Ronald P. Dore

Ronald P. Dore FBA (born 1 February 1925) is a British sociologist specialising in Japanese economy and society and the comparative study of types of capitalism. He is an associate of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and is a fellow of the British Academy, the Japan Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The citation for his eminent scholar award from the Academy of International Business describes him as "an outstanding scholar whose deep understanding of the empirical phenomena he studies and ability to build on it to develop theoretical contributions are highly respected not only by sociologists but also by economists, anthropologists, historians, and comparative business systems scholars".^[1][1]

Early life

The son of a train driver, Dore went to Poole Grammar School. With the outbreak of the Japanese war, he was one of the "Dulwich boys", so-called because of their lodgings at Dulwich College, 30 sixth form students chosen to study languages at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) to boost the ranks of military translators.^[2] Other "Dulwich boys" included P. G. O'Neill, John McEwan and Sir Peter Parker. Although he had chosen Turkish as his first, and Chinese as his second choice language, he arrived at SOAS to discover that he had been enrolled in the Japanese course. After injuring himself before he could take part in active service, he returned to the UK to teach Japanese, and complete his external degree at London University. His first trip to Japan was in 1950, arriving in Kobe.^[3]

Academic career

Having learned Japanese during the war, Dore graduated with a degree in Japanese from London University in 1947.^[4] Dore began research in SOAS. He has also worked at the University of British Columbia, the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, the Technical Change Centre at Sussex, the Institute for Economic growth in Delhi, Imperial College in London, Harvard University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[1]

Publications

• Life in a Tokyo Ward. 1958.
• British Factory, Japanese Factory. 1973.
• The Diploma Disease. 1976.
• Shinohata, a portrait of a Japanese village. 1978.
• "Goodwill and the spirit of market capitalism". British Journal of Sociology. 1983.
• Education in Tokugawa Japan. 1984.
• Flexible Rigidities. 1986.
• Stock Market Capitalism, Welfare Capitalism: Japan and Germany versus the Anglo-Saxons. 2000.

Honors

• Association for Asian Studies (AAS), 1986 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies^[5]

Notes

1. "AIB Fellow - Ronald P. Dore".
2. Sadao Ōba The 'Japanese' war: London University's WWII secret teaching programme p11.
3. "Interview of Ronald Dore".
4. "London School of Economics Biography page".
5. Association for Asian Studies OBE (AAS), 1986 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies; retrieved 2011-05-31