The study provides an analysis and review of social cohesion in 22 Asian countries in a comparative perspective. It presents a valid and reliable measurement of current and past levels of social cohesion and explores its most important determinants and outcomes. As an extension of the Social Cohesion Radar series the study will be of interest and value to policy makers, academics, think tanks and civil society organizations.
Social cohesion has become an important public goal in many countries across the globe, not only in the Western hemisphere, but also in Asia. Despite the growing political and academic interest in the concept, there is no generally accepted definition of social cohesion. As a result, empirical insights are lacking. Against this backdrop, the Bertelsmann Stiftung has initiated the "Social Cohesion Radar" which now, for the first time, presents empirical findings on South, Southeast and East Asia. The study provides an analysis and review of social cohesion in 22 Asian countries in a comparative perspective. It presents a valid and reliable measurement of current and past levels of social cohesion and explores its most important determinants and outcomes. As an extension of the Social Cohesion Radar series the study will be of interest and value to policy makers, academics, think tanks and civil society organizations.
Religious culture is an important keyword for understanding rapidly changing East Asian society, especially China, Japan, and Korea. Despite the common influence of Confucian culture on these countries, each has shown a very different pattern of social progress in modern and postmodern times. Although surveys report a low ratio of religious identification and membership in this region, people in this area are religious in a different way from Western societies, and religious culture is closely related to political, economic, and social subsystems. A real force of changing East Asian society is not only political powers or economic classes, but also an invisible culture based on religious belief and practice. This book focuses on the dynamic relationship between social progress and religious culture, organization, or movements in each society since 1945.
Xie and Chao present a collection of research on mobile communication in Asian communities and countries such as Bangladesh, China, India, Japan, and South Korea. With chapters written by scholars from diverse cultural and institutional backgrounds, this book provides both localized and comparative perspectives on mobile communication research. Exploring the way mobile apps are used in daily life in Asian countries, Xie, Chao, and their contributors analyze how mobile apps improve lives, help people build relationships, sustain communities, and change society for the better. They look at areas including the role of mobile apps in public service delivery and access, family communication, cultural norms and identities, organizational communication, and intercultural communication. The investigation of these topics elevates the understanding of the cultural, familial, interpersonal, organizational, and intercultural consequences of mobile communication in a global context. Through examining mobile apps use in regard to scale, scope, depth, complexity, and distinctiveness within the Asian context, this book furthers the research agenda of mobile communication and enriches our understanding of current practice and future direction of mobile communication. This book serves as a useful reference for scholars and students interested to learn more of the development and application of mobile communication from a global and comparative perspective.
This book is about generating types of societies by the degree of individuals’ satisfaction with life domains, aspects, and styles via factor analysis. It adopts an evidence-based approach in typologizing and a bottom-up rather than a top-down perspective. Thus, the book’s position is against Hegel (freedom for one person), Marx (the Asiatic mode of production), Weber (Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism), Wittfogel (Asiatic autocracy), and Rostow (Western-led modernization). These classical and modern authors tend to see Asian societies with somewhat fixated eyes and categorize Asian societies in a top-down manner. When random-sampled respondents are questioned about their satisfaction with daily life in terms of life domains, aspects, and styles, public policy and institutions as well as survival and social relations are inevitably touched upon—the latter two being the key dimensions common to the World Values Survey and other cultural surveys. This book proposes a new mode of typologizing societies, Asian or non-Asian, not immediately familiar to human geographers, cultural anthropologists, or sociologists, but revealing many complex unknowns with the easy-to-learn typologizing method.
The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Revising established research, this handbook equips readers with an understanding of the complex interplay between local and global and public and private contexts in the development of young people in Asian countries.
A detailed study of sports' arrival, spread and advance in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. A selection of articles addresses critical issues of nationalism, communalism, commercialism and gender through the lens of sport. This book makes the point that the social histories of South Asian sport cannot be understood by simply looking at the history of the game in one province or region. Furthermore, it demonstrates that it would be wrong to understand sport in terms of the exigencies of the colonial state. Drawing inspiration from C.L.R. James' well-known epigram, 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?' the findings suggest that South Asian sport makes sense only when it is placed within the broader colonial and post-colonial context. The book demonstrates that sport not only influences politics and vice versa, but that the two are inseparable. Sport is not only political, it is politics, intrigue, culture and art. To deny this is to denigrate the position of sport in modern South Asian society. This volume was previously published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.
While the balance between private and public sectors are based primarily on the experiences of the wealthy societies in Western Europe and North America, the global reach and increased political weight of East Asian economies is bound to influence other societies as well. Contemporary Social Issues in East Asian Societies: Examining the Spectrum of Public and Private Spheres focuses on modern highly developed East Asian societies and their social issues, particularly ones that are related to family, institution, and health. By examining the modernized global society and its connectedness, this book is a vital resource for researchers, students, and academicians interested in the distinctive features connected with local, social and cultural traditions of East Asian society.
