Papers presented by Ai Hisano since 2019

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

"Gendered Personality as an Asset: 'Restaurant Girls' and Japanese Department Stores, 1900s–1930s"

Abstract:

Department stores have served as an important commercial and cultural institution that helped transform retailing systems, consumption patterns, and people’s tastes in many countries since the late-1840s when the first department store was born in Paris. Yet the adaptation of their business and its influence were contingent on social contexts. In Japan, department store restaurants became a landmark for Japanese shoppers not only to rest while shopping but also to enjoy occasional eating-out experiences with their families. Department store restaurants contributed to the restructuring of department stores not only by providing new food services but, more importantly, by offering emotional labor through their waitresses, or so-called 'restaurant girls,' who were mostly ages 15 to 18. These young female employees played an instrumental role in presenting the modern image of a department store in a highly gendered way. In analyzing restaurant girls’ emotional labor, I argue that their modernness rested on the nature of their work as much as on their appearance with Western hairstyles and dresses. Restaurant girls’ new form of labor entailed the incorporation of personality into business management. As service providers, their dispositions, including charming personalities associated with femininity, were significant prerequisites for employment. Once they were hired, the presentation of their feminine personality, particularly through a smile, constituted an important part of their job. By specifying a certain type of personality based on contemporary gender norms, department stores’ recruitment policies served to categorize and select 'appropriate' women and reinforce the idealized image of the gendered body and personal dispositions. In the modern commercial world, not only did the performance of personality become gendered, but it also became productive.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

"“Don’t Streamline Mother While I’m Gone”: Industrial Aesthetics in the Post-War United States"

Abstract:

This article explores how the expansion of new types of design—so-called industrial design—changed sensory factors of products in the United States during the post-World War II era. Industrial design as a profession was born during the Great Depression in the United States. In the following two decades, design became a part and parcel of business activities in various sectors, including electronic appliances, furniture, and consumer products. The post-World War II period was the beginning of a new era for industrial design as the second generation of industrial designers began to emerge, and the profession expanded substantially. Historians have explored how new technologies and new consumer products changed people’s feeling as well as lifestyles. But few have delineated how the makers of these technologies and products envisioned consumers’ new way of feeling about themselves and about the goods. This paper seeks to unpack the inner working of business strategies that created new commercial culture and products that altered people’s sensibility. I analyze how industrial designers sought to understand the influence of design on people’s sensory experience by asking the following two-interrelated questions: (1) How industrial designers envisioned and created new aesthetics in product design; and (2) How, or if, this new aesthetics altered business strategies and people’s sensibility in mass consumer society. Here I use the term “aesthetics” to refer to wholistic human perception and sensation, following the original definition derived from the ancient Greek word Aisthesis. Because design influences almost every aspect of human life, the aesthetics of design should be understood not merely as the appearance of objects but as a significant element concerned with entire sensorium of the human body.

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2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

"Between Global and Local: The Dynamics of the Food Industry"

Abstract:

This paper examines the twinned processes of globalization and localization in the food industry from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. A striking feature of the globalization of the food industry has been that both very large and very small business enterprises have been agents in the process. Large multinational corporations are much more visible in the market due to their market dominance, financial power, and brand publicity. Yet, smaller enterprise and individual entrepreneurs were crucial actors in enriching local, as well as global, food culture by taking advantage of their cultural knowledge and ethic networks. An equally striking feature has been that in both cases there has been a great deal of localization, intentional or unintentional. The globalized food market today is a product of co-creation by these agents. The interplay between the global and the local has been a crucial factor that has helped shape organizational behavior in multiple industries. The importance of local conditions in particular has attracted attention from scholars interested in how and why local communities continue to matter for organizations after the increasing expansion of global networks and connections. This paper moves this body of literature forward to reveal the complexities of globalization and localization processes. From an array of recognizable labels on supermarket shelves to personalized fast food and beverage orders, in today’s highly globalized culinary environments, people are accustomed to access to standardized food products wherever and whenever they eat. Yet, locality continues to matter enormously. Because what people eat is deeply rooted in their own culture and local conditions, including the availability of ingredients, preferred taste and flavor, and tradition and beliefs associated with food, the food industry provides a unique perspective in how the global and the local interplay in the dynamic development of an industry.

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