Narrative Management in Corporate Japan

Scandals and failures in some of the best known international Japanese-owned companies have shown that there is sometimes a considerable difference between the public and internal narratives of Japanese firms. This book explores the extent to which Japanese firms’ public claims reflect wider reality.


Exploring how and why corporate narrative-management is ‘accepted’ or ‘rejected’ by external and internal audiences in Japan, the book clarifies what narrative-management means for Japanese organizations. It argues that the role of narrative-management has become much more prevalent in Japan in recent years, but that it does not serve quite the same role as it does in the Western environments where the theory and practice first emerged. The author presents interview-based case studies within four very different large Japanese organisations, all of which have deployed and loudly announced new restructuring plans based largely on Western models of corporate ‘best practice’. The book aims to describe and account for these Japanese corporate narratives, and asks what they are, why they are deployed and who believes in them.


As the first narrative-related work in the Japanese context, this volume provides an insight into the development of Japanese narrative-management. It will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese Business, International Business and Organizational Studies.