Please join us for what will be an invigorating discussion with one of the most renowned authorities on education in Japan! The Japanese Studies Centre is pleased to welcome Professor Roger Goodman (University of Oxford) as a speaker on the topic of Family-Run Universities in Japan.

INSIDE A FAMILY-RUN UNIVERSITY IN JAPAN

PRESENTED BY PROFESSOR ROGER GOODMAN, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Date: Thursday, 2 September 2021

Time: 5-6pm Melbourne Time

Please register here to receive a zoom link.

Abstract: According to some estimates, up to 40% of Japanese private universities are family businesses in the sense that members of a single family have substantive ownership or control over their operation. This talk examines how such universities have negotiated a period of major demographic decline since the 1990s: their experiments in restructuring and reform, the diverse experiences of those who worked and studied within them and, above all, their unexpected resilience. It argues that this resilience derives from a number of ‘inbuilt’ strengths of family business which are often overlooked in conventional descriptions of higher education systems and in predictions regarding the capacity of universities to cope with dramatic changes in their operating environment. This analysis underlines the need to employ a more actor-centred approach to balance the consensus-based functionalist paradigm which has tended to dominate the study of Japanese society.

Speaker Bio: Professor Roger Goodman is the Nissan Institute Professor of Japanese Studies and Warden of St. Antony’s College at The University of Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences in 2013, was Chair of Academy’s Council between 2015-19 and has been President of the Academy since 2020. He has published three major monographs, Japan’s International Youth (1990), Children of the Japanese State (2000) and (with Jeremy Breaden) Family-Run Universities in Japan (2020), and has been the editor or co-editor of a further ten volumes. Most of his work is also available in Japanese editions. He has supervised almost forty doctoral theses on topics ranging from Shinto shrines to volleyball coaches, teacher unions to karaoke, hikikomori to firefighters.