EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A Symbolic Framing of Exploitative Firms: Evidence from Japan

Jungwon Min ()
Additional contact information
Jungwon Min: Inha University

Journal of Business Ethics, 2024, vol. 190, issue 3, No 4, 589-605

Abstract: Abstract Symbols can be used to mask or embellish firms’ exploitative labor practices. The present study defines exploitative firms’ abuse of symbolic management using legitimate symbolic terminologies to embellish their demanding working conditions as symbolic framing and examines it in the Japanese context. Because of strong social criticism for exploitative practices, firms are under pressure to avoid giving an exploitative impression to stakeholders, particularly job seekers in recruitment. This study argues that exploitative firms respond to these pressures by embellishing their descriptions of the hard-working conditions at the firm, using certain symbolic expressions. To test this argument, this study examined recruitment advertising of 1238 Japanese firms between 2006 and 2017 and analyzed their ideal candidate profile (ICP) statement—a description of personal attributes that align with the firms’ working conditions—based on topic modeling. The results showed that exploitative firms tend to frame their working conditions in the ICP statement as ‘challenging work,’ which acknowledges the demanding work environment but frames it positively. This tendency was strengthened for firms with younger employees. The results provide the current literature with new insights regarding the dark side of symbolic management.

Keywords: Exploitative firms; Symbolic management; Symbolic framing; Topic modeling; Recruitments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-023-05404-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:190:y:2024:i:3:d:10.1007_s10551-023-05404-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-023-05404-1

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:190:y:2024:i:3:d:10.1007_s10551-023-05404-1