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.
Author(s): Takashi Inoguchi
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 132
City: Singapore
Preface
References
Acknowledgements
Praise for “Typology of Asian Societies”
Contents
1 How I Was Inspired by the Eurobarometer and Grappled with the AsiaBarometer Survey
References
2 How My Encounters with Cultural Psychology and Evolutionary Biology Helped to Justify My Choice of Perspective and Approach Adopted in This Book
References
3 The Need for a Bottom-Up Perspective About Asian Societies
References
4 The Need for an Evidence-Based Approach to Asian Societies
References
5 Two Methodological Issues
5.1 The “Survey as Conversation” Problem
5.2 The Level of Analysis Problem: Aggregating Individual Response Patterns to Societal Response Patterns
References
6 Attending Holistically and Analytically
References
7 Are Asian Societies One Type?
7.1 Typology of Asian Societies
References
8 Choosing Indicators and Typologizing of Societies
8.1 Choosing Indicators: Form and Substance
8.2 Typologizing Societies
8.3 Methodological Issues Related to Factor-Analyzing Human Daily Life Satisfaction of Each of 29 Asian Societies
References
9 Factor Analysis Results
Reference
10 Twenty-Nine Types of Asian Societies
10.1 Abc Society: Octopus-cave Society
10.1.1 Japan
10.1.2 Indonesia
10.1.3 Taiwan
10.1.4 Afghanistan
10.1.5 Uzbekistan
10.1.6 Tajikistan
10.2 Acb Society: God-of-Small-Things
10.2.1 India
10.2.2 Bangladesh
10.2.3 Nepal
10.2.4 Myanmar
10.2.5 Cambodia
10.2.6 Laos
10.2.7 Mongolia
10.2.8 China
10.2.9 South Korea
10.3 Bac Society: Society Colonized from Within
10.3.1 Hong Kong
10.3.2 Malaysia
10.3.3 Thailand
10.3.4 Vietnam
10.3.5 Kyrgyzstan
10.4 Bca Society: Fragmented and Fractured Society
10.5 Cab Society: Seeming Fractured and Fragmented Divisions of a Society
10.5.1 Pakistan
10.5.2 Brunei
10.5.3 The Philippines
10.5.4 Bhutan
10.5.5 Kazakhstan
10.6 Cba Society: Micro-monitoring Society
10.6.1 Singapore
10.6.2 Sri Lanka
References
11 Strength and Weakness of the Proposed Typology
11.1 Measurement and Comparison
11.2 Interpretation of Typologized Results
11.3 How to Cope with Globalization and Democratization?
11.4 Managing Globalization and Democratization
References
12 Corroborative Analysis and Empirical Validation
References
13 Conclusion
References
Appendix A Asia Barometer English Master Questionnaire 2006
Appendix B List of Multilateral Treaties Covered in the Dataset
Appendix C Multilateral Treaty Participation (Accumulated Number)
