Using Japanese higher education as a case study, author Brian J. McVeigh explores the varieties of 'exchange dramatics' among the Education Ministry, universities, faculty, and students. With one eye on large-scale processes and the other on everyday practices, he elucidates trafficking between micro- and macro-levels and key concepts of 'value,' 'exchange,' and 'role performance' by studying how political economy configures dramatization and deception at the everyday level. Relying on extensive ethnographic participant observation and the notion of the 'gift,' McVeigh challenges the commonly accepted idea of 'social contract' for understanding state-society relations. Written to be read as both a political and philosophical commentary and anthropological investigation, this work has theoretical implications for comparative studies of political systems, particularly regarding the relation between self-deception and the ideological manufacture of legitimacy.

"This book is an ethnographic, participant-observer study based on the author's extensive experience with ten post-secondary institutions in Japan, in a variety of roles including graduate student, researcher, professor and department chair....It is an intriguing approach that helps us see the data in a different light, to see connections that we might otherwise not see. . . . Presents a fascinating, but disturbing, case study of undergraduate education in Japan." - Canadian Journal of Higher Education, Vol 39, No. 1