Paper short abstract:

This talk examines how family-run universities in Japan have negotiated a major demographic decline since the 1990s. It identifies a number of 'inbuilt' strengths of family business which help account for the unexpected resilience of the private university sector in a period of crisis.

Paper long abstract:

Globally, private universities enrol one in three of all higher education students, while in Japan (which has the second largest higher education system in the world in terms of overall expenditure) almost 80% of all university students attend private institutions. According to some estimates up to 40% of these institutions are family businesses in the sense that members of a single family have substantive ownership or control over their operation. This talk examines how such universities in Japan have negotiated a period of major demographic decline since the 1990s: their experiments in restructuring and reform, the diverse experiences of those who worked and studied within them and, above all, their unexpected resilience. It argues that this resilience derives from a number of 'inbuilt' strengths of family business which are often overlooked in conventional descriptions of higher education systems and in predictions regarding the capacity of universities to cope with dramatic changes in their operating environment. This analysis underlines the need to employ a more actor-centred approach to balance the consensus-based functionalist paradigm which has tended to dominate the study of Japanese society.