Vanguard
Designing Work
Professor Mitsuyo Hanada has, long, been investigating the concept of work in light of the relational nature of society,organizations, and individuals. He strongly advocates the importance of hands-on work relating the issues. He shared with us his views, drawing from the experiences he has gained and practices over last three decades.
HANADA, Mitsuyo
ProfessorFaculty of Policy Management
Real World over Theory
I studied psychology in university.
Unlike today, psychology was not a field that attracted many students
in those days. Keio University’s Department of Psychology where I
studied was a particularly small department, and it was a unique one,
too, in that most of my classmates also went on to become educators
and researchers. During my university years, I mainly looked at
psychological phenomena using the tool of experimental psychology. I
had always been interested in the fields of social psychology and
educational psychology, and I started to conduct experiments and
research into how a person’s social backgrounds influences his or
her outlook and way of thinking. After graduating with a bachelor’s
degree from Keio, I wanted to study a broader academic field, such as
educational psychology and organizational behavior, and decided to
study in the United States. Rather than conducting theoretical research, though, I wanted to take a hands-on approach and explore
the actual behavior of individuals.
Learning from Hands-on Work
I enrolled at the University of
Southern California graduate program and earned two master’s
degrees—one in educational psychology and one in sociology—and a
Ph.D. in sociology. I did not hole up in the lab for my studies,
though. I learned about society in real-life settings, and I really
learned a lot. In the area of pedagogy, for example, I studied school
counseling and served as a school psychologist. I was involved in
supporting the social integration of students with severe
disabilities. I also helped to create frameworks for volunteer-based
community activities. The United States adopts an administrative
system composed of states, counties, and cities/towns. In very
special cases, however, there are communities that choose not to
incorporate as cities or towns. In other words, the residents of a
community can decide not to adopt the administrative structure of
city or town. In such cases, public services are provided directly by
the county. A variety of problems arise as a result, though, and
support organizations staffed by volunteers are created to act in
place of the city or town as consultants and intermediaries between
the residents and the county. I offered counseling services regarding
education at one such organization. In the area of organizational
science and sociology, I conducted research on how to support
corporations and factories with a multinational, multiethnic
workforce in their efforts to encourage employees to have a sense of
unity and a positive work attitude while allowing each other to
retain their unique individuality. While doing this research, I also
provided consulting services in related activities at corporations
facing this challenge.
Putting My Real-World Experience to Work
After receiving my graduate degrees, I
continued my research and hands-on work in the United States. I had a
growing sense, though, that I wanted to look at society from a
slightly different perspective. Just at that time, the SANNO
Institute of Management invited me to join them in creating a new
kind of university—one with an entirely new structure. I love to
create new things and I had many ideas percolating in my mind at that
time so I decided to return to Japan to get involved in designing
this new university. It was 1978. While mentoring students at the
newly established SANNO University, I also worked with Japanese
companies that were entering overseas markets. I was helping them
create support programs for local employee training. In those days,
Japanese companies were just starting to set up local affiliates
overseas, and very little was known yet about how to manage and train
locally hired employees, develop their sense of belonging in the
organization, and successfully launch a factory or company. During my
years in the United States, I had had the experience of supporting
people in various life circumstances. Also around that time,
psychology-based corporate management packages had started to be
available in Japan. I was able to apply my experience and modify
these foreign-made management packages to fit for Japanese
corporations in expanding overseas. I worked closely with
corporations in every aspect of the process, from on-site hiring
activities that required me to make extended stays overseas, to
employee training and team-building as well as the development of
methods for the corporations to provide ongoing support to their new
factory or company.
Creating Something Entirely New
Just when I was sensing that the work
with SANNO University was at a good stopping point for me, I was
presented with an opportunity to participate in the launching of the
Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus and I decided to take up the
challenge of this new creative adventure. I envisioned and created
classes where students could learn by participating in society even
after coming to SFC. I designed classes where, for example, students
could participate as volunteers or interns at different organizations
and groups. Today such a class that offers students an opportunity to
work in a corporate setting would be called an internship. SFC was
new in those days, though, so when the first and second cohorts were
heading toward graduation we needed to get the word out to society at
large and particularly to corporate human resource departments about
the merits of the kind of students we were producing. In this way, we
hoped to support students’ job hunting efforts and career
development. Every week corporate HR officers were invited to come to
SFC and watch a class and see what kind of students our campus was
creating. It is quite hard to raise the name recognition of a new
academic faculty among corporate HR departments, but we worked hard
to develop and implement a framework to achieve exactly that. Looking
back on it now, it was a satisfying and enjoyable time.
Career Resource Laboratory
In 1999, I launched the Career Resource
Laboratory as one of the first laboratory at the Keio Research
Institute at SFC. The Career Resource Laboratory teams up with
corporations and assists them in creating internal frameworks and
programs to support each employee in autonomously crafting his or her
own career. We are not “outside consultants.” We form a single
team with the company representatives and brainstorm and take action
together. To do this, it is crucial that we have a firsthand
understanding of the perspective of employees in the various work
positions. We also place emphasis on developing trainers so that the
program takes root and can operate successfully even after we are no
longer involved. There are many, many package programs available, but
I think it is the university’s mission to provide support developed
by starting from a zero base and considering matters from the on-site
perspective. It is also the university’s responsibility to innovate
and create new proposals through an ongoing process of trial and
error.
Moving Forward Constantly
For the past five or six years, I have
been involved in a Japan International Cooperation Agency program
where government officials in charge of vocational education and HR
training officers at major corporations in developing nations and
countries facing industrial development challenges are invited for a
few weeks to Japan and together we create career education and
vocational education programs. What kind of vocational education
program would be suitable for a given nation? What can we do to
ensure that the education programs and packages are easy to
understand? We develop educational materials to create a positive
work mindset, an attitude where each employee has a sense of
ownership for his or her job. We clearly emphasize that work is not
just a question of skills and knowledge, but is also a question of
having a positive work attitude. I am confident that this is a
critical core principle, true at organizations and corporations in
any nation. To build this attitude requires clear principles and a
solid vision regarding the content of the vocational and career
education as well as easy-to-understand educational materials. I am
engaged in such activities because I think they are important for a
betterment of everyday life in all corners of society.
A Brief Background of Professor
HANADA, Mitsuyo
Professor Hanada received his bachelor’s degree from the Department of Psychology of Keio University’s Faculty of Letters in 1971 and moved to the United States that same year. He enrolled at the University of Southern California where he received a master’s degree in educational psychology in 1974, a master’s degree in sociology in 1976, and a Ph.D. with distinction in sociology in 1978. He was a lecturer at the Department of Sociology at California State University, Los Angeles; professor at the School of Management and Information Science at SANNO University; and later director of the Global Management Research Center at that same university. In 1991, he joined the Faculty of Policy Management at Keio University as professor. Today he heads the Career Resource Laboratory, part of the Keio Research Institute at SFC. Professor Hanada specializes in human resource and career development and is involved in research and hands-on work in a wide range of areas, including international HR management systems and the design of new HR organizational paradigms. His major journal articles include “Jinji seido ni okeru kyoso genri no jittai” [The Principle of Competition in Human Resource Management Systems] (winner of the Fiscal 1987 Takamiya Award for most outstanding article from the Academic Association for Organizational Science; Organizational Science, 1987), “Implementation of Human Resource Management Systems Based upon Individual Career Goals” (Hitotsubashi Business Review, 1989), and “Koa jinzai no kino to joken” [Core Human Resources: Their Functions and Conditions] (Diamond Harvard Business Review, 1995).
(23 November 2010)
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