Academic Culture: An Analytical Framework for Understanding Academic Work

Download or read book Academic Culture: An Analytical Framework for Understanding Academic Work written by Kazumi Okamoto and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: That we live in a world ruled and confused by cultural diversity has become common sense. The social sciences gave birth to a new theoretical paradigm, the creation of cultural theories. Since then, social science theorizing applies to any social phenomenon across the world exploring cultural diversities in any social practice—except the social sciences and how they create knowledge, which is is off limits. Social science theorizing seemingly assumes that creating knowledge does not know such diversities. In this book, Kazumi Okamoto develops analytical tools to study academic culture, analyze how social sciences create and distribute knowledge, and the influence the academic environment has on knowledge production. She uses the academy in Japan as a case study of how social scientists interpret academic practices and how they are affected by their academic environment. Studying Japanese academic culture, she reveals that academic practices and the academic environment in Japan show much less diversity than cultural theories tend to presuppose.