Ranking Regime and the Future of Vernacular Scholarship

World university rankings and their global popularity present a number of farreaching impacts for vernacular scholarship. This article employs a multidimensional approach to analyze the ranking regime’s threat to local scholarship and knowledge construction through a study of Japanese research universities. First, local conditions that have led to the perpetuation of the world university rankings are examined. Next, the use of bibliometric indicators in performance assessment, a critical consequence of the popularization of the world university rankings, is tested against two prevailing factors in Japanese academia: the bipolar character of academic publishing and institution-centered audit. Despite high-flying idealism, the quest to improve positions in the rankings may fall short of addressing real needs of enhancing individual performance in pursuit of globally relevant research and ensuring equity among different generations of scholars. The study also points to the precarious future of vernacular scholarship, as the rankings celebrate audit culture and export its norms as well as an increasingly inwardlooking propensity of Anglo-American academic circles to the rest of the world.

Industrial Competitiveness Council attended by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and several of his cabinet ministers.Among other priorities, these key strategies called for the creation of worldleading knowledge hubs by "globalizing" both human resources and operational systems of universities.Such university reform, if successful, is expected to boost the international stature of Japanese universities, leading to their improved position in the world rankings.The government subsequently announced a plan to allocate targeted, large-scale funds of 200 to 400 million yen per year for up to ten years to the nation's twenty-some research institutions to enhance their international competitiveness.Only institutions that passed a prescreening, which incorporated an assessment of paper production and citations, were eligible to apply.
Although Shimomura did not specify during his interview the rankings and league tables in which Japanese universities were expected to improve their performances, a document submitted to the Council1 clearly earmarked the results of the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings.In addition, the same document identified "international" and "citation" indices as two areas in which Japanese universities are particularly lagging behind their peers overseas.Thus, universities are expected to improve their performances by making considerable efforts in these "weak" areas.
The less overt but perhaps more profound impact of Shimomura's announcement was that it indirectly endorsed the use of commercial world university rankings as a tool to assess national higher education policy outcomes.Although such appropriation may seem unwarranted, the Japanese government is hardly alone in its efforts to align university reform goals with methodologies employed by ranking organizations.Some neighboring East and Southeast Asian states had earlier embarked on creating "world-class", "top" or "excellent" universities, 2 employing language that tacitly reflects the desire to be listed among the top universities in the world university rankings.
Despite the world university rankings lacking "validity, rigor, or meaning of value" (Boulton, 2010, p. 5), universities are not only "tempted" to improve their performance specifically to meet rankers' requirements (Rauhvargers, 2011, p. 15) but are now driven to do so by state authorities.With the increased clout of university rankings, there is a growing importance bestowed on institutional prestige.It is no longer "the quality of individual students within national systems that are benchmarked, but the quality of these national education and training systems as a whole" (Brown, Lauder & Ashton, 2008, p. 133).As many university rankings also publicize "by country" scores (x numbers of universities in the top 200, for example), they look as much like Olympic medal counts as a "beauty contest" (Cantwell & Taylor, 2013, p. 201).
A quest to raise the global profile and reputation of flagship research universities is reported prevalent among institutions and policy-makers worldwide (e.g.Altbach & Balán, 2007;Hazelkorn, 2008).Some use the rankings as a policy instrument to evaluate the performance of universities (Hazelkorn, 2008;Deem, Mok & Lucas, 2008), reflecting problematic "confusion" of rankings with evaluation and accreditation tools (Hazelkorn, 2008, p. 211).Asian or East Asian governments, in particular, are said to be particularly "sensitive to rankings" (Lo, 2013, p. 462; see also Shin & Cummings, 2010, pp. 581-2).Consequently, higher education institutions and scholars in the region are exposed to pressure to perform and excel in a manner compatible with the ranking systems.
For instance, in South Korea, many institutions employ the same standard measures to assess research performance as those used by the university rankings, regardless of academic field.Such evaluation typically favors publications and citations in "international" journals over their domestic counterparts (Shin & Cummings, 2010, pp. 591-2).As a result, "soft-discipline scholars" are often disadvantaged in faculty hiring, promotion and remuneration considerations (Shin & Cumming, 2010, pp. 591-3).In Taiwan, scholars collectively protested against the government's blanket use of indexed journal indicators as research evaluation criteria through an on-line petition.Humanities and social science scholars, in particular, objected to the devaluation of and disregard for their research accomplishments (Chu, 2009;Chou, 2014).Similar concerns are raised in different national contexts concerning diminishing interest in research that addresses local needs (Chou, Lin & Chiu, 2013;Deem et al., 2008, p. 91;Kang, 2009).
Against such a background, this article analyzes the pervasive impact of the world university rankings for vernacular scholarship and knowledge through a study of Japanese research universities.It first analyzes local conditions that have led to the perpetuation of the world university rankings in a non-English language academic context, where blanket application of standardized and monolingual parameters is particularly problematic (for Japan, see Ishikawa, 2012).Factors examined here include: the "decline" of domestic universities scandalized in the media; growing corporate demand for globally savvy graduates; allegation of insularism among students of leading Japanese universities; and inter-ministerial rivalry for shares of diminishing state funds.Together these factors form fertile ground for university rankings to thrive as legitimatized denominators of national competitiveness.
Next, the article focuses on the wider acceptance of bibliometric indicators 3 in performance assessment as a critical consequence of the popularization of university rankings and their influence over vernacular scholarship.Here, two dimensions of Japanese academic society, the bipolar character of academic publishing and an institution-centered audit system, are highlighted as posing particular challenges under the growing influence of the global ranking regime.This section first provides an overview of academic publishing in Japan, within which resides a bipolarity that juxtaposes autonomy and dependency.It goes on to argue that English-language paper and citation data omit significant segments of Japan's academic research, and are therefore unfit to accurately assess the performance of scholars in Japan.Although humanities and social science scholarship remains rooted in the national-language medium, overwhelming proportions of research articles by scholars in natural science, engineering and biomedical disciplines are published in international 3 "Bibliometric indicator" here refers to a quantitative tool used to assess scientific publications and citations, typically in scientific journals listed on commercially available databases such as Thomson-Reuter's Web of Science.A bibliometric indicator is the most frequently used denominator of a university's research performance and is thus closely linked to institutional positioning in various league tables, despite repeated criticisms over misuse (see, for example, Anninos, 2013;Dolan, 2007, pp. 25-28;van Raan, 2005).Tools that measure citations and calculate journal impact factors are based predominantly on publications in English language journals and rarely acknowledge vernacular language research ouputs, especially for papers in the humanities and social sciences (see, for example, Montgomery, 2013, Chap. 4).journals.As the latter group opts out of publishing in domestic journals with lesser impact, the bases of domestic journals are further weakened.
In addition, as the nation's nascent "audit culture" increasingly favors measurable data in much the same way as its Western predecessors, institutions and individual scholars are subjected to uneven pressure to realign their research performance along global parameters.In this sense, the ranking regime exposes inherent contradictions in Japan's emergent audit culture, which tends to strengthen already tight government control over national research universities, while individual scholars are conversely given less supervision and fewer opportunities for evaluation.Despite its high-flying idealism and popularity with local stakeholders, the push towards creating more topranked universities may fall short of addressing real needs to enhance individual performance in pursuit of globally relevant research and ensure equity among different generations of scholars.
The final section ponders the future of vernacular scholarship in the changing order of the world's knowledge by responding to voices of concern (Barth, 2002;Gledhill, 2002;Scott, 2012).One of the issues raised is how the homogenizing and standardizing power of the "North Atlantic vernacular" (Scott, 2012) may jeopardize the appreciation and sustainability of other vernaculars.More importantly for this article, "academic self-enclosure" (Gledhill, 2008, p. 173), a byproduct of neoliberal "audit culture" in the West (Shore & Wright, 1999;Strathern, 2000), may now be exported to the rest of the world together with the proliferated ranking regime.Japan's case is instructive when we critically question the adherence to a monolithic, world-class universities model in a globalized post-industrial society that celebrates diversity and multiplicity as a source of creativity.
The dire condition of Japan's scholarship under the ranking regime also resonates with difficulties encountered by other non-English language scholarships in Asia and elsewhere in the world.Diversity in local contexts and academic traditions notwithstanding, more studies will show that core concerns of the politics of ranking are those of identity, representation, and justice rather than "methodological fetishism" prevalent in the studies of rankings (Amsler & Bolsmann, 2012, p. 292).Further empirical evidences are due to identify what is behind the relationships unfolding under the banner of globalization both at the power center and the periphery of the world's academic knowledge production.

Scandalizing the "fall" of local universities
When Times Higher Education (THE) published the results of its "renewed" world rankings in 2010, after ending their collaboration with Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and forming a new collaborative partnership with Thomson-Reuters, Japanese newspapers were quick to harp on the "downfall" of local universities: Only five Japanese universities were listed among the world's top 200, compared with eleven in the previous year.Also, Asia's top position went to the University of Hong Kong, replacing the University of Tokyo as the region's higher education leader (see for example, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 2010, September 13;Yamane, 2010).Significantly, the news either downplayed or ignored the fact that the 2010 THE rankings lacked continuity with previous ranking methodology conducted under the aegis of the THE-QS partnership and in fact were the latest addition to an existing line of rankings with varying methodologies, approaches and biases.Rather, the media amplified a narrative bemoaning the "deteriorating" performance of Japanese institutions.Public outcry and terse remarks from political leaders ensued.
Also, by calling the THE exercise The Times rankings, the local media's coverage of the ranking outcomes conveyed an air of authority via established Western journalism.Despite its former alliance with The Times (of London), the current THE magazine has no affiliation with the newspaper but retains the name and the international "brand" image that comes with it, a strategy that proved successful in Japan.The fact that THE is a British commercial educational magazine, providing college information to readership mostly in the United Kingdom, has been obscured.In other words, the THE's audience and "provincialism" (Scott, 2012, p. 113) are rarely, if ever, critically examined by the local media.
The media reports also elicited from Japanese nationals lingering memories of "PISA shock" in 2003, in which Japan fell from 1st to 6th in Mathematic Literacy and 8th to 14th in Reading Literacy in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).PISA shock reverberated throughout the nation, and mounting criticism over the Japanese education system subsequently led to an overhaul of primary and secondary education policies in Japan (Ishikawa, Fujii, & Moehle, 2013, p. 16).This episode demonstrated the increased weight international comparison used to assess global competitiveness had garnered in public opinion, particularly for evaluating the outcome and quality of domestic education policies.Brown et al. (2008, p. 133) cite world university rankings and the PISA exam results as sources of competition pitting schools, colleges, universities, think tanks, design centers and research laboratories against one another on the front line of "knowledge wars" that place national pride at stake.

Business community's quest for global talent
Due to "shock" over the reported decline of local universities reinforced by the namesake of the prestigious Times, the THE world university rankings have secured wide publicity in Japan, even when compared with preceding world league tables such as the Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) and the QS World University Rankings, launched in 2003 and 2004 respectively.There is more to this development than mere hype, however.One cannot deny that the media in fact provided a story local stakeholders wanted to read.
Coverage of the university rankings in newspapers such as Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei), Japan's leading economic daily, in a way sheds light on the business community's frustration over the state of Japanese universities.Following the release of the new rankings, Nikkei articles repeatedly cite the opinions of business leaders who denounce the "delay in universities' internationalizing efforts" and emphasize the need to cultivate global capacity among graduates.The portrayal of Japanese universities, their lagging competitiveness and susceptibility to being overtaken by their Asian peers may reflect growing frustration on the part of employers over universities and the training they provide for graduates.Not only is Japan poorly represented among the top 200 shares in the league tables in terms of the ratio of institutions to GDP (22nd), but also Japanese universities' contribution to economic development compared with other OECD countries is particularly low (Goodman, 2013, p. 38).
Japan is among the world's most rapidly aging societies, with shrinking domestic markets.Coupled with a stagnant economy, Japanese business is enhancing global outreach, particularly operations in vibrant neighboring Asian markets.Japanese corporations have thus been increasingly vocal about the need for hiring and training gurobaru jinzai or "global human resources".That is, those who possess international outlook, experience and foreign language skills and who will undertake expanding business operations overseas.
Since about the same time the renewed THE rankings were released in 2010, there has been a fundamental shift away from the conventional hiring of new graduates from domestic universities to searching for global talent within or outside of Japan.For instance, Panasonic Corporations, one of Japan's largest recruiters of new college graduates, announced in 2010 its plan to allocate 80% of spring 2011 job openings overseas (1100 out of 1390 total) while reducing domestic recruits by 40%. 4 Concurrently, there was another notable trend to change the intra-company medium of communication to English, thus requiring minimum standards for new recruits' communicative skills in English.Rakuten Inc., Japan's leader in internet marketing, and Fast Retailing Co. Ltd., a leading company in apparel manufacturing and retailing well-known for its Uniqlo brand, announced a decision to convert their official company language to English (The Yomiuri Shimbun, 2010, August 25).At the time, these moves, which might have already been pursued in some neighboring Asian countries, were still new to Japan.Subsequently, recruiting new staff overseas and instituting a company-wide policy making English the official language of communication have become commonplace and cease to make national headlines.
Such trends in recruitment and hiring practices are closely monitored by students, prospective students and their parents.Although prestigious local universities offered a secure "passage" to regular, full-time employment up until the 1990s, the bridge between schools and companies has since become not only "longer but narrower" (Komamura, 2011).As part-time employees and those on a temporary contract basis already account for as much as 30% of the total workforce in Japan, "full membership" in a company, which offers traditional job security and other benefits, is no longer taken for granted (Komamura, 2011, pp. 170-171).

Elite students' insularism?
Higher educational institutions cannot turn a blind eye to changing requirements from the corporate sector as the success of graduates in the job market may well determine their own future viability.Internationalization policy of the Japanese government and universities, which had previously focused on the recruitment of international students, began in the 2010s to place more weight on sending Japanese students overseas to reverse their "insularity" or "inward-looking" tendency.
The stagnating number of Japanese high school and university students studying overseas since 2000, at a time when the number of international students was seeing phenomenal growth around the globe (OECD, 2012, p. 362), further deepened the concern over Japanese students' insularity.Critics (eg.Fukushima, 2010;Hobo, 2010;Tsuji, 2010) identified what might be called an "elite (student) insularism" or the inward-looking tendency among students of leading universities as well as professionals.They point out that the stagnation in study overseas is not the outcome of economic woes but more a reflection of the lack of aspiration among youths to venture abroad.Although the trend stems from a combination of factors and is not necessarily psychological in nature as many critics claim, the lack of enthusiasm to study overseas among students at Japan's most prestigious universities raises national concerns over their ability to train the next generation of leaders.Universities nationwide have since launched new or expanded previously existing study abroad programs with the government's support.
As discussions of insularism provoke worry, it is not hard to imagine ambitious prospective students and parents forgoing domestic universities and seeking an education that maximizes their 4 Panasonic is only one of many Japanese corporations that have implemented similar changes in staff hiring.According to an editorial in Nihon Keizai Shimbun, dated June 15, 2010, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. announced a plan to increase the number of foreign nationals, who are mainly of Asian nationality, by 800 every year until their number reaches 4000, a goal expected to be reached in five years time.Positions available are for engineers, technicians and production personnel.The company also plans to hire an average of 2000 Japanese new graduates per year, which translates to roughly a 40% reduction from the number of domestic recruits as of 2010.The article refers to other examples of leading corporations such as Toyo Engineering Corporation and Daikin Industries that likewise have increased the number of overseas recruitments for managerial or technical positions.competitiveness and future job security by deferring to top-rated institutions listed in the world university rankings. 5Graduates of prestigious domestic universities are still able to land secure jobs with relative ease at present, but their future appears increasingly unsure, judging from changes in corporate hiring practices and global operational demands.

International competitiveness and distribution of public funds
The reported decline of Japanese research universities' positions in world university rankings has additional repercussions.Namely, it is used to pressure universities to improve cost-effectiveness under a national political climate of fiscal austerity.Over the years, MEXT has taken issue with Japan's level of public expenditure on tertiary education, which remains among the lowest of OECD countries (0.6% of GDP, compared with the OECD average of 1.3%) (Newby et al., 2009, pp. 39-40;OECD, 2013, p. 199).MEXT has used such figures to negotiate an increase in public spending with the Ministry of Finance (MOF) to keep universities internationally competitive.The MOF, however, employed the same "competitiveness" rhetoric and used the world university rankings as a proof of local universities' under-performance, criticizing poor cost-effectiveness and lack of effort on the part of publicly funded universities. 6o counter MEXT's claim, the MOF strongly criticized Japanese universities for the decline in research outcomes despite having received greater government support in the form of increased funds and opportunities to apply for competitive research grants.Furthermore, the MOF denied a correlation between budget size and research performance by comparing two universities: Tokyo Institute of Technology, a leading science and technology institute in Japan, and University of Tsukuba (formerly Tokyo University of Education), a comprehensive research university with traditional strengths in the humanities and social sciences.Although Tokyo Tech receives only half the amount of subsidies for their operational budget, it recorded 1.3 times more paper citations than Tsukuba.
The reported dramatic decline of Japanese universities in the world university rankings thus instigated inter-ministerial rivalry over shares of diminishing public funds.The use of citation indices as instruments to measure institutional research performance is also indicative of the nature of the emergent audit culture in Japan, which will be revisited in the following section.
Faced with criticisms from both within the government and outside, MEXT set a concrete target to improve the global reputation of local institutions in the public eye.Global reputation is thought to be reflected in the world university rankings, making the rankings both a competitiveness and an accountability issue.Yet, pressure on universities to improve their positions may lead to outcomes both intended and inadvertent.

Impact of the Ranking Regime on Local Scholarship Autonomy and dependency: Academic paper production in Japan
As noted, factors that have contributed to the "popularity" of the global rankings in Japanese society are multi-faceted and complex.Various factors in media, business, universities and government as well as issues such as employment and recruitment, medium of communication and inter-ministerial rivalry in an increasingly neoliberal political climate all play a part.In a sense, the rankings accommodate both global and local demands.
This section seeks to assess the impact of the ranking regime on local scholarship by focusing on the proliferation of paper and citation indices often used in ranking exercises.Before doing so, however, an overview of local academia, particularly the status of academic journal publications in Japan, is warranted in order to facilitate a contextualized understanding of these issues.
Japan has arguably one of the most autonomous higher education and research systems in the non-Western world.This is due to the nation's history, the use of the national language for all levels of education and an independent system to train university faculty without requiring them to attend Western institutions to attain higher degrees or garner prestige, except during periods immediately following the establishment of the modern university system in the late 19th century.Also, the existence of a sizable academic community and domestic intellectual readership has sustained domestic markets, as is the case for humanities research outputs.Even when scholars in the humanities and social sciences were sent to Western institutions to obtain postgraduate degrees, English-language publications were not necessarily required or particularly valued when these scholars applied for faculty positions upon their return home, that is, until fairly recently. 7cademic publishing in Japan, however, is characterized by its bipolar nature within a single national system of research.At one pole, scholars in broader "hard" science fields publish the majority of their articles in journals overseas.At the opposite pole, research in cultural and social studies remains solidly embedded in the national-language medium.For both the hard sciences and the humanities, publishing English-language articles in international peer-reviewed journals has gained importance over the past decade.One must consider both dimensions to fully understand the country's representation in overall science as well as the university ranking exercises.
Although detailed, contemporary data on academic publishing trends by language that specifically addresses the humanities and social sciences in Japan is rare, an informal internal survey conducted at a single research university may provide a rough indication of where these trends are headed.Take Osaka University, one of Japan's leading comprehensive research universities, enlisted in most world university rankings and league tables, as an example.The university has some 24,000 students and 3,000 faculty members in 11 undergraduate and 16 graduate schools in a multitude of disciplines, as well as roughly 30 specialized research institutes and centers.The university is known for its prominent medical and engineering faculties with smaller but reputable humanities and social science faculties, which constitute roughly 20% of the university's total faculty members.Osaka University is fairly representative of Japan's several former imperial universities, which have served as the backbone for the nation's postwar economic success.Between fiscal years 2003 and 2005, over 80% of all papers published by the natural science, engineering and medical faculties were written in English.Research papers produced by two representative humanities faculties, on the other hand, were predominantly written in Japanese: An average of 91% and 87% of the total academic papers produced during the same period within the faculties of letters and law, respectively, were written in the national language (Ogawa, 2006, pp. I-3, 9).Barring the faculty of economics, where papers written in English (70% in FY 2005 when single-authored and internationally co-authored papers are combined) outnumber those in Japanese, the majority of research output in the humanities and social sciences is written in Japanese (ibid.p. 9).Note, however, that there is significant variation by institution and by year, even within the same discipline. 8In addition, due to globalization trends of higher education and research in recent years, coupled with the Japanese government's policy of internationalization as noted above, publishing papers in English has become more common even among the humanities disciplines.The fact that the number of English-medium journals in the humanities in Japan has doubled between 2003 and 2009 testifies to this point (see note 10).Paper outputs in the humanities and social sciences by Japanese scholars in international journals listed on Web of Science have increased by nearly 10% over the past five years, if not their shares in total paper outputs worldwide (Funamori, 2012, slide 13).
Although the use of Japanese for academic communication purposes is, more or less, limited to within Japan, the "autonomy" of national language-based academia is supported by relatively robust scholarly communities.Although smaller in size compared with their medical, natural science and engineering counterparts, quite a few domestic academic associations in the humanities and social sciences count their members in the thousands, thanks to a long history and solid membership bases, some having been established soon after Japan's modernization period in the late 19th century.There were more than 104,000 researchers in the social sciences and humanities in Japan in 2011; approximately 93,000 of them are affiliated with universities (MEXT, 2012a, p. 124).According to a Science Council of Japan database of academic societies (Gakkai Nenkan), the Japan Sociological Society (Established in 1924.Numbers in parentheses that follow also indicate the year of each organization's establishment) has 3600 members, the Japanese Educational Research Association (1941) has 3000, the Historical Society of Japan (1889) 2300 members, the Society of Philosophy (1884) 2300 members, and the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology (1934) 2000 members.These associations as well as non-affiliated, highly literate intellectuals form a core readership that has sustained domestic markets for articles and books in the Japanese language produced by scholars in Japan.In other words, most scholars in the humanities and social sciences have conducted research in the national language for domestic scholarly and intellectual audiences in a rather autonomous home academic market.
Scholars in broad natural science fields, on the other hand, have long used or more recently converted to the English language with relative ease, albeit with notable differences between disciplines.The natural science community in Japan has in fact been highly dependent on overseas journals as an outlet for its research output. 9In 2009, when scholars in Japan produced about 8% of the world's academic papers, 80% were published in journals overseas (MEXT, 2012b, pp. 3-4, 40).There has even been a concern raised in the domestic academic community over "paper drain", meaning some of the best research results produced at home are published elsewhere.
Currently there are more than 2000 academic journals in Japan (MEXT, 2006, p. 70).The number of journals with high impact factors, however, indicating that they are read worldwide, remains small. 10Referring to the "underdevelopment" of domestic scientific journals, a MEXT policy document cited the lack of a system "to properly evaluate excellent research outputs with authority" (MEXT, 2006, p. 73).In addition, most scientific journals in Japan are published by academic associations and circulated among members for the purpose of exchanging information among insiders (MEXT, 2006, p. 74).Few journals expand their market beyond the realm of academia and seek a for-profit business model.The MEXT report (ibid.)thus concluded that many of the existing journals are still in need of stricter quality control, financial independence and appeals beyond inner circles to contribute to the advancement of academic fields in Japan.
To maximize publicity and the impact of their work, the majority of natural science, engineering and medical science scholars in Japan prefer to publish their research outcomes abroad in internationally recognized journals.As a result, Japanese scholars need to pay increasingly higher fees for subscription and access to domestic research results (MEXT, 2012b), raising accessibility concerns at home.
In the above, the bipolar character of academic publishing in Japan was reviewed.Although researchers in natural science, engineering and medical science faculties by and large rely on overseas, English-language journals to publicize the outcomes of their research, researchers in the humanities and social sciences still publish mostly in national-language medium outlets with low international visibility.Paper and citation indices, the most frequently used denominators of universities' research performance as well as various ranking exercises, are based predominantly on publications in English-language journals and rarely acknowledge vernacular language research results, thereby undercutting researchers producing papers or books in the humanities and social sciences.Japanese universities that make the top 100 in international league tables, the majority of which are national (public) universities, are all, not surprisingly, comprehensive research institutions with strong natural science, engineering and medical faculties. 11Universities specializing in the humanities and social sciences do not usually fare as well in ranking exercises that employ metrics tending to obscure strengths in these fields, particularly those in a vernacular language.
When the world university rankings measure research performance by referring to Thomson Reuter's Web of Science, for example, out of all papers produced by researchers in Japan, the share stressed the importance of domestic academic outlets and the use of one's native language to nurture conceptual creativity.One senior university executive and chemistry professor, for example, stated that innovative ideas tend to be first published in domestic journals at a stage when they are "too new" and thus likely to be rejected by established journals overseas.A successful "induction period" of three to five years for a major discovery to be mainstreamed requires first a supportive home audience, the chemist stressed. 10Some 400 of the 2000 journals in total were English-language medium as of 2009.Of those 400, 84% were in the natural sciences, engineering and medicine, while the remaining 16% were in the humanities and social sciences.Although the representation of humanities journals remains fairly small, English journals in these fields have increased two-fold since 2003 (MEXT, 2012b, p. 40).Sheer difficulty of using a foreign language, quality control and standardization of academic terminology, shortage of staff skilled in English-language editing and publishing and resultant high costs are cited as factors contributing to the conservative number of English-language publications in general (MEXT, 2006, p. 71).  1The seven former imperial universities of Hokkaido, Kyoto, Kyushu, Nagoya, Osaka, Tohoku and Tokyo, and private universities of Keio and Waseda with strengths in natural science, engineering and medical disciplines are case in point.
of the humanities and social sciences combined constitutes a mere 1%. 12 One cannot generalize by relying on a single source, and research portfolios clearly differ among countries. 13Yet the fact remains that a predominant proportion of papers produced by scholars in Japan, which are considered to have some measure of international visibility, are in fields other than the humanities and social sciences.
Simply put, the global university rankings, which heavily rely on journal citation indices, generally acknowledge most of the natural science research outputs by Japanese scholars but rarely those of their colleagues in the humanities and social sciences as well as national language-based science disciplines.The "world reputation" of Japanese universities has thus been forged through the "dependency" of scientific fields on Western publications.A quest to improve standings in the world university rankings by the Japanese government may pressure institutions to realign their institutional goals with international indicators.Such an attempt can have consequences for all research-oriented institutions, but it may affect individual disciplines differently.

Nascent "audit culture" and national university corporations
Evaluation by bibliometric tools, which may be more applicable to some segments of research over others, has become increasingly common in Japan.Since the 1990s, the importance of performance evaluation of universities has been stressed in an overall trend of nationwide university reform, resulting in the establishment of an accreditation system and evaluation and quality assurance mechanisms for education and research (Itsumura & Yasui, 2006, pp. 131-2).Furthermore, the incorporation of national universities in 2004, which ostensibly made them independent agencies, required these institutions to submit to MEXT their mid-term goals every six years, based on which their performance and degree of achievement were to be evaluated.The evaluation at the end of each term would determine the financial support available for each institution, an amount destined to dwindle in the climate of national fiscal austerity (Kaneko, 2013, pp. 177-180).Consequently, while the evaluation scheme of national university corporations was intended to measure the degree of achievement stipulated in institution-specific targets, in reality, absolute performance indicators were preferred when it came to evaluation of research (Kaneko, 2013, p. 180).
Concurrent with the incorporation process, the government has taken steps to reduce the financial support of universities' regular operational funds and increase shares of competitive research grants.Citation indices and journal impact factors, which had been used with restraint and caution up to the mid-2000s, 14 thereafter came to be used widely among researchers as performance 12 This is a rough estimate calculated using data compiled by Funamori (2012, slide 13), a specialist on institutional research and evaluation at the University of Tokyo, based on her analysis of Thomson Reuter's Web of Science from 1981 to 2010.The quoted figure is derived from data provided for different academic fields in the year when their annual outputs were at their highest and thus does not reflect the share of humanities and social sciences in any given year. 13It is difficult to determine from the figures if the share of humanities and social science articles is disproportionately small in Japan.For a comparison, the share of social science articles in the United States in 2010 was 5.9% (National Science Board, 2012, Chap. 5, Appendix table 5-43). 14Until the mid-2000s, the Japanese government was rather conservative in using journal impact factors and citation indices for the assessment of research, judging from a review of policy documents over the past decade and interviews with university administrators experienced in research evaluation.When MEXT released a guideline for evaluation of research and development in 2005, they in fact cautioned against the misuse of journal impact factors and clearly warned not to confuse journal impact factors with indicators of the quality of research articles (MEXT, 2005).
indicators when they applied for research grants, especially in the natural and medical science fields.Even prior to this shift, since the late 1990s journal impact factors have come to be used for individual promotion and performance evaluation among medical faculties and departments (Itsumura & Yasui, 2006, p. 141).
Contrary to the purported objective of giving more autonomy to national universities, the incorporation of national universities has failed to weaken the government's hold on institutions (Newby et al., 2009).Although the university reform that resulted in the incorporation of national universities in Japan bears striking resemblance to Britain's neoliberal policy under the Thatcher administration of the 1980s (Kaneko, 2013, p. 177), somewhat idiosyncratic dynamics are at play for state assessment exercises in Japan and the resultant "audit culture" (Shore & Wright, 1999;Strathern, 2000).

Institutional vs. individual audit
Audit of Japanese national university corporations has primarily been a monitoring and assessment exercise targeting institutions rather than individual scholars.Individual scholarly evaluations such as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the United Kingdom has not been imposed on Japanese national research universities by the state authorities concerned.A system that prioritizes institutional evaluation may reflect the strong tendency toward collectivism in Japanese society, according to Takamitsu Sawa (2011, pp. 7, 9), an economist with extensive experience in university senior management and government advisory positions.The assessment system of national universities based on midterm planning is a legacy of the centrally planned economy of Japan's past.Such institutional evaluation works against the very principle of liberalization through incorporation, Sawa argues.Instead, Sawa urges that, since research is an outcome of individual creativity, it must be evaluated individually, implying the need for peer review by a small number of experts for each specialized field.
Fundamentally, the university audit system in Japan is not "emancipatory" as in the case of the United Kingdom, where it was promoted in the name of "autonomy" for the academic community "policing itself through peer review" rather than the state (Goodman, 2013, pp. 43, 48).Nor is the audit system pursued in the name of "equality" or "democracy" (Scott, 2012, pp. 119, 127) by introducing "objective" methods of evaluation.The world university rankings were introduced and adopted in Japan in the absence of a systematic review of individual performance or history of peer or external evaluation such as that implemented in the United Kingdom (Goodman, 2013, p. 44).
For one, audit pressure is not burdened equally among different generations of scholars.Takeuchi (2010) thus talks of an "inter-generational gap, clash and friction" among university faculty in Japan.From the 1990s, there has been a long and steady decline in academic jobs in Japan due to nationwide expansion of graduate schools and a concomitant increase in the number of new PhDs (Takeuchi, 2010, pp. 14-5; see also note 7).Facing a tight and competitive job market, young scholars are pushed to increase productivity, driving them to create the equivalent of a "paper trail" (Barth, 2000, p. 9;Shore & Wright, 1999, p. 567).Senior faculty members, on the other hand, landed academic jobs when the market was still expanding.Many were recruited under a lifetime employment arrangement rather than a short-term contract, often through references, where promotion was contingent on age and availability of posts rather than individual merit (Takeuchi, 2010, pp. 16-7).
Once securing a permanent position within the university, individual faculty members are still left with considerable leeway in their daily conduct of education and research, even if exposed to increasing burdens of administrative and other work demands.If Americans are "among the most normalized and monitored people in the world", contrary to their rugged individualist self-image (Scott, 2012, p. 127), Japanese senior scholars have remained rather unmonitored, at least for now, while host institutions are subjected to ever tighter control and pressure from the state to become globally competitive.
Metrics concerning journal article production, impact and citations are the mainstay of many world university rankings as they purport to offer globally comparable, objective scores.The rankings thus reward institutions that play by the rules of the audit game.The emerging audit culture for national research universities in Japan, however, is primarily concerned with meeting declared targets as a way to achieve institutional accountability.The collective auditing does not promote equity or fairness among member institutions, nor does the exercise reward or penalize individual performance, all the while placing a disproportionately heavy burden on young researchers just entering the academic job market.
The world university rankings and the existing corporate audit system that binds Japan's national universities to prescribed standards of achievement both insist on measuring and comparing institutional performance, but they are ironically at odds with one another.With the recent announcement of the government's quest to enlist ten universities among the world's top 100, Japanese university auditing methodology, particularly when applied to leading research institutions, may change.A transition toward concrete scoring systems, based on measurable indicators used in the rankings, may already be underway.
The goal to create "world class" universities will further concentrate funds toward a small number of institutions.Disciplines that can produce more measurable outputs, such as papers published in journals listed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and thus contribute to improving ranking scores will be strengthened, and so will universities with more internationally visible academic fields.In addition, the move will reward a handful of established and thus relatively senior researchers and their teams in measurable and globally competitive areas of science.The "measure the measurable" trend will proceed in a national context where the measurable is more severely limited than in English-speaking countries.Anglo-American databases such as SCI and SSCI simply do not capture the depth or multiplicity of research produced in Japan.There is no alternative in sight, however.Scientific publishing in Japan is too "international" to develop an independent system of assessing domestic research, while the humanities and social sciences are too autonomous and lacking in global input.Neither seems to offer a solution to producing indicators of global significance for locally meaningful research output.
The ranking regime will undoubtedly affect assessment and funding trajectories in Japan.This change will be reflected in the strategic behavior of individual researchers, departments and institutions, and perhaps not always in a manner conducive to improving the quality of research (Itsumura & Yasui, 2006, p. 141).Heavy concentration of funds devoted to a small number of research universities and centers of excellence over the past decade has already changed the national research structure from a pyramid shape to a tower, according to K. Oike, former president of Kyoto University (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 2013, June 13).Unlike the old system in which the upper echelon of academia was supported by a broad foundation comprising a number of diverse public and private institutions with their own research function and agendas, it now teeters atop a thinning and weakening base to fall back on.

Ranking Regime and the Future of Vernacular Knowledge "Partial view" of Japanese universities
Following an analysis of the perpetuation of the world university rankings in a Japanese local context, two conditions were cited as factors rendering the use of bibliometric indicators for crosscultural assessments of institutional research performance problematic: the bipolar character of academic publishing and institution-centered audit.Building on this discussion, the final section ponders the future of vernacular scholarship, focusing specifically on the Japanese language-based humanities and social sciences.Rather than forecasting the future, the objective of this section is to recapitulate the emerging contradictions and contestations in knowledge production, both in local and global contexts, which affect the future course of vernacular scholarship.
The first condition stemming from the use of bibliometric indicators in assessment of research performance is the bipolarity of academic publishing in Japan; that is, the dependency of the nation's scientific community on international English-language journals on one hand, and the autonomy of the humanities on the other, which is sustained by the size and long-standing tradition of national language-based academic markets.Natural science scholars have ensured the visibility of scientific research from Japan, particularly when international contests such as the world university rankings employ paper production and journal impact factors as proxies of excellence.By and large, productivity and competitiveness in many natural science, engineering and medical fields have led to some of Japan's research universities being awarded top-ranked positions in the global university league tables, earning a prestigious reputation for the nation's university community.
Works by local humanities and social science scholars, on the other hand, have been obscured by predominantly English and thus Anglo-American-centered journal databases and citation indices.Even when non-English vernacular journals are listed in commercial journal databases, their contribution to journal impact factors is negligible due to limited readership, appeal and accessibility of national-language scholarship in the global research community.Non-English papers published in journals with smaller circulations may even be detrimental to overall citation "scores" by eroding per paper or per faculty points compiled by the rankers.In addition, vernacular journals offer smaller prospects for commercial profit due to more limited markets.Consequently, journal publishers and database providers, who thrive on increased journal sales (Rank Scholarship [Editorial] 2012, p. 7) and analytical tools due to the global popularity of auditing and rankings exercises, are unlikely to promote the inclusion of vernacular journals in their lists or data sets.Hence, Japanese universities are and will be, for the foreseeable future, assessed and ranked through a "partial view" (cf.Brenneis, 2004;Considine, 2006).

Asymmetrical to multidirectional globalization
There is no doubt that raising English-language paper productivity in the humanities and social sciences matters for Japan's future.It is a critical step on the path to promoting globally engaged research, while ensuring connectivity and fostering dialogue with international scholarly communities.Doing so while upholding the scholarly commitment to local society means that researchers play dual roles, a demanding task, to say the least.Therefore both roles need to be evaluated fairly.Here, the second condition, which concerns the assessment system of Japanese national universities, poses a particular challenge.
The current assessment system of national universities holds institutions responsible for their own midterm goals.The responsibility to undertake assessment or quality assurance exercises in principle rests with each individual institution after its incorporation.If institutions do not properly assess the performance of individual scholars, which is the tendency under the current system, there is little incentive for Japanese humanities scholars to publish in English.Some of them voluntarily publish in languages other than Japanese for international recognition, while others, particularly young researchers, who are vying for positions in an increasingly competitive academic job market, seek leverage by publishing in internationally recognized journals.Those works by young researchers may not be evaluated highly, unless perhaps at the time of appointment.Now, with a national drive to improve positions in the world university rankings, the national university assessment system is likely to place more weight on metrics, such as citation indices and the total amounts of external funds received, to evaluate research performance.The move may inevitably lead to further concentration of public research funds toward measurable scientific fields at selected research universities.This then renders the humanities disciplines further obscured, un-assessed, and under-funded.
For the humanities and social sciences, the real issue is to alter the flow of knowledge from a one-way to two-way traffic.It means rectifying the asymmetrical, unilateral flow of knowledge, currently directing predominantly from the West to local societies, and activating a two-way communication between the Japanese humanities and social sciences communities and their counterparts overseas.All the while local scholarly commitments need to be retained.To do so, local scholars need to be encouraged to engage more with the world and contribute to the construction of knowledge from a vernacular perspective.The motivating factor for the humanities and social sciences to engage in discourse with their colleagues overseas is to profit from diversity as a driver of critical analysis and creativity, rather than the profane reason that English papers contribute to improved positions in the ranking exercises.
The government's policy of recruiting more foreign scholars, as announced by Minister Shimomura in the same press conference introduced at the beginning of this article, is thus somewhat misplaced.The MEXT directive to increase foreign staff, if promoted as part of an initiative to include more Japanese universities in the world's top 100, may exacerbate an existing imbalance of West to East knowledge traffic.The diversity of staff has value in and of itself but needs to be pursued as part of each institution's strategic plan for the future.Again, the importance of proper evaluation of research and education by faculty needs to be reiterated.When researchers of diverse backgrounds converge in institutions of higher education and research, equity regardless of age, gender, and national and cultural background need to be ensured through fair evaluation.

Ranking regime celebrates and exports audit culture
All over the world, it is not uncommon for research universities with ambitions to improve their standing in the university rankings to encourage faculty to publish in journals listed in specific databases, which are then measured as a proxy of the institution's research power.Among frequently used indicators is Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge, formerly the ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) database, which includes SCI, SSCI and the "Arts and Humanities Citation Index".At the time of its creation by the ISI, SCI was a tool for libraries to make purchasing decisions as to which journals to keep and which to drop (Ciancanelli, 2007, pp. 71-2;Guédon, 2001, Chap. 6).The tool subsequently came to be used to evaluate the performance of research scientists by measuring the impact of their articles.For university administrators, SCI has come to signify an objective and quantifiable, and thus verifiable, evaluation mechanism applicable across disciplines.It has thus evolved into a "new managerialism" or "career management" tool (Rank Scholarship [Editorial] 2012, pp. 4-6;Guédon, 2001, Ch.6) and an "unyielding yardstick for hiring, tenure, and grants" which may even affect research orientations (Monastersky, 2005).
Bibliometric indicators have developed into convenient tools for the faculty reproduction, promotion and distribution of resources within academia in the United States and elsewhere (Cameron, 2005, pp. 112-114).Even when used within the particular national context where they first originated, indicators such as SCI and SSCI are inherently "invalid and inevitably corrupt" (Scott, 2012, pp. 112-128).Scott (2012, pp. 56, 112-113) argues that such techniques of quantitative commensuration rarely measure the quality at stake with accuracy and are basically a provincial Anglo-American exercise masquerading as a universal assessment tool (p.56).Furthermore, the very existence of such a tool, despite its ostensible utility when first devised, inevitably precipitates a chain of events, such as "rings" of scholars who regularly cite each other, that undermine the tool's validity (Scott, 2012, p. 115).
As audit and quality control have become dominant in education systems throughout much of the world, with the proliferation of neoliberal policies and ideologies, journal impact factors and citation indices have become a collective "force" that solicits a "perverse colonizing effect" (Scott, 2012, pp. 115-6).This force is strengthened and spread to the rest of the world through the propagation and popularity of various world university rankings (see also Amster & Bolsmann, 2012, p. 292).
The world university rankings celebrate audit culture by rewarding its subscribers.The rankings export the norms and tools of audit operations originating in English-speaking countries and promote allegiance to quantitative commensuration adopted there internationally.Institutions with a desire to be listed among the world's top universities drive their staff to upgrade their performances along scales recognized by the audit culture, and by extension, ranking parameters.
Journal impact factors and citation indices have already become a global currency.Ironically, however, while on one hand the global appeal of these tools is enhanced, they seem to promote reclusiveness in academia on the other.As noted above, bibliometric indicators are used for the sustainability and the reproduction of academia, an internally useful tool.Consistent with the popularity of bibliometric tools, the audit culture in the United Kingdom, for instance, places "an even greater premium on 'impact' in the academic field itself" (Gledhill, 2008, p. 182), thereby promoting a "culture of professionalization and academic self-enclosure" (p.173).
The world university rankings export this worrisome, inward-looking propensity to the rest of the world; meanwhile citations continue to be concerned with "inner circle" visibility.In addition, some reputational surveys conducted by the ranking agencies score peer reviews, which are largely conducted within the same regions and the same disciplines as those of reviewers. 15Disciplinary and geographically specific connections and visibility thus matter and contribute to improving ranking scores.Despite the illustrious image of "world-class" institutions and global excellence, the world university rankings seem to promote rather than shun insularity in the academic community.
By citing and being cited, universities may metrically flourish with increased paper production and measured impacts.Behind races to create the world's top-ranked universities, some of those governed by the ranking and audit regimes will resort to "triviality" rather than enhancing their imagination and creativity (Barth, 2000, p. 10).Along the way, fundamental questions of "For whom do we produce knowledge?"and "What purpose do we serve?" remain unanswered (cf.Gledhill, 2002).
For Japan and its vernacular scholarship, answers to these questions touch the very heart of the mission and existence of research universities, which are being radically transformed under globalization.The state has embraced the world university rankings embedded in its policy goals without importing the core principle of audit culture.The path the country takes will therefore differ from others, but it will be rugged and equally precarious as seen from an uneven unfolding of the construction and representation of global knowledge.

About the Author
Mayumi Ishikawa Osaka University ishikawa@iai.osaka-u.ac.jpMayumi Ishikawa is a sociocultural anthropologist and professor of the Institute for Academic Initiatives, Osaka University, Japan.Her research interests include the globalization and internationalization of higher education, the mobility of students and scholars, science and education policy, as well as power and the constructions of knowledge.

About the Guest Editor
David Post UNESCO GMR & Pennsylvania State UniversityPost@psu.eduDavid Post is Senior Policy Analyst with the Global Monitoring Report of Education For All, and is currently based at UNESCO in Paris.He also is Professor of Comparative and International Education who is currently on leave from Penn State University in the USA.He has researched and published about educational stratification, about child labor issues, as well as the politics of educational mobilization.He also investigates the impact of concurrent employment on student academic achievement.He has been a visiting professor at the Colegio de México, at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, and at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.Finally, David served for ten years as editor of Comparative Education Review, where he became concerned about the commodification of scholarship and the possible responses to it by intellectuals, for example through peer-reviewed, open access publication of studies like those in this special issue.Last year, the EEPA printed the Spanish version of his commentary, "Los Rankings Académicos." http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/1347 to copy, display, and distribute this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Education Policy Analysis Archives, it is distributed for noncommercial purposes only, and no alteration or transformation is made in the work.More details of this Creative Commons license are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.All other uses must be approved by the author(s) or EPAA.EPAA is published by the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education at Arizona State University Articles are indexed in CIRC (Clasificación Integrada de