This study explores the production, dissemination, and reception of the discourse of educational excellence and internationalisation in Japan's Designated National University Corporation System. The study frames the policy initiative within the longstanding goals of the Japanese government and demonstrates how the work of Michel Foucault helps…

The current study explored the relationship between test-based accountability and teachers' involvement in school-level decision-making and classroom autonomy, examining how this varied by country, specifically in the United States, Australia, South Korea, and Japan. Additionally, the study investigated whether this relationship differs based on…

International comparative ethnographic studies of ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) are difficult to conduct but worth the effort. Comparative studies featuring thick description and polysemic interpretations can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, expand the menu of the possible, expose the provincialism of national approaches, and…

Increased pressures of internationalization compel universities worldwide to search for successful education models and frameworks that can enhance their entrepreneurial status and international competitiveness. This study aims to explore the political interests, power dynamics, and consequences of transferring educational systems, models, and…

The ambitious 15-year agenda known as the Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015 by all members of the United Nations, contains a pledge that "no one will be left behind." This book aims to translate that bold global commitment into an action-oriented mindset, focused on supporting specific people in specific places who are…

Nowadays in Japan, people's social existence may become less well defined as changes are brought about by social shifting. Japan is simply shifting from a society model based on an industrial society to another model, so-called a consumer society. In terms of social structure, this means shifting from the idea of society and economy assuming the…

Addressing the root cause of Japanese higher education problems, the present literature-based study explores Japanese higher education's power relationship with one of the most influential stakeholders, the business world. It first draws attention to the incongruity between the business enterprises' proclaimed struggle with the securement of human…

This paper discusses human relationships with the natural world in Japanese educational policy. Based on two case studies, we argue that policy must recognize the cultural and spiritual ties that people in Japan have fostered in order to live well, which this paper considers to be part of "re-wilding education policy." We briefly review…

This volume offers a timely collection of research-based studies that engage with contemporary conditions of precarity across an array of locations, exploring how it is understood, experienced, and acted upon by educators in schools, universities, and nonformal educational spaces. Precarity presents as layered, unpredictable, destabilizing, and…

Internationalisation is a polyvalent policy discourse, saturated in conceptual and ideological ambiguity. It is an assemblage of commodification, exploitation and opportunity and is a container for multiple aspirations, anxieties, and affordances. It combines modernisation, detraditionalisation, and expansiveness, with knowledge capitalism,…

This article examines a case of what Olssen et al. (2004) call "managerial oppression" set in a faculty of international studies of a Japanese university. Japanese universities have, in recent times, been facing the financial pressures of a falling birthrate and dwindling enrolments. To remain solvent, some universities have had to…

This study explores the different ways in which the notion of multiculturalism in Japan has been influenced by various social and historical trajectories. Since the Japanese government started to promote "internationalization" in the 1980's, slogans such as "international exchange," "cultural exchange," and…

The result of an interdisciplinary seminar in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, this book reviews patterns of academic power in several nations. The authors are John H. Van de Graaff, Burton R. Clark, Dorotea Furth, Dietrich Goldschmidt, and Donald F. Wheeler. Separate chapters are devoted to the Federal Republic of…