Office Ladies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7079331 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tomoko Kurihara (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Publication date | 2007-02-15 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | OTHER |
| Venue | The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1002/9781405165518.wbeoso007 |
| OpenAlex | W4241679633 |
| ISBN | 9781405165518 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
Office lady” ( ofisu redì ), or in its shortened form OL ( ō eru ), is a term commonly used in Japan to describe female workers who are employed in submanagerial positions in white‐collar workplaces. In its popular usage, the term OL lacks specificity and usually refers to women who work in any office environment, in a firm of any size, and in any sector or occupation, whereas the scholarly work on OLs has tended to focus on women working in large companies employing over 1,000 people. Typically, OL refers to young unmarried women in their twenties and thirties, but its usage is flexible and may refer to the full range of marital statuses, including married individuals with or without children, and older, either single or widowed working women. The term OL was coined by the media in the 1960s to represent the greater numbers of women who had entered the labor market following the structural changes in the post‐war economy, mainly in the expansion of the service, wholesale, and retail industries. The emergence of the term appeared to mark the empowerment of women in society, suggesting that women were able to form an identity primarily based on their role as workers. In spite of this, for much of the twentieth century the image of the independent working woman in Japan was limited to her main role as a powerful consumer of high fashion and overseas travel. For this reason, in parallel to the feminist critiques of patriarchy and workplace employment practices, it seems that the term OL has acquired somewhat pejorative connotations, as keeping women on the periphery of economy, workplace, and society. From the late 1990s onwards, the term “career woman” has become a respectful self‐reference preferred among the new generation of OLs. Indeed, postmodernization and the expansion of knowledge‐intensive occupations have allowed a greater proportion of female workers to take up jobs in specialist clerical, professional, and managerial positions in the fields of banking, finance and retail distribution, and information technology
Business · Demographic economics · Economics · Empowerment · Patriarchy · Political science · Sociology · Tertiary sector of the economy · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Gender Studies · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Marketing
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |