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Industrialized countries have increasingly used skill-based selective migration policies to reduce labor and skill shortages. But are these policies effective? This paper uses Japan and the United Kingdom to illustrate how immigration policy and employment, training and labor practices influence labor and skill supply. Until recently, these two countries had different migration policies and labor practices. Yet data shows similar patterns of labor and skill shortage profiles in both countries. This paper draws on empirical research to argue that such outcomes suggest that immigration policies will not alleviate labor and skill shortages unless accompanied by the transformation of employment and training practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction to this special issue begins by presenting a recent puzzle – the increasingly strong position of the Japanese prime minister, who has traditionally been regarded as weak, in contrast to the increasingly fragile position of the United Kingdom prime minister, who has traditionally been regarded as strong. To make sense of these developments, the introduction reviews existing academic perspectives related to prime ministerial leadership with a specific focus on the literature on the UK and Japanese prime ministers. It subdivides our understanding of prime ministerial leadership into three distinct but inter-related levels of analysis. First, the institutional setting, which concentrates attention upon prime ministers' relations with the machinery of government and a range of institutions including the executive, legislature and judiciary, and relates to prime ministerial versus cabinet government debates, and the core executive model. Second, the party context, which focuses on prime ministers as leaders of their political parties and debates surrounding party centralisation, internal party cohesion and leadership selection and ejection. Third, the role of agency within these above two settings and in relation to the broader public, which includes the personal skills and performative styles of individual prime ministers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential of the camera framing, or shot-size, semiotic resource to encode meanings related to social distance has been recognized for some time. This study seeks to bring this resource into the remit of systematic analysis. Data are taken from screen measurements of portrayals of social actors in news programming produced by two national broadcasters, NHK in Japan and the BBC in the UK. Results for these two media outlets are compared and an attempt made to place the results in a meaningful cultural context. Analysis focuses on NHK’s images and the less familiar Japanese media system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]