Topics that shape the future
- Closer look at research results -

The paper I wrote is titled Role of Social Capital in Career Development: Empowering a Japanese Woman to Become an Executive at an International Company. This paper uses a Japanese female global leader, who is the poster child for intercultural communication, as a research collaborator (called a historical structuring invitation in this research methodology), to analyze the process she went through to become a global leader and the social capital she adopted in the process to shape her career.

Here, we use TEM (Trajectory Equifinality Modeling) *1 of TEA (Trajectory Equifinality Approach), one of the most representative qualitative research methods. The concept of equifinality is at the core of this method, in which humans are viewed as open systems, and are considered to be "beings that, influenced by historical, cultural, and social factors over time, follow diverse trajectories but reach a certain steady state equally" *2. In other words, there are other people who reach the same destination in completely different places by following different trajectories. Therefore, even in a small number of cases, we can analyze from the trajectories what historical, cultural, and social influences promoted and hindered the person (s) to move to the destination.
The research collaborator I chose is a woman named Yumi (not her real name), born in the late 1940s, who achieved excellent grades in high school but gave up on going to college due to her family's financial situation. After getting a job, Yumi got married, gave birth, and accompanied her husband on an overseas assignment. She then got a job as a secretary at a foreign company in Japan, and later built her career up to become a director at the same company. Yumi's career development took place between the 1960s and 1990s, and her work was filled with very interesting research material that can be used to see the state of Japan's globalization.
Given the title of her thesis, some have commented that it "just highlights one Japanese woman becoming an elite at a foreign-affiliated company" and that "is that really empowerment?", but Yumi's warm family was by no means financially well off. However, I learned a lot from her, both as a research collaborator and as a person, from her passion for communicating and collaborating with people from culturally different backgrounds than her own, valuing her relationships with the people she met, and building her career. Not only was she skilled in English, the world's common language, but the fact that Yumi communicated with everyone in an equal manner and carved out a career by valuing her relationships with others is very inspiring for us who teach students.
In particular, when I began editing the book during the COVID-19 pandemic, with classes being conducted entirely online, I personally felt the importance of social capital and actively utilizing it, and struggled daily to think about how to best impart social capital to my students.
*1 Yuko, Yasuda, Akinobu, Nameda, Mari, Fukuda, Tatsuya, Sato (2015). TEA Theory. Shinyosha.
*2 Y. Yasuda (2019). TEA. T. Sato, H. Kasuga, and M. Kanzaki (eds.), Mapping Qualitative Research Methods, (pp, 16-22). Shinyosha.

It is no exaggeration to say that the academic field of intercultural communication originated from training designed to prevent Americans who had expanded their economic base around the world after World War II from returning home before completing their terms.
When I returned to Japan from my second long stay in the United States in the 1990s, interest in this field was quite high in Japan. At that time, intercultural communication research was dominated by a cultural essentialist approach. In other words, it was based on a somewhat static approach that assumed that culture itself was an essentially unchanging entity, such as the United States versus Japan or Japan versus China. Of course, this way of thinking is widely accepted by many people, including beginners. Later, research also began to appear from a cultural constructivist approach, which argues that culture is cultivated and that the process of communication determines which of an individual's multiple cultural aspects will be expressed.
Culture refers to a group of people who share certain patterns of behavior, but the scope of what it refers to has expanded over time. We see a variety of cultures, including nationalities, ethnicities, organizations, genders, physical abilities, and sexual orientations.
I have noticed that the subjects in this field that I was so fascinated with studying in the United States in the late 1980s are actually being replaced by other subjects (e.g., communication on social media) back in the United States. Communication on social media is very important, but with wars and conflicts continuing, it is extremely important to learn how to communicate in the real world with people from different cultural backgrounds.

I have been conducting research using qualitative research methods. Time performance, or time efficiency, seems to be a popular word these days, but from the perspective of time performance, qualitative research methods are far from it. Quantitative research methods are used to verify hypotheses. In contrast, a very limited number of qualitative research methods (e.g., grounded theory approach, etc.) both build hypotheses and verify them, but most qualitative research methods build hypotheses. When building hypotheses, it is important to have a point of view and ideas. Ideas can come from slowly facing each piece of data. Also, inspiration can come to mind and a name for a group of data can suddenly come to mind.
Nowadays, it is easy to output speech to a Word document, and there are many different types of coding software. The number of qualitative research methods has also increased significantly since I was a graduate student. However, unfortunately, just because the tools have become more advanced does not mean that you will gain analytical skills by using those advanced tools. My mentor taught me that it is important to develop one's own insight by using research approaches and methods that suit the research purpose. I would like to convey the same message to future researchers and students.