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This article discusses the topic of women's careers in Japan, focusing on the diversifying changes that have occurred since the 1940s. The article highlights various disciplines that have contributed to the study of women's careers, including labor economics, social psychology, and pedagogy. It also mentions several specific studies that have been conducted on women's careers in Japan, covering topics such as career formation, maternity leave, and the impact of women's work on family life. The article includes a special issue that explores different aspects of women's careers within the context of these diversifying changes. The issue covers topics such as mentoring, beauty product salespeople, gender integration in the military, female entrepreneurs, labor migration, and career development in consumer movements. The article concludes by noting that these diversifying changes have had both positive and negative impacts on women's lives, with increased autonomy and control simultaneously occurring. [Extracted from the article]

Process-oriented social research is a type of social research which theoretically emphasizes the notion of time and/or empirically stresses the significance of process-produced data. Therefore, this type of research has to be especially conscious of time. This special issue introduces several recent studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the entrepreneurial processes of Thai female returning migrants. A phenomenological qualitative research method was employed at the individual, household, and community levels. The results revealed that most female returning migrant workers were married, aged between 26–45 years, and majority of them had graduated from high school. They migrated to South Korea, Taiwan, and Israel, both legally and illegally. They worked in the industrial, agricultural, and service sectors. When female migrants returned to their origins, they worked as agriculture or livestock entrepreneurs, and business operators. There are three steps to becoming an entrepreneur: 1) Opportunity Recognition; 2) Opportunity Exploitation; and 3) Value Creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various hypotheses have been used to examine gender inequality in careers, while at the same time comparative and historical sociology has developed around certain areas of interest. This introduction clarifies that there is a need for a comparative and historical sociology specifically related to women's careers. It presents the rationale for this special issue, which gathers articles opening gateways to further research in this vein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the works of classical sociologists, this study demonstrates that the "socio-cultural network analysis" is a "process-oriented methodology". "Sociocultural network" is a concept originally proposed on the basis of "thick comparison" studies conducted of two Thai villages; it includes both cultural elements and social actors. Different from the early classical sociologists (Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer), the later classical sociologists (Georg Simmel, Émile. Durkheim, Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Talcott Parsons) utilized the terms "network" and "process" and thereby prepared the basis for process-oriented methodology. Among them, only Simmel, Weber and Elias created a direct portal to process-oriented methodology by employing those two terms in a significant and interconnected way and in their philosophical, historical and comparative studies. Thus, the socio-cultural network analysis can be regarded as a descendant of these three sociologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "process" concept is particularly crucial especially for historical and comparative sociology. This paper explains the objective of this HSR Focus; after referring to the term "process-oriented" in related human and social sciences, it necessitates the examining "process-oriented" theories in historical and comparative sociology from the viewpoint of "process-generated data." Finally the paper indicates the duality of "process-oriented" theories as a tentative summary of results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]