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This proposal has three central objectives. The first is knowledge exchange. This grant will fund the first direct exchange of new scholarship on class, culture and inequality between academics in Japan and the UK, who are working on these issues from a range of different empirical and conceptual perspectives. This is the first, essential step in a longer-term process of establishing an enduring research collaboration between individuals working on these issues. For reasons of cross-cultural sensitivity that we elaborate upon in the Case for Support, it is imperative that we utilise the specific opportunity offered by this call to provide an environment for the face-to-face dissemination and discussion of our work. Linguistic boundaries and spatial propinquity represent substantial barriers to the open exchange of research in this context. Whilst English will be the medium of communication for our planned events and activities, our team offers two bilingual Co-Is and a PI with a working knowledge of Japanese and a sustained experience of life in the country. Nevertheless, even where such language barriers may not be relevant, there are still cultural modes and mores, the nuances of which cannot be effectively conveyed through electronic media.

This naturally leads to our second objective – the development of a research network of academics spanning both countries, with a shared interest in understanding how well currently operationalized definitions of social class and stratification can help us to understand the accumulation and reproduction of inequalities; which organisations like the OECD and UN identify as one of the leading threats to global prosperity and stability. In particular, we want to uncover how such classifications might be reconceptualised to better account for the lived reality of inequality in terms its social and cultural, as well as economic, dimensions.

The third objective of this application is therefore to build capacity to enhance and justify the larger subsequent proposal that will follow on from this initial networking project. While the current proposal will deliver clear dividends for knowledge translation and exchange and for relationship building, we do not  see this as an end in itself. Consistent with the ESRC’s longer-term strategic aim of fostering the development of both closer and sustained research and innovation collaborations between the UK and Japan, our longer-term objective is to make our network the foundation for a large-scale, mixed methods comparative analysis of contemporary class structures in Japan and the UK. This is an approach that builds directly upon the progress made in the UK by the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) experiment; this was a flagship social science research project, based in the ESRC’s Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change at the University of Manchester, that has had a clear and demonstrable impact on the public imagination, political debate and private enterprise.