Hitotsubashi University

This course covers topics that are ethically questioned in business and consumption. It consists of lectures and exercises where all participants are expected to engage in discussion.

Students discuss ethical issues in business and consumption. The course aims to:
-Understand principles and rules that determine ‘right’ and ‘wrong;'
-Understand the decision-making process and influencing factors in the context of business and consumption practices; and  
-Consider implications to oneself as a practitioner and an individual consumer. 

Topics covered in the course include:
• Introduction to ethics in business and consumption – What is ethics in marketplace? What is the ‘responsibility’ of marketers and consumers, and to whom?  
• Ethical theories and principles – What makes it ‘right’?
• Ethical decision-making – How do we make decisions?
• Ethical and sustainability issues in business and consumption
• Notions of 'social responsibility' and ‘sustainability’

This course aims to highlight the importance of communication with stakeholders and an understanding of public relations methods. The course utilizes various media to acquire basic knowledge of effective public relations.

Communication is the key to any organization’s success. With the diversification of societal needs and business environment, it is crucial for companies to implement an effective public relations strategy as part of their management strategy and to build a trust-based relationship with stakeholders. For effective public relations/corporate communications, companies need to understand mass media and social media, with the latter receiving considerable attention from the business world as a direct and fast-acting communication channel with their high-priority stakeholders.

 

This is an introductory course tracing the genealogy of Western masters who established sociology over the past 100 years or so, from Durkheim, Weber to Baudrillard, Goffman, and Bourdieu. It oversees their research, theory and thoughts, providing students to gain a three-dimensional understanding of the constant interrelationships between society and sociology throughout history.

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a basic understanding of the transformation of the Japanese economy in the late early-modern and modern times, while at the same time acquiring a multifaceted view of historical facts. The course introduces the characteristics of the transformation process of the Japanese economy in the late early modern period and the modern period (19th century to 20th century). In addition to macroscopic perspectives such as industry, distribution, and trade structures, the course also focuses on microscopic perspectives such as the way people worked and lived at the time and the transformation of society.

This course analyzes a selection of works by Western writers and film directors from 1990s to the present, with the exception of Ishiguro’s short story) which are set in East Asia and/or contain characters from East Asia. It explores the answers to the following central questions: Is the portrayal of East Asian people and cultures in each of these works fairly accurate, or is it conforming to biased existing discourses? Are there correct and incorrect ways to present East Asia in literary and cinematic works?

The course aims to apply logical reasoning to our examinations of racial and cultural issues and to learn to think for ourselves, instead of allowing existing discourses to think for us.

Recently, deep leaning has been the successful tool for various tasks of data analysis. Also, the theoretical structure of deep neural network (DNN) has been clarified gradually. On the other hand, such theoretical structure is crucially based on elementary linear algebra. Thus it is worth studying machine learning from scratch, that is, elementary linear algebra. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to understand topics on machine learning including elementary deep neural network and reservoir computing.

This course explores different aspects of the relationship between language and economy, looking at the economic value of language; the linguistic side of the economy, and how the relationship between economic and linguistic forces help shapes today's global world. 

The aim of this lecture is to familiarize students with the various methods of media research (both quantitative and qualitative) and their theoretical backgrounds. Students may already know (and be using) some of the methods and theories, but this course aims to enlighten them of other approaches as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the various methods.

The course includes engagement with videos about media research methods as well as discussion of recent articles from media and communication journals. Students will be expected to introduce each article in class to facilitate the discussion. Students will gain an understanding of the different kinds of media research methods, as well as when, how and why they were developed. This is not a practical course so students will not be taught how to use particular methods, but this course should help them make a more informed choice of research methods for their own projects.

The course covers the analytical tools and techniques that are necessary to examine a wide variety of fixed income securities and their derivatives. Fixed income securities are financial instruments whose cashflows are fixed and determined in advance. The instruments we cover include treasury and corporate bonds, bond futures, and interest rate swaps. After introducing the notion of yields, duration and convexity, and term structure models, we discuss the evaluation and the risk management of fixed income investments.

The aim of this course is to provide students with the introductory theory of fixed income securities and its applications to the investments. After completing the course, the students will: (i) Be familiar with the basic concepts such as yields, duration and convexity; (ii) Develop and apply the tools for pricing and hedging the fixed income securities; (iii) Understand the theoretical models for the pricing of fixed income securities, and (iv) Master the interest rate derivatives and its applications for hedging and risk management.

This pilot course introduces cutting-edge approaches to analyze and devise responses in relation to conflict and violence, with a particular focus on digital instruments. Students will learn emerging concepts and techniques in various fields, from peacemaking to peacekeeping; peacebuilding; disarmament; human rights, and disaster relief, as well as associated risks and benefits. The course includes active learning elements, whereby students will interact with guest lecturers from the UN, research institutes, and aid groups, while practicing skills for open-source investigation.