Yoshio Higuchi
Dean of Graduate School of Business and Commerce

A subject of social sciences

After the end of the cold war, we are facing many new social and economic conflicts. Giving our careful considerations on the background of these problems, we could be identified in the fact that two types of human societies had, through the 20th century, competed with each other for dominance in the world. One of them was a totalitarian system and the other a free, individualistic system.

In the former system, it was believed for a long time that a group of the power elite should be able to recognize the needs and wants of people forming a society and to draw an optimum blueprinted plan toward an ideal human society. However, in spite of such a belief, individuals under this system, who had been compelled to obey the control from above, had gradually lost the will to exercise their own originality and ingenuity.

These were situations that no one in the system had expected. We are able to call these situations an "unitended result of human actions", arising from the fact of limitations of human knowledge and abilities compared with unlimited diversities of the world surrounding us.

It has become steadily clear that such a design by the power elite was impossible through the collapse of the former type of social system. Some people might say that it means a victory of the free, individualistic social system. At the same time, however, it is also true that there are many problems in this latter system which is losting a potent competitor following quite a different value. These problems arising from social actions by free individuals should be improved not through large scale drastic social experiments but through a piecemeal social engineering. This is the case that knowledge of the social sciences could prepare some meaningful devices for human societies.

You will read and discover various research areas on business and commerce in our curriculum of the graduate school. We hope that our curriculum may be useful for your academic researches to come to grips with and solve problems related to "unintended results of human actions".