Abstract
Beginning in the 1990s, the Japanese economy entered into a prolonged period of alternating low growth and decline, during which Japanese companies began to introduce organizational and policy changes in an attempt to restore their economic performance. This thesis employed the perspective of social exchange to examine how these changes impacted the relationships between company and employees through a meta-synthesis of existing case studies of large Japanese electrical and electronic manufacturers. It was found that the company actions on the whole increased the flexibility of the relationships between company and employees. While one impact of the increased flexibility was to allow greater opportunities for women and to accommodate a greater diversity of individual circumstance, the actions also had the consequence of reducing the overall status of employees and weakening relationships of social exchange.