How the japanese learn to work 2nd edition - part 10

ở trong tiếng Anh nhưng thường có vai trò khác nữa, đó là một từ đánh dấu thì khi động từ được chia ở thì quá khứ datta (suồng sã), deshita (lịch sự).
Nội dung trích xuất từ tài liệu:
How the japanese learn to work 2nd edition - part 10 Policies and prospects 169of post-war Prime Ministers, Hayato Ikeda. ‘Human resources’ (jinteki shigen)were two of his favourite words. The legal framework for the Ministry of Labour’s training and testingactivities—the 1959 law—was set at that time. Retraining needs from therun-down of the coal industry as cheap oil began to flow in the 1960s providedanother momentary focusing of political interest (and the brilliant idea ofearmarking a tiny oil-import tax for that retraining led to a valuable sourceof finance for vocational training as a whole, via the Employment ProjectsPromotion Agency). In the 1970s, the switch to slower growth after the oilshock coming, together with the realization of how much more rapidly theJapanese population’s average age would rise than any other nation’s before,brought the question of retraining for the older, especially the ‘voluntaryretired’, worker into political focus—and the revision of the VocationalTraining Law in 1978 was in part a response to that. That issue still smoulders, but by and large VET is still not a matter ofgreat political interest as it is in some other countries. No-one would think ofappointing a political overlord to co-ordinate policy. Japan has so far avoidedlarge-scale youth unemployment. If there is a concentration of unemploymentamong the least skilled segments of the working population, it has hithertogone unremarked. Skill shortages are sometimes forecast—as when a MITIcommittee forecast a 600,000 deficit in software technicians by 1990—butthese rate only relatively restricted coverage in the industrial press. The 1984revision of the vocational training law (the Law to Promote the Developmentof Vocational Skills) requires the Minister of Labour to promulgate a nationalplan, but this formality amounts to little more than a description of theMinistry’s current budget initiatives and a forecasting of future ones. (SeeCantor 1984, McDerment 1985, RDIVT 1984, etc. for accounts of the formalsystem.)CONSULTATION AND RESEARCHThe viability of the sectionalist modus vivendi means that it is left to eachMinistry separately to find ways of keeping in touch with its constituency,and of canvassing for suggestions about, or monitoring the effects of, itspolicies. The Ministry of Labour has a Central Consultative Committee(distinct from the Central Skill Development Association which has theexecutive function of running the testing services) on which sit eight ‘menof learning and experience’ (six professors, one essayist and one pensionfund president), six trade unionists and six employers’ representatives. TheMinistry of Education has a similar Consultative Committee for Scientific1 70 How the Japanes learn to workand Vocational Education—similarly composed except that it does not havethe formal trade union representation. Various bureaus in MITI set up ad hoccommittees for separate fields—like the one quoted above on software skills,while the Enterprise Behaviour Section of the Policy Bureau, which has awatching brief for training matters in general keeps in touch with panels ofoutside experts and mobilizes them for particular research and consultativeexercises. A similar section in MITI’s Small and Medium Enterprise Agencyhas a similar function. The purely consultative status of the formal bodies,and the general tradition that they should allow their secretariats to set theiragendas, mean that their influence on policy is not great. Research efforts are equally multi-sourced. The Ministry of Labour hastwo research centres under its budgetary control—the one at its university-level Research and Development Institute of Vocational Training, and theother, a free-standing quango which takes the English title: National Instituteof Employment and Vocational Research. The former is the only centre ofnote for work on the pedagogy of skill training, but both are engaged insocio-economic research. In the latter they are matched by the Ministry ofEducation’s National Institute for Educational Research and by a researchinstitute—the Japan Efficiency Association—at Sanno College which issupported by MITI. (NIER tends to stick to work related to the schoolswithin the Ministry of Education’s purview, and the JEA to research withinindustry, but there is a good deal of overlap.) There is also an employers’training association (the Japan Industrial and Vocational TrainingAssociation, associated with the Japan Productivity Council) which spendsa little over one per cent of its half-billion yen budget on research. Both the great degree of overlap in these research activities and theiroverall quality may be gauged from such of it as has been cited in thesepages. Very little of it is observational or interview research; the vast bulkis postal survey resear ...