Working as a reporter in a Japanese newspaper: Between organizational logic and occupational logic

Abstract

In this article, we examine the relationship between employment attachment to a firm and affiliation to a professional group by focusing on the case of journalists in the Japanese daily press. Based on a lengthy ethnographic observation carried out in the newsroom of one of the country's major daily newspapers as well as on a series of 72 interviews, this work first shows how the standards in force in major Japanese firms give media companies a central role in the organization of the profession: they select new reporters, train them, manage the careers that take place in the internal market and provide their employees with a monopoly on access to institutional sources. But the study also reveals that an occupational logic coexists alongside the organizational logic, through professional socialization outside the company and the evaluation of work by peers. Finally, the analysis focuses on solutions provided by managers in a context of crisis for the traditional press, and some decisions upset the balance between organizational logic and business logic in favour of the latter. The Japanese daily press thus provides an example (very atypical compared to other research subjects in the sociology of work and professions) of management's initiative to reinforce an initially weak occupational logic.