Abstract
This study analyses why and how academic inbreeding as a recruitment practice continues to prevail in Japan, a country with a mature higher education system, where high rates of academic inbreeding endure in most of the research-oriented universities in spite of several higher education reforms. Based on a qualitative analysis, we disclose three characteristics that lead academics to become inbred at Japanese universities. One characteristic—the adoption of “open recruitment processes” in detriment of “closed recruitment processes”—changed over time, limiting academic inbreeding practices, but two other characteristics remained unchanged over time: the “one university learning experience” and the “concentration of doctoral supervisors at the same university”. These latter characteristics represent difficult challenges to be tackled as they are also traditional characteristics of the Japanese higher education system. The research also shows that academic inbreeding practices are a means to assure organizational stability and institutional identity, features perceived as important by Japanese universities. A central challenge for the Japanese universities is then to guarantee these features without needing to rely on academic inbreeding practices to obtain them. However, devising policies to meet this challenge calls for institutional will to change, proactive strategies and time.
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Notes
For a in-depth analysis of the effect of prestige on hiring practices between university departments see Roebken (2007)
A further particularity of gakubatsu is that once hired, the academic cannot be fired and the universities need to retain the faculty member in spite of lack of productiveness or competence (Shimbori 1981).
The SEU set the conditions to be met in order for a university to be created as well as the regulations after its establishment.
The growth of the higher education system in the 1960s and 1970s was impressive. According to Oba (2007), the number of universities rose from 245 in 1960 to 420 in 1975, when in 1943 only 19 existed.
This position to be offered by the supervisor was often dependent on the opening of a vacancy in the “right” timing.
Several inbred interviewees mentioned that their learning path tends to be very narrowly focused on the research interests of the research group to which the supervisors at bachelor, master and doctoral level education belonged to.
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Horta, H., Sato, M. & Yonezawa, A. Academic inbreeding: exploring its characteristics and rationale in Japanese universities using a qualitative perspective. Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. 12, 35–44 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-010-9126-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-010-9126-9