The concept of “academic freedom” is often discussed in conjunction with “university autonomy.” However, this does not imply that academic freedom should only be considered within universities. As “university autonomy” is widely regarded as an institutional guarantee of “academic freedom,” it goes without saying that universities are indeed important institutions wherein researchers are employed. However, scientific communities are no less important than universities because the latter are reference groups of researchers and are indispensable for research activities. Therefore, both “university autonomy” and “autonomy of scientific communities” can be seen as the foundation of “academic freedom.”

Many studies have explored the roles of scientific communities in the sociology of science and education. However, the specific role of these scientific communities in academic freedom have not been extensively discussed compared to the role of universities. Therefore, this paper examines how the roles of scientific communities should be viewed from the perspective of academic freedom.

Specifically, this paper assumes that issues of academic freedom ensue from the conflict between the demand for autonomy and that for efficiency. Then it examines how these two demands are structured at different levels: the knowledge formation mechanism, the economic basis for research activities（research funding system）, and the policy and administrative structure for academic research. It then further examines what role the scientific communities play at each of these levels.

Consequently, it is noted that the idea of autonomy has been maintained through the functioning of scientific communities, with the freedom of these scientific communities often taking precedence over the freedom of individuals. However, it is also observed that there are many areas of knowledge formation, research funding, and academic administration where scientific communities are not involved. Additionally, the idea of freedom based on scientific communities has been relatively reduced by the growing demand for efficiency. Finally, the paper discussed the essential and challenging issues in considering the roles of scientific communities in academic freedom.

The initial policies of the AAUP, as articulated in the 1915 Declaration, align with traditional professionalism ideals described by Freidson. These policies emphasized the necessity of academic freedom and tenure based on specialized knowledge and public duties, justifying professional autonomy through expertise. Academic freedom was tied to the obligation to engage in sincere scientific inquiry, including the exclusion of those deemed incompetent or unsuitable.

The 1940 Statement, co-authored with the Association of American Colleges and Universities, does not explicitly differentiate between those with and without expertise. However, it still supports academic freedom and tenure rights based on specialized knowledge and public duties, along with accompanying obligations. This principle remains a reference point for the AAUP’s activities today.

Without clear constitutional protections for academic freedom, the AAUP has worked to establish and maintain nationwide professional standards. Through investigations and recommendations, it has promoted academic freedom and tenure. However, the AAUP’s professional approach only indirectly impacts the improvement of working conditions at individual institutions. Since the 1960s, influenced by competing faculty unions and the democratization of university faculty, the AAUP has increasingly leaned towards unionism. This shift led to the departure of members unable to reconcile with unionism, but the AAUP continues to support both the protection of academic freedom based on professionalism and collective bargaining on economic and academic issues rooted in unionism.

In recent years, facing increased political intervention in education and a lack of public funding, the AAUP has further embraced unionism, as seen in its partnership with the American Federation of Teachers（AFT）, while still maintaining its unique role as a professional association.

According to Nordelgraaf’s categorization of professionalism, the AAUP’s policies in the 1915 Declaration align closely with protective professionalism. In contrast, the 1940 Statement is characterized by a more limited scope of justified academic freedom based on specific university faculty duties, without explicitly basing professional autonomy on specialized knowledge. Thus, the AAUP’s policies have gradually shifted from early ideals, particularly in relationships within university organizations, towards connections with stakeholders envisioned by connective professionalism. A significant aspect of the AAUP’s movement history is its broad connection with colleagues, including K-12 teacher unions and those surrounding tenured university faculty.

The AAUP’s experience shows that overcoming the divide between professionals and non-professionals involves broad collegial cooperation across job categories, organizations, and industries. However, whether this strategy effectively protects academic freedom requires separate consideration. The current reliance on contingent faculty indicates the difficulty of protecting academic freedom without constitutional backing. On the other hand, if successful, the AAUP’s strategy of extending collegial relationships could counteract the “academic anxiety” caused by organizational demands. Polster concludes that stopping this cycle requires actions promoting collective safety and well-being, encouraging colleagues to do the same. If the decline in public trust in universities and faculty today results from fragmented professional adaptation to market and organizational demands, a different pursuit of the public good is required. The AAUP’s policies, as a strong alternative, deserve continued attention, including future developments.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the meaning of university autonomy today. Globally, the current social climate poses new challenges to university autonomy in two aspects. One is the trend of political intervention in academic freedom and university autonomy, and the other is the transformation of the meaning of academic freedom and university autonomy in the age of social networking（SNS）. In order to achieve these objectives, this paper does not undertake a systematic analysis, but rather explores pioneering cases to illustrate the transformation.

First, the author will briefly introduce the peculiarities of Japan, where academic freedom and university autonomy are one and the same. Next, the author describe the recent situation in which university autonomy is being lost. Since the Donald Trump administration, hostile attitudes toward universities by politicians have spread. Furthermore, after 2022, as a result of the global economic recession and the dominance of right-wing populist parties and regimes advocating anti-immigration in Europe and the U.S., they will try to politically intervene in universities and place restrictions on academic freedom and the internationalization of research activities. Since most universities are financially supported by national and local government, the retreat of financial support also became a political intervention to undermine the foundations of academic freedom and university autonomy, such as the tenure system. In order to gain attention, universities must also appeal to it. Gathering attentions became the goal of the university's autonomy.

This paper discusses “academic freedom” through an analysis of response data from two different surveys. One is a survey of the “new types of specialists” that have been assigned to each university in response to developments in higher education policy and science and technology policy. Respondents were faculty development specialists（FDers）, career support and education specialists, institutional research specialists（IRers）, University Research Administrator（URAs）, and coordinators of industry-academia-government collaboration. The survey was conducted from December 2017 to March 2018. A total of 1,847 surveys were sent to a total of 674 valid responses. The other is a survey of practical professors. The survey targeted university faculty members belonging to academic departments related to the four fields of tourism, media, fashion, and sports management. For comparison, respondents included research faculty without practical experience. The survey was conducted from February 2022 to May 2022. A total of 2,583 people were asked to complete the survey, with a total of 500 valid responses.

The four main findings are as follows. First, while there were differences in research efforts among the “new types of specialists” depending on whether they had tenure or not, there were no differences depending on whether they were practical professors or not. Second, there were large differences within the “new types of specialists” regarding the research environment. Third, there were large differences in the status of research activities among the “new types of specialists.” Fourth, in terms of research performance, the “new types of specialists” survey shows that the group with no fixed term of employment has more performance. According to the survey of practical professors, research faculty members had more research output only in the form of academic papers（peer-reviewed articles）than practitioner faculty members. Some question items showed that practitioner faculty members with no fixed term of appointment were more successful in their research.

In the survey of practical professors, no clear differences were identified in terms of comparisons between academic and practitioner faculty. On the other hand, survey data from the “new types of specialists” showed that many of the employed fixed-term faculty members had low research effort and research performance, and some indicated that research was not necessary. He/she/they may be proactively fleeing from “academic freedom,” perhaps due to the uncertainty of their future careers caused by fixed terms of employment and further driven by the poor research environment. If this is the case, the university needs to understand such a reality and consider appropriate treatment.

This paper focuses on “academic freedom” as it is restricted within universities. The issue of restrictions on academic freedom is not only relevant to the “new types of specialists” and practical professors but also to research faculty. The normative issue of disputing situations that deviate from the “academic freedom” that should be there is also important. At the same time, in “academic freedom” research, the empirical question of how much freedom is at stake and for whom must also be pursued.

The government’s refusal to appoint members to the Science Council has triggered a sudden debate on academic freedom and university autonomy. This paper examined the situation from this perspective using official statistics and our own web-based survey, and found that（1）long-term trends in official statistics indicate that quantitative and qualitative changes in the number of university faculty members have occurred amid the popularization of higher education, while at the same time the old gender disparity remains strong,（2）the general public perception of university faculty members does not support their “professionalism” that much, and（3）the number of university faculty members is still low.（2） The general perception of society does not support the “professionalism” of university faculty members, and（3）Society’s sense of trust in the research community may be in jeopardy.

These results indicate that the conditions under which university faculty members can exercise academic freedom and university autonomy, as well as social support, are shaky, and that the guarantees of constitutional, legal, and institutional rights may face a crisis that may diverge from reality and become a mere skeleton. He pointed out the limitations of the traditional defense of academic freedom and university autonomy, which implicitly assumes a “traditional image of faculty” as if the state of academia were ideological, uniform, and eternal, and stressed the need for serious consciousness of confrontation and dialogue with civil society beyond the classical paradigm of bureaucracy versus democracy.

The purpose of this study is focusing on women who have experienced “exclusion” from girls’ peer groups, aiming to depict the process of being excluded from the girls’ group and the discussing by a gender perspective. The author conduct-ed semi-structured interviews with women in their late teens to early twenties who are graduates of part-time high schools and correspondence high schools. Through an analysis of the women’s school experiences, the following characteristics of exclusion from girls’ peer groups were observed:

Firstly, the starting point for exclusion included deviations from norms, conspicuous behavior, suspicions of violating school rules based on appearance, acts contrary to the group’s “leader,” and deviations from communication norms. These criteria were not as clear-cut as those for males, such as “acquisition of the opposite sex” or “achievement-oriented” approval. Furthermore, these criteria were often less visible as problems because they conformed to the school culture and were easily justified. On the other hand, they had a nature that could change depending on the dynamics of the situation. In other words, the criteria shared within the girls’ peer groups were not easily visible from the outside, but they resembled “unspoken rules” that were commonly shared within the context of the situation.

Secondly, the exclusion process revealed that exclusion from girls’ peer groups was often not perceived as problematic by the individuals involved or their surroundings, and appropriate interventions were lacking, leading to a process where it ceased to be considered a problem. Nonetheless, exclusion from girls’ peer groups, given its significant impact to the extent that it could result in the affected individuals being unable to attend school, later became treated as issues related to “school absenteeism” or “career choices.” As a result, the challenges in interpersonal relationships remained unresolved, and it became a matter to be shouldered as “personal problems” when facing decisions about their educational paths.

In result, this study demonstrates how participants were excluded from school without the exclusion from girls’ peer groups being “problematic,” leading to them facing issues like school absenteeism and future career choices as “personal problems.” It also suggests one facet of the difficulties girls face in the school environment. This research not only highlights the issues associated with exclusion from girls’ peer groups that have been overlooked but also provides insights into the education and support provided by non-mainstream secondary education institutions that accept individuals who have been excluded in both the relational and educational sense.

Limited empirical studies in Japanese sociological research have focused on genetic factors. When analyzing the degree of inequality in educational attainment, the total family effect is captured in the analyses as an estimated value that combines the influence of genetic variation and family-level social influence. In other words, studying the unobserved genetic factors of individuals will contribute greatly to our understanding of the causal mechanisms of social inequality. Thus, focusing on genetic factors and socioeconomic status is crucial when considering the overall impact of socioeconomic status on educational attainment.

A solution to this issue is through behavioral genetics methodology, which de-composes the variance of an observed trait into variances in terms of additive genetic as well as shared and nonshared environmental effects. However, previous studies that employed this method considered inequality in educational attainment that is based solely on the statistical effect of the latent variable “shared environment.” It indicates differences between families but does not examine the relationship between educational attainment and parental education, which are usually considered in educational sociology. Therefore, this study identified the la-tent variable using parental education levels to investigate the effects of genetic factors and parental education on the relationship between IQ and educational attainment.

An analysis of adolescent and young adult twin data（698 pairs of identical twins, 209 pairs of fraternal twins）collected by the Keio Twin Study indicated that genetic, shared environmental, and nonshared environmental factors explain IQ by 43%, 30%, and 27%, respectively. Furthermore, genetic, shared environmental, and nonshared environmental factors explain educational attainment by 40%, 27%, and 34%, respectively. Moreover, the analysis found that the relationship between IQ and educational attainment is explained by shared environmental factors rather than genetic factors. When latent variables were identified using residual scores controlling for parental education, approximately 50% of the relationship between IQ and educational attainment was explained by parental education.

Hence, regarding the relationship between IQ and educational attainment, the analysis supports the notion that the family environment mediates the relationship between IQ and educational attainment, rather than genetic factors.

Using a behavioral genetics approach, this study confirmed the influence of parental education on children’s educational attainment, which has been observed in educational sociology.

In the few discussions of housework and gender studies that have focused on children, gender differences have been widely reported, with girls doing more housework than boys. However, it can be pointed out that behind children’s housework, various factors, such as parental substitutions and discipline, are intermingled.

In this paper, we focus on mothers’ efforts to teach their children housework in the home, which is considered an important place for learning gender roles, and examine the relationship with the attitudes toward the gender role division of labor. If mothers who support the notion that “it is preferable that men engage in paid work and women in housework”, they might actively teach their daughters household chores, while they are reluctant to teach their sons. If that is the case, mothers may contribute to reproducing the gender role in the next generations.

For the analysis, I used a data from the Japanese Longitudinal Study of Children and Parents 2015 and 2017 by the Institute of Social Science at the Universi-ty of Tokyo and Benesse Educational Research and Development Institute. The survey includes parent-child pair data for Japanese elementary school students nationwide. I predicted the hypothesis that the more mothers support gender-role on housework, the more they train their daughters in housework（Hypothesis 1）, and the less they train their sons（Hypothesis 2）. The dependent variable is “Train children in cooking or cleaning”, and the independent variable is to what extent mother supports the view on the gender roles. Control variables include children’s school year（2 groups）, mother’s educational background, mother’s share of housework between the couple, mother’s employment status and work style, number of siblings, and whether the children live with their grandparents.

Firstly, it was confirmed that mothers of girls teach their children housework more frequently than mothers of boys. Applying ordered logistic regression model, this tendency was robust even after taking into account various factors such as the family structures. Contrary to the hypothesis 1, the more mothers supported the gender role, the less frequently they taught their children household chores. This tendency was rather clear for girls. Hypothesis 2 is supported for sons’ result. This tendency remained even when the mother’s educational back-ground was controlled. In the end, the results suggest that mothers who support gender role division of labor do not tend to teach their children housework in the first place.

Analysis of parent-child pair data for Japanese elementary school students shows that there is a clear gender difference in teaching housework to children, with mothers of daughters more likely to teach their children than mothers of sons. On the other hand, contrary to the hypothesis, the more mothers supported the gender role division of labor, the less likely they were to teach their children household chores. In order to unravel the socialization of gender roles, further research is needed from the perspective of housework.

Sociological research has predominantly concentrated on the significance of educational attitudes as a mediating factor in generating class disparities in educational attainment. However, considering theoretical considerations about the purpose of education and the results of sociological research of social networks, the sociological study of educational attitudes has potential for development in the following two directions. The first is to broaden the scope of the research to include attitudes toward children’s social contribution, rather than limiting the research to attitudes toward children’s status attainment, as has been done in the past. Second, the scope of the background factors to be considered should not be focused solely on the status and resources of the parents themselves but should be extended to their social networks.

Based on the above issues, we conducted an exploratory analysis from these two perspectives using survey data from parents raising children. The results of the log-linear model revealed the following: 1）status attainment orientation, which has traditionally been the focus of attention, is indeed related to parents’ social status, but independently it is also positively related to the size of the competitive network; 2）only the size of the cooperative network and not social class is positively associated with the socially contributory parenting orientation, which has traditionally been overlooked; 3）positive parenting attitudes is negatively as-sociated with the size of the competitive network, but social class has no direct association; and 4）those with strong status attainment orientation are more likely to adopt negative parenting attitudes. These results suggest that private and cooperative relationships may influence the development of prosocial attitudes, that competitive kinship may act as a background factor for multigenerational influences on educational attainment, and that their relationships with children’s parents should be considered when enhancing child-rearing resources outside the nuclear family.

The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on the linkage between education and jobs in Japan from individual-level survey data. The author analyzes to what extent linkages exist between- and within-educational level and fields.

The Mutual Information Index, which is a class of entropy-based segregation measure, is applied to the 2005 and 2015 Social Stratification and Social Mobility Surveys in Japan. The analysis also employs a counterfactual framework and decomposes the change in linkage strength between the two time points into the structural and marginal components.

The results observe the followings.（1）University contributes the most to the association with occupation for males, and high school for females. The structural linkage, which purges the effect of composition ratio, shows that for both men and women, junior high school has the strongest linkage, followed by university, high school, and junior college.（2）Within-education groups explain approximately 30% of the total linkage strength and their contribution is higher for women than men. It means that fields of study account for non-negligible portion of the association with occupation.（3）A counterfactual comparison between 2005 and 2015 shows that the linkage strength in 2015 is smaller than that in 2005, which is interpreted as a structural weakening in the linkage. The results imply overeducation by which increasing number of highly-educated individuals cannot attain jobs that match their fields of study.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify, from the perspective of boundary work theory（Fournier 2000）, the process which teachers create boundaries and con-struct their own “unique” professionality through talking about the differences be-tween school and juku, or between teachers and juku instructors.

Today, juku has been accepted in Japanese society. This is a serious situation for teachers who are also involved in teaching, and it shakes their professionalism. This is because it removes the exclusive status of teachers as an occupation-al group involved in teaching and forces them to ask what the difference is between teachers and juku instructors, and what are the unique professional characteristics of teachers. However, the teacher profession theory, which has a wealth of accumulated knowledge about the professionalism or professionality of teachers in Japan, has neglected this issue. This paper, inspired by the “sociology of professions,” positions teachers and juku instructors as educational professions competing for “jurisdiction”（Abbott 1988）over teaching, and examines the professionality of teachers in the context of this conflicting relationship, based on data from an interview survey conducted by the author.

The main findings are as follows. First, the study participants positively evaluated juku regardless of whether or not they had gone to or worked at juku. In other words, they approved the jurisdiction of juku instructors concerning teaching. Second, although this behavior could lead to the “derofessionalization”（Andrews & Wærness 2011）of teachers, the study participants created a boundary by dividing the task field of teaching into “academic achievement” and “personality development,” and by shifting the center of gravity of jurisdiction from the former to the latter, they found the “unique” professionality in teachers. Third, the professionality of teachers presented in narratives could conflict with the institutional framework governing their daily practice. However, this could not be an occasion for realignment of the boundary, and it was maintained.

Based on the above findings, the significance of this paper is that it expands the scope of teacher profession theory in the following two respects. First, the findings of this paper argue for the possibility of developing “bottom-up” approaches that describe the professionalism or professionality constructed by teachers themselves. The construction of professionality through boundary work is an autonomous activity that is developed based on the logic specific to the field, and teachers do not necessarily professionalize themselves in accordance with the “top-down” framework.

Second, the findings of this paper arouse interest in the teacher profession theory of the “others” outside the school. Regardless of policies, juku has exerted a dynamic that defines the way teachers should be, simply by existing. Given the current situation in which more and more occupational groups, not limited to juku, are becoming involved in education, it will be necessary in the future to find the figure of teachers not only within the school, but also in the relationships with various others located outside of the school.