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Japanese University Reform — Hybridity in Governance and Management

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Abstract

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, looking both at historical features of Japanese universities and more specifically at the 2004 reform that established the National University Corporations. I then discuss how the Japanese university reforms compare with the main reform trends at European universities. Finally, I explain Japanese university reforms in terms of three organizational theory perspectives — an instrumental, a cultural and an imitation perspective.

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Notes

  1. IAIs are often associated with NPM, as are the Next Steps agencies introduced in the UK in 1988. Seen in a wider historical context this is debatable, however. Many countries, like the Scandinavian ones, have had this independent agency form for several hundred years, and in Sweden it has even existed since the 16th century. Nevertheless, for countries with a traditionally integrated structure, IAIs of course represent increased autonomy, and the modern IAIs may have more built-in autonomy than the traditional ones, thus resembling the corporate form more closely.

  2. The first initiatives to transform Japanese national universities into corporations were launched back in the 1960s and 1970s, before the general emergence of NPM reforms (Yamamoto, 2004).

  3. But the public universities have two-third of the graduate students, dominated by the natural sciences (Yamamoto, 2004).

  4. So these actors were very sceptical about whether more formal autonomy in reality meant more autonomy and not more control.

  5. An interesting exception is that this does not include or apply to the salaries of faculty members. Since the standard student/teacher ratio is laid down by law, this had led to more frequent hiring of part-time academic personnel to save money. Universities were also hit by a more general decision to save 5% of personnel costs in government administration organizations during the period 2006–2010.

  6. There is also increased differentiation within this group, with some of the best universities, like Tokyo University, faring better financially than the others.

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1097, Blindern, Oslo, 0317, Norway

    Tom Christensen

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Christensen, T. Japanese University Reform — Hybridity in Governance and Management. High Educ Policy 24, 127–142 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/hep.2010.28

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