EUIJ WASEDA

The lectures and workshop were held in conjunction with the advanced course Comparative Corporate Governance, which is offered by the School of International Liberal Studies, and taught by Professor Pokarier.

1. Representative of European company
Mr. Jan De Bock, who is a managing partner in trainspot, a marketing and communications agency, started the lecture series as a representative of European enterprises. He introduced his experiences of difficulty in coordinating what the headquarters of his firm in Belgium wishes to sell and what the Japanese market desires. He discussed a lack of mutual understanding of specific commercial practices in Japan, mostly affected by cultural factors. On what the unification of Europe brings, he does not regard the phenomenon positively, as there are linguistic, cultural and political difficulties at country and regional level in Europe, and concluded that a successful marketing strategy today must keep going on its hard way.

2. Governing System of the EU and its Market-Building
Associate Professor Paul Bacon, the Vice-Chairperson of the EUIJ at Waseda, gave the second lecture. His lecture was basically teaching the institutional system of Europe, including how decision making is organized and how the evolution of each organization of the EU has been taking place since the organization was created in 1950s. Although the EU had its own policies for market-building and has promoted integration aggressively, he suggested that the future of European integration is difficult to predict.

3. Continental European practice
Professor Pokarier, coordinated the two earlier lectures and the workshop, and finally presented his lecture on continental European practices. He looked at each of t French, German and Italian approaches to business management, discussing several features of each country. After the lecture, he instructed students to have a discussion on the key statistics of European countries, related to business and commercial matters.

Through the lecture and workshops of the day, that is, the understanding of what is going on in the real business world, how the institutional system works at the EU level and how commercial practices are governed in important continental European countries, students were able to gain valuable knowledge, and discussed the issues with efficiency.