Although scholars in various academic fields have a keen interest in the social institutions that reproduce the university system, generally their gaze has been averted from a close analysis of the professors themselves. This volume aims to initiate a project of describing academic traditions at universities in East Asia. The present neoliberal discourses of university reform amplify the need for just such an ethnographic study of the professoriate. How does change toward institutional models resembling the Western university affect the traditional, local cultures of the professoriate in...

This monograph is a substantial contribution to our knowledge of the internal workings of a Japanese university, focussing on the world view of the professor. In this anthropological case study of a private university in urban Tokyo conducted through extended participant observation, Gregory Poole, at once both an insider and outsider, tells an ethnographic story that explicates a professoriates working world.
The author addresses one basic problem-how do Japanese professors configure their working world? In answering this research question, he demonstrates how the present climate of...

This monograph is a substantial contribution to our knowledge of the internal workings of a Japanese university, focussing on the world view of the professor. In this anthropological case study of a private university in urban Tokyo conducted through extended participant observation, Gregory Poole, at once both an insider and outsider, tells an ethnographic story that explicates a professoriates working world.
The author addresses one basic problem-how do Japanese professors configure their working world? In answering this research question, he demonstrates how the present climate of...