This book clarifies the fundamental difference between North America-based instrumental motivation and Korea (and East Asia)-specific competitive motivation by which the EFL learners' excessive competition to be admitted to famous universities and to be hired at a large-scale conglomerate is the main source of L2 motivation. It enables readers to…

Food safety and quality assurance systems have emerged as a key mechanism of food governance in recent years and are also popular among alternative agrofood movements, such as the organic and fair trade movements. Rural sociologists have identified many problems with existing systems, including corporate cooptation, the marginalization of small…

This policy profile on education in Japan is part of the "Education Policy Outlook" series, which presents comparative analysis of education policies and reforms across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Building on the OECD's substantial comparative and sectorial policy knowledge base, the…

University reforms around the world reflect many of the ideas and measures associated with the New Public Management (NPM) reform wave that emerged in Australia and New Zealand in the early 1980s. However, they also display features of the post-NPM reforms introduced in the last decade. In this article I focus on university reforms in Japan,…

In the era of globalisation, competition has also become global. In higher education, countries worldwide are attaching increasing importance to international ranking exercises and subscribing to the "world-class universities" paradigm, complemented by various strategies to benchmark with leading universities in order to enhance the…

This paper suggests that as university missions have adapted to accommodate major developments associated with, for instance, mass higher education and internationalisation agendas, university workforces have diversified. They now, for instance, incorporate practitioners in areas such as health and social care, and professional staff who support…

The rapid development of higher education in the postwar period has given rise to various problems, and higher education studies in Japan have developed in response to them. What have been the major issues, and how did academic research respond to them, in postwar Japan? This article delineates an outline of higher education studies in general,…

This study focuses on aspects of the Changing Academic Profession survey of 2007-08 that describe the place of faculty in their institutions. The authors examine the following aspects of institutional life: (1) the faculty role in institutional governance; (2) who evaluates their teaching and research; (3) the locus of their loyalties as between…

The development of world-class universities is high on the policy agenda of governments across the globe. China's 985 Project is among the earliest national initiatives to concentrate research funding to build world-class universities. Ten years after it was initiated, the project has enabled selected institutions to improve their research and…

The Entrepreneurial University is a failed idea. This is not to disparage the entrepreneurial activities of faculty, graduates and students. Neither is it to criticise industry-sponsored research and co-authorship. University research and higher education have a role in innovation. However, if entrepreneurialism is institutionalised as a policy of…

This book grew out of the experience of a European Union Thematic Network of the same title, and focuses on aspects of the complex and varying relationships between globalisation, Europeanisation and Education. The volume is divided into two parts: Part One: Governance and the Knowledge Economy, focuses on how the discourses of a Knowledge Economy…

Japan's higher education system, in which private universities and colleges play an important part, has embarked on far-reaching reform in the 1990s. Its main objective was to free the national (public) universities from tight control by the central government and to give them more autonomy. In light of dramatic demographic changes, especially a…

Political, economic, and social explanations of higher education reform, and the very definition of "reform," are the main departure points of this volume. The introduction uses the examples of Canada, Austria, Germany, and Japan to show that in all these countries, reform has meant reduced state funding and control and increased…

As an analysis of context and rationale, and of the changing strategies and practice since the early 1990s, this article identifies the major arrangements for assuring and enhancing educational quality and touches on their characteristics, with a focus on the Japanese national universities. The effects of, and issues raised by, current strategies…

As higher education has grown and state funding has been constrained, the financial sustainability of institutions of higher education (HE) has become an issue for policy makers and for those who govern and manage these institutions. The challenge for governments is to ensure that increasingly autonomous institutions respond to public interest…