Ronald P. Dore

Ronald Philip Dore (1 February 1925 – 14 November 2018) was a British sociologist specialising in Japanese economy and society and the comparative study of types of capitalism. He was an associate of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and was a fellow of the British Academy, the Japan Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The citation for his eminent scholar award from the Academy of International Business describes him as "an outstanding scholar whose deep understanding of the empirical phenomena he studied and ability to build on it to develop theoretical contributions are highly respected not only by sociologists but also by economists, anthropologists, historians, and comparative business systems scholars".

Biography Early life Ronald Philip Dore was born in Bournemouth, Dorset, on 1 February 1925. His father worked as a cleaner, fireman, and later a driver for Southern Railway. Dore attended Poole Grammar School.

Dore began to learn Japanese in 1942 as part of an 18-month Board of Education initiative to train sixth form boys in languages critical to the war effort. He was one of thirty students who were enrolled in its Japanese language programme. Originally, he applied to study Turkish as his first preference, and Chinese as his second, only to find that he had been enrolled in the Japanese course.

Language education on the programme was provided at the School of Oriental and African Studies, but Dore and the other students resided a few miles away in Dulwich College, leading to the group of students being referred to as the "Dulwich Boys". Other notable Dulwich Boys included P. G. O'Neill, John McEwan and Sir Peter Parker. Sandy Wilson also attended at the same time as Dore, but did not complete the course. His first trip to Japan was in 1950, arriving in Kobe. land reform and village life. He also engaged in a number of studies comparing Japanese social organizational forms and institutions with those found in other parts of the world. This resulted from earlier comparative research on development while employed at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University and led to his important analyses of Japan's post-war industrial system and of different forms of stock market and welfare capitalism.

Many of Dore's publications were translated and published in Japan, where he was greatly admired. His facility in the Japanese language as a foreigner was unsurpassed, and he would frequently deliver lectures in that language with notes hardly filling a half A4 size sheet of paper.

He held academic positions at the University of British Columbia, the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, the Technical Change Centre in London, the Institute for Economic growth in Delhi, the London School of Economics, Imperial College London, Harvard University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. and Keith Lewin.

Death Dore died aged 93 in Grizzana Morandi, Bologna, Italy, on 14 November 2018. He was the last surviving Dulwich Boy. 1974 Association for Asian Studies (AAS), 1986 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies Order of the Rising Sun (Third Class) Japan Foundation Prize (1977) Honorary Doctorate, Doshisha University (2008)