Japan's small-scale family enterprises

Large firms are deemed to have powered Japan's growth through their real successes in generating output, raising productivity, absorbing and creating innovations through large-scale R&D, and creating and developing "the Japanese management system" of industrial relations, internal decisionmaking and close intragroup affiliations. Big business plays a highly visible, broad political and social role, financing political leaders and their factions, influencing national economic and other policy, serving as a role model, and preaching its business ideology. It is a system of male managerial elites dealing on equal footing in carefully developed formal and informal networks with counterpart elites -- central government bureaucrats, elite politicians, and others holding power at the top of the pyramid of Japan's hierarchical society. Some characterize big business as the brain of Japan's economy. If that is the case, then small enterprise is the heart and the backbone of the economic, political, and social realms in Japan. In particular small-scale family enterprises have long been and continue to be a large and dynamic element in the political economy of Japan -- in entrepreneurship, job creation, output and political clout. Small business makes up the bottom two-thirds (or more) of Japan's social and economic pyramid

Learning masculinities in a Japanese high school rugby club

This paper draws on research conducted on a Tokyo high school rugby club to explore diversity in the masculinities formed through membership in the club. Based on the premise that particular forms of masculinity are expressed and learnt through ways of playing (game style) and the attendant regimes of training, it examines the expression and learning of masculinities at three analytic levels. It identifies a hegemonic, culture-specific form of masculinity operating in Japanese high school rugby, a class-influenced variation of it at the institutional level of the school and, by further tightening its analytic focus, further variation at an individual level. In doing so this paper highlights the ways in which diversity in the masculinities constructed through contact sports can be obfuscated by a reductionist view of there being only one, universal hegemonic patterns of masculinity

Researching shadow education: Methodological challenges and directions

Research on shadow education has considerably increased in volume and has helped to improve understanding of the scale, nature, and implications of the phenomenon. However, the field is still in its infancy. Literature on shadow education reflects confusion over terms and parameters, and data suffer from challenges in securing evidence from actors who may be unwilling or unable to respond to enquiries in a clear manner. Particular care is needed in cross-national and cross-cultural comparisons. Nevertheless, the trajectory of improvement in both conceptualisation and instrumentation gives ground for confidence that shadow education will be progressively better documented and better understood. © Education Research Institute, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea 2010.published_or_final_versionSpringer Open Choice, 01 Dec 201