it often targets less masculine boys who are unathletic and bookish (p. 76). Also, in other contexts such as the workplace, different groups of men may engage in such fraternal masculinity by testing and validating their manhood.

Race plays a critical role in men’s mutual perceptions and their engagement in masculine acts in America. African American men continue to be hypersexualized and hypermasculinized. Collins (2004, 56) explains that the system of chattel slavery justified the hard manual labor of black men by portraying them as “big, strong, and stupid.” “Because enslaved African men were denied the patriarchal power that came with family and property,” they were associated with “other markers of masculinity, namely, sexual prowess and brute strength” (Collins 2004, 58). By contrast, biological racism and the exploitation of Asian immigrant men as “coolie” labor in the pre–World War II period continually reinforced the cultural stereotypes of Asians as the “Yellow Peril” or a foreign threat to white Americans (Espiritu 2007). Regardless of the vastly different histories and demographics of various Asian countries, Asian men have all been similarly hyperfeminized and desexualized. Hegemonic masculinity in American culture, which embraces aggression, rationality, and dominance, inevitably categorizes Confucian-oriented traits, such as conformity, cooperation, absence of open ego displays, and the tendency to honor tradition, as feminine (Cheng 1996). Similarly, during the rise of the Japanese economy in the early stages of globalization in the 1990s, the United States was portrayed in the US media as having a “frontier-expansionist masculinity,” with aggression and strength. In contrast, Japanese companies and Japanese businessmen were constantly depicted as being “soft,” “feminine,” and subordinate (Hooper 2001, 193–94).

In contrast with the American working-class masculine values of independence and individual dignity, traditional Japanese workplaces are known to value a high level of cooperation between workers and managers, based on lifelong employment, the age-based power hierarchy, and workers’ sacrifices for and loyalty to the authority of the company (see, e.g., Nemoto 2016). A worker’s subordination to authority is critical to his being seen as an ideal worker and to remaining in the inner circle of management in traditional Japanese companies. Japanese corporate management, based on the age hierarchy and lifelong employment and with little outside monitoring, has often been criticized as contributing to fraud at some companies, including Mitsubishi Motors (Soble 2016), where the president and CEO covered up large financial losses for years. In another scandal, Mitsubishi Motors falsely inflated the fuel economy of certain cars. Under Mitsubishi’s authoritarian regime, engineers often avoided admitting their failure to meet their targets so as not to anger their superiors (Hagiwara 2016). These institutional business differences between Japan and the United States may help explain the different strategies of managers and workers to respond to the pressure to raise profits.

Account Manipulation and Fraternal Masculinity

Conquering financial uncertainty and taking risks to increase profits, even through illegitimate means, are central to managerial masculinity. Risk-taking behaviors with regard to individual accomplishment are also rationalized as contributing to the corporate objective of increasing profits (Messerschmidt 2014, 83); Japanese managers’ relying on account manipulation as a profit recovery scheme is evidence of this. Also, managing financial challenges involves fraternal exchanges of validation and recognition of leadership.

The Japanese subsidiary I worked for was under financial pressure and lacked any long-term plan for its recovery. The managers and vice president rotated out every four years; while there, each implemented inconsistent reforms in production and management, and the company cut budgets, hired fewer people, and closed down extra offices in the United States. The headquarters in Japan constantly pressed Japanese managers to increase earnings by raising productivity, improving sales, and reducing defects so that the firm could quickly “return the debts they had invested,” but the office in Japan rarely had any specific plans or suggestions for how to achieve these goals. The American workers constantly criticized the “lack of leadership” on the part of Japan.

As Rothstein found (2016, 54), it was common to see suspicion between workers and managers: many production workers complained about the long working hours, the fast pace of work, and the lack of sufficient help, and managers kept pressure on the workers, while not trusting their skills and capabilities. Although lean production had been implemented twenty years before, the lean method manual had only been partially translated from Japanese into English. Production workers thought that, because Japanese managers changed every four years, they lacked the leadership skills and knowledge of American autoworkers and cared little about the future of the plant. There was not enough time to train each worker in the lean production methods, and injuries due to difficulties with slowing down the machines were common. For Japanese expats—who were used to working with only lifelong employed Japanese coworkers—exercising leadership over American shop-floor workers or American managers, who associate leadership with an American brand of strength and toughness, was not an easy task.

One Japanese manager, Akio, and a former vice president of the company, Hozumi, increased the firm’s earnings by purchasing cheaper American materials instead of imported materials from Japan. While insisting that the quality of the materials was exactly the same whether they purchased them from a Japanese company or an American company, they lied to the Japanese parent company, which prohibited the use of American materials. The firm’s earnings temporarily recovered until the Japanese office found out about the violation of the purchasing rules. Hozumi was immediately asked to return to Japan. Akio was also told to leave the US office as soon as his successor was appointed. Akio insisted that this cost-cutting strategy was a panacea for the financially struggling firm. Even though he violated the rules, he described himself as a hero who tried to rescue the firm. He was able to rebuild his confidence because of the validation he got from the local American workers. American plant workers and American managers applauded the two Japanese men, arguing that they did the right thing to fix the firm’s financial problems. American production workers were quoted as saying that these Japanese managers understood the problems of the plant and thought about the American workers, not just about themselves. They defended the purchase manipulation for the purpose of inflating earnings as necessary to save local American employees and as something that exemplified responsible leadership. American production workers legitimized the Japanese men’s leadership because they thought that they showed a willingness to sacrifice themselves to save American employees and thus proved that they belonged. The Japanese managers’ act of “leadership” and their American coworkers’ collective approval seem to have lowered the level of mistrust and increased the fraternal bonds between these Japanese managers and American workers.

Also, one of the former vice presidents of the subsidiary, a Japanese man, Seiji, implicitly engaged in account manipulation. He had falsely recorded a large amount of labor costs as depreciation costs for equipment purchases. (Calculating labor costs as equipment depreciation costs and thereby removing them from a firm’s total expenditures is a common scheme undertaken to inflate corporate earnings. Known as “window dressing,” it is a criminal act.) This person’s accounting manipulation not only improved the firm’s earnings that year, but it eventually led to his promotion to the board. But the large amount of depreciation continued to burden the firm for years. There were no outside monitors reviewing the vice president’s accounting. Most of the Japanese expats in the US firm criticized his deceptive accounting as unethical, but no one reported it to the office in Japan. Even after he returned to Japan a few years ago, Seiji continued to make frequent visits to the US subsidiary as a senior advisor.

While the Japanese managers described this man as authoritarian and corrupt, white American managers described him as a friendly and nice person. This former vice president, in addition to manipulating accounts, substantially increased the salaries of a small number of the white American managers who were close to him. (He may have favored some American managers to enhance US–Japan managerial solidarity, but he also may have increased their salaries in order to enhance his authority over them and ensure his autonomy with regard to his account control.) At the same time, he substantially cut the company’s retirement co-pay for a large number of production workers. The production workers were resentful and continually asked for the reason behind this unequal treatment: why should the American managers receive significant raises while the production employees lost a large portion of their retirement? Seiji apparently did not think that improvement of the production workers’ lives was critical to recovering the firm’s profits. A few team leaders also remembered this individual as someone who had “restructured” lean production by eliminating major inspection requirements including quality circles for checking product quality; furthermore, the machine maintenance checkup list was so simplified that machines were not properly repaired anymore and were constantly overused. It is likely that he eliminated the machine inspection process in response to the requests of production managers and team leaders who were already overworked and complained that stopping machines for inspection delayed production.

Seiji successfully manipulated the firm and his American subordinates for his own benefit. His mismanagement, cover-up, and mistreatment of employees made the firm’s financial struggles worse while securing a promotion for himself. Shielding himself with the validation of the white American men, Seiji exemplified management masculinity with calculative individualism and compromised morals for the sake of reward and profit. From the management standpoint, the two budget manipulations discussed here took place in the context of Japanese management’s lack of long-term business strategies and leadership and mistrust between American workers and Japanese managers. Japanese managers were also under constant pressure to defend their performance to the headquarters in Japan.

In these instances, different types of fraternal bonds were built between Japanese managers and Americans. The first example shows that, with American production workers’ recognition, a Japanese manager could legitimize his purchase manipulation as a heroic and self-sacrificing act rather than a selfish and profit-motivated one. In the second example, the Japanese manager proved his financial virility to the American managers through his offer of individual raises for those men who may have, in return, legitimized his power. Even though both managers’ acts can be seen as egotistic and profit driven, they played differently with different groups of Americans.

Reassertion of White American Masculinity and Management by Intimidation

White American men have a sense of entitlement and wield their racial privileges over nonwhite men and women, and they resist the loss of such power (Kimmel 2013). They may engage in displays of their aggressive and confrontational manhood as a critical tool of management, criticizing nonwhite manhood as being too feminine to be in charge and forcing white women to obey white male authority. Some white American managers at the firm have employed the tactic of intimidation to assert their power over male engineers and white female employees; bullying the engineers for being slow, selfish, and too highly paid; and controlling the women’s behavior. They have also criticized the Japanese managers as lacking strength and forcefulness and insisted that the company be fully managed by white American men.

Robert was a large, talkative maintenance manager with his head entirely shaved. Born to a father who was a welder, Robert once worked at an American electrical firm as an engineer, then moved to the Japanese firm in the early 1990s. At the beginning of most of the meetings, he took time to brag about his performance, letting everybody know about the long list of machines he was in charge of, and explaining how much money he had saving in purchasing or repairing the machines. He finished his talk by complaining about the young engineers who were taking too long to fix machines, were unwilling to listen to him, and were receiving far larger salaries than most of the maintenance workers on his team. Robert constantly asserted his technical skills and knowledge of engineering and insisted that he ought to be promoted over both the maintenance and engineering teams, claiming that he could manage the two teams effectively.

All the engineers, including the Japanese engineers, and the white American women in the office (not those on the floor) thought promoting Robert would be a disaster for the firm, since he was a power-hungry bully and a dangerous man who constantly used threats to make others do what he wanted them to do. Two engineers complained that Robert would spread bad rumors and lies about those who did not obey him. Bullies often hyperfeminize the men they target, those who do not conform to their place in the male hierarchy (Kimmel 2008, 76). Robert repeatedly made fun of one engineer, Warren, for his slow work pace and detail-oriented work habits, even though Warren was known to be the smartest engineer at the firm and was of the most highly paid. Robert’s attacks on Warren may have come from his jealousy with regard to Warren’s high salary, technical expertise, and college engineering degree. Robert also may have targeted Warren due to his “feminine” traits such as being quiet, slow, and wearing nerdy glasses. Warren, who was anxious about this treatment, confided in the Japanese managers about his recent divorce and his health problems, claiming they were the causes of his slow pace of work. Whenever Yoshiki, another Japanese manager, tried to cover for Warren and stop Robert’s attacks on him, Robert mocked and criticized Yoshiki as being “too nice” to force Warren to complete his work.

Yoshiki, who was an engineer in addition to being a manager, was in charge of all the American engineers. There was a chronic shortage of engineers at the firm, and two more were about to leave the company for better salaries and benefits in other Japanese firms. This shortage also slowed down the overall work pace of the engineers. The maintenance workers who worked for Robert complained that the engineers were too difficult and territorial and unwilling to cooperate with other workers.

Robert and the maintenance workers said that the engineers should obey Robert, not Yoshiki, who was “weak.” They stressed the idea that Robert was a “real” manager, due to his embodiment of white American hegemonic masculinity, characterized by physical strength, aggression, and forceful leadership, and one who could conquer the challenge the firm was currently facing. Robert repeated these accusations in almost every meeting: that Yoshiki was too “soft,” too “nice,” and “weak,” lacking white working-class men’s masculine traits and incapable of properly supervising the American engineers.

The white American managers, who were all men, explicitly embraced Robert’s strength, believing it could force the slow engineers to get their work done on time. Patrick, another big man and the assistant vice president of the firm, criticized, with a smile, the Japanese managers’ inability to manage them. “American engineers cannot manage themselves. They can’t get their work done on time. They need a strong man. Robert knows how to manage them.” The black manager, the only nonwhite local manger, however, did not support Robert. The white American managers praised the idea of Robert being promoted to lead two teams, in maintenance and engineering, identifying themselves with the authority of white hegemonic manhood and simultaneously resisting the idea of their subordination to Japanese management. The white managers desired to displace Japanese managers and occupy the top positions at the firm. Patrick demanded more power for the American managers in the firm. “We should follow the management of Toyota USA so that Americans manage the firm 100 percent and the Japanese can all be consultants,” he would say in a raised voice at meetings. None of the Japanese managers liked Robert’s forceful diplomacy, but they could not come up with better ways to repair the machines faster. The vice president eventually assigned Robert to be the manager of both the engineering and maintenance teams, removing the Japanese manager.

White American managers did not hesitate to employ tactics of intimidation to control women workers. In the subsidiary where I worked, some white middle-aged women were frequently pressured to obey managers who reprimanded and yelled at them. Patrick asked Tracy, an accountant, not to request any overwork pay or vacation time because the company couldn’t accommodate that but also told her to finish all her work and keep to her deadlines. Tracy ended up working weekends for no pay.

Such behavior was not unusual for Patrick. He often berated Susan, a long-time worker in human resources, threatening to fire her; this was sometimes followed by Susan’s crying and leaving work in the middle of the day. Patrick blamed Susan for her “unprofessional” behavior such as leaving work earlier than others and being married to the manager of the rival Japanese firm. Patrick, along with some of the other men on the floor, said Susan might be a spy for the rival firm, leaking information to her husband because “she is just not trustworthy.” As far as working hours went, no one complained about some senior women in production who would leave work early, yet Patrick continually attacked Susan, who was seen as a candidate for the position of human resources manager, for not being an ideal worker.

The white men’s control over the white women extended to the women’s interactions with the Japanese men at the firm. Mary, the leader of the quality section, was often reprimanded by the general manager because she tried to talk to the Japanese managers about ongoing workplace problems such as theft and defect hiding. Mary confided in me that she was repeatedly told not to talk to the Japanese managers about any of these problems. She said that the American managers tried to keep all the production problems hidden from the Japanese managers.

White American managers formed a united front to mutually support white hegemonic manhood and present themselves as superior to the Japanese managers who resisted the tendency to lead with aggression and confrontation. They acted on their racial and gendered entitlement, using their privilege to criticize, intimidate, and control less masculine men, Japanese men, and white women, and believed that their strength and forcefulness were key to conquering the firm’s financial difficulties and remasculinizing the Japanese firm to an American standard.

Compensatory Masculinity and Defect Hiding

When the hegemonic ideal is unattainable, a man may compensate for his lack of hegemonic status by modifying his manhood acts and resisting his subordinate status (Schrock and Schwallbe 2009, 285–87). In this section, I argue that a shop-floor worker’s modification of teamwork and production processes were acts of compensatory masculinity. This African American man emulated hegemonic masculinity and disrupted the management’s emphasis on raising productivity. A workplace culture that long neglected defects and that normalized the racial and gender hierarchy also served to bolster his assertion of power over the team and its defect-hiding scheme.

At my firm, upper managers repeated, on a daily basis, the importance of raising productivity and lowering customer complaints, even though they did not suggest how to achieve these goals; they just continued to pressure production managers to do something. Each team, on average, produced 6.7 units per hour, but all teams were told to make 7 units per hour. The management explained that low productivity on a team meant that the workers needed to do more overwork to produce the same number of units, costing the firm extra money. Thus, productivity must be kept high in order to avoid delays and cost overruns. Also, the vice president said that the company’s recent increase in defects was mostly the result of human error and that if the workers carefully followed the standardized workflow and movements, the number of errors and defects should decline. Yet very few workers agreed with this. Many workers complained that machines were breaking because of the daily long hours of operation and that the Japanese office’s reluctance to replace them was making it more difficult for the workers to reach the daily production goal.

The managers used peer pressure and team competition as a method of control: workers were required to post their team’s number of defects, their productivity per hour, and their machine downtime on a board so that everyone could compare them. Among the eight teams in the firm, Pack B consistently demonstrated high productivity with a low number of defects. Eventually, however, the managers would come to learn that Pack B had been hiding a large number of defects for years.

Pack B was mostly under the control of a senior African American man, Darrell, who determined all schedules and the hours of work of team members as well as the production process. Not hesitating to show his hostility to women, Darrell would glare and yell at me when I was on the floor. It was obvious that Darrell was not doing much work, as he was so busy monitoring and talking to the team members. He would become anxious around Japanese managers whenever they were near Pack B. Darrell had worked for the firm for over twenty years and had long engaged in defect hiding as a member of Pack B.

Every day Darrell ordered team members to produce twice as many products as they needed to and then asked them to replace defective parts with parts that had no defects. Then, the workers would leave a large number of defective parts in the back of the plant so that people would not see them (although they were later found). By making twice as many products as others and by using twice as many materials and work hours, Pack B maintained an extremely low defect rate.

Darrell had informal authority to assign jobs to the members of his team. Andrea, one of two Bosnian American women who had just started working in Pack B, was concerned about her loss of work hours. Andrea was told that there would be no work on the weekends, when in reality she was just being excluded from those work shifts. When she complained about not getting to work on the weekends, Darrell yelled at her, intimidating her and telling her to leave the team. Darrell seemed to offer extra hours frequently to those whom he favored or those who needed some quick cash. One worker confided in me, “This team is run like an independent company. This guy does whatever he wants to do and no one stops him.” Andrea was fearful of Darrell, remembering past run-ins with him. Darrell’s son, Irvin, used to work at the firm, too, and was also quick to anger. One time he screamed that he would be back with his guns so that he could shoot everyone there and then he left. All the employees had to evacuate for the rest of the day, but Irvin did not come back to the workplace. Andrea reported these incidents to an African American team leader and some white production managers more than a few times, but they did not do anything to change the situation. The white managers told her to stay away from Darrell. In his management of the team by intimidation and exclusion of women, Darrell emulated manager masculinity and compensated for his lack of hegemonic status.

Previous research has associated such tactics as theft and pilferage on the part of manual workers with disobedience toward management. Indeed, Darrell’s defect-hiding practices and use of excess materials might mark his actions as an example of disobedience or resistance to management’s obsession with profits. In engaging in these actions, he also took advantage of the workplace negligence regarding defects and possibly managers’ distance from or lack of engagement with him.

Why didn’t the team leader and production mangers stop Darrell, given all the complaints from the workers? First, it may have been because of the firm’s chronic indifference to defective products. Team leaders and managers might not have considered Darrell’s actions as critically damaging to the firm. Or even if they did, managers and team leaders had normalized the custom of simply neglecting defects. Second, regardless of Darrell’s disruptive behaviors, team leaders and managers might have seen him as actually physically threatening, especially taking his son’s actions into consideration. In addition, the fact that he was an African American man in a white male-dominated workplace, where white men were in the positions of power, might have made the white managers reluctant to reprimand him, as it would make the racial hierarchy visible.

The workplace was white male-dominated, but the American workers did not discuss divisions based on race, gender, or nationality. The Japanese managers told me how the plant normalized white male authority, from which black and immigrant men (and women) were excluded. The Japanese managers saw white men constantly yelling at immigrant women who spoke with strong accents and who did not conform to the subdued images of white femininity. There were a few young female workers on the shop floor who were hired through family connections to the white men. The shop floor looked like a white family, headed by white men of all ages and young white women. There was only one African American manager out of all the managers in the office, who mostly distanced himself from the white managers. He complained to the Japanese managers that his compensation was lower than that of the white managers.

Just as the white managers explicitly relied on racialized images of Asian man in their interactions with Japanese managers, the white managers and workers might have been reluctant to say anything against Darrell partly because of the racialized image of hypermasculine African American manhood and partly because white men’s reprimanding of an African American man could expose racial hierarchies and white male privilege. Or Darrell himself might have relied on the stereotypical image of African American manhood to construct his authority over other workers and managers. Garfield (2010) found that African American men associate their assertion of masculinity with the value of self-determination, independence, and freedom from oppressive social conditions and inequality in America, and some of them see the use of violence as necessary to achieving power and respect as a black man. Darrell’s control of his team and expression of his compensated masculinity might have stemmed from his contestation not just of management but of American race relations in general. Thus, Darrell’s engagement in compensated masculinity may have been directed against hierarchies of both class and race.

Meanwhile, the production managers and team leaders may have been indifferent to managing defects and negligent with regard to Darrell’s behavior. The obvious defects should have been caught and the products removed during the early stages of production. But most inspectors suspected that the production teams were often intentionally ignoring defective products and passing them on to completion and shipping. A worker in the quality department complained about the Japanese management. “I don’t understand why the upper managers do not fire team leaders who do not do any work! American managers would immediately fire them.” A large number of production workers expressed frustration with deteriorating product quality and decreasing workplace standards and saw the Japanese managers as not exercising their authority and taking action appropriately. The top management’s excessive emphasis on productivity and profits and the production managers’ negligence of defects may have legitimized the shop-floor workers’ defects hiding.