Training Researchers in the Asia-Pacific: A Regional Response to Global Leadership in Research
The growth of the audit culture in the world academic research system as typified by the United Kingdom Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) has led to an extreme preoccupation with research league tables, and their associated branding, marketing, and managerial strategies. The most examined of all research league tables is the UK RAE, which has been held every 5–6 years since 1985.
Landscape as theme park: demographic change, tourism, urbanization, and the fate of communities in 21st century Japan.
In this article the authors address a simple question: What will the already observable
demographic changes mean for tourism in Japan, apart from the presence of older people? Indeed, if
the population will be nearly halved in the next 50 years, one must actually address the question of
whether many of the more peripheral communities in Japan will survive at all, or whether they resemble
the ghost villages in Shiga prefecture to the east of Lake Biwa. Some pointers to the fate of
these communities can already be discerned in a series of studies carried out in the last 20 years. On
the basis of selected case studies this article projects this process over the next 50 years to see what the
impact will be on the Japanese rural periphery and on patterns of tourism. Japan as a whole has an
extraordinary concentration of theme parks and other tourist facilities based on notions of identity
and heritage. The title of this article refers to the fact that many communities in Japan are already
turning their landscapes into quasi, if not actual, theme parks in order to attract tourists, capital and,
especially, more residents. Over the next 50 years this process of conversion could become a Darwinian
struggle for survival as the population diminishes outside Japan�s major cities.
Application of the Kano Model for a Better Understanding of Customer Requirements in Higher Education—A Pilot Study
Various pieces of information and knowledge turn into “know-how” simply by their application in the market. This applies to all spheres of activities. It is therefore important to know and understand the requirements of customers already in the stage of making a product, and to confront these with the possibilities of a producer. In this article we are exploring the possibilities of a better understanding of the requirements of customers and stakeholders in the process of the creation of products in educational services. In particular, we examined seven general requirements: practice orientation, ethical orientation, research orientation, quality resources, innovation orientation, skills orientation, and quality staff. We use the Kano model on a pilot sample of respondents at an institution of higher education. Our results showed that “practice orientation” and “quality resources” are the most stable requirements, while “quality staff” is the least stable. The most linear requirement (the same effect on satisfaction and dissatisfaction) is “innovation orientation”. “Research orientation” belongs to attractive requirements and we also found that in the case of “ethical orientation” there are weak relations between positive and negative responses in our survey. The “skills orientation” proved to be too general, and our research shows that it could be indifferent. It is therefore advisable to specify the investigated skills when investigating requirements on educational services. The main contribution based on the proposed research procedures is an effective linking of customers and producers already from the beginning of constructing a value chain. Investing in sophisticated management approaches when modelling products and processes can thus become a significant source of the competitive advantage of an educational institution. At the same time, it is a contribution to better placing of its graduates in the labor market.