Lecture: ‘Men at Work’: What Does Professional Baseball Demonstrate In Contemporary Japan?

December 13, 2001

Lecture: ‘Men at Work’: What Does Professional Baseball Demonstrate In Contemporary Japan?
Professor William Kelly (Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies, Department of Anthropology, Yale University)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. & Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 PM

One of the sillier contrasts of professional baseball in the US and in Japan is the claim that the Japanese athletes are grim “men at work” whereas we Americans are spirited “boys at play.” Like most national characterizations, it has a kernel of insight wrapped in layers of self-serving stereotypes. Japanese have more clearly recognized that professional baseball teams are workplaces, that they are constructed socially of work relations and ideologically of authority claims. In particular, since the mid-1960s, an effort has been made to construct them as corporate workplaces. Professor Kelly asks why this came about and why it has not been particularly successful, and considers what audiences have made of this thoroughly compromised organizational form. He proposes that a central fascination of baseball fans is savoring the gaps between the corporate image mongering and a more complex, occasionally sordid reality of team life and player careers.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology