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In the wake of the extraordinary financial scandals that both preceded and followed the September–October Financial Crises of 2008, discussions about the executive virtues of honesty and integrity are no longer academic or esoteric, but critically urgent and challenging. As representatives of the corporation, its products and services, corporate executives in general, and production, accounting, finance, and marketing executives in particular, must be the frontline public relations and goodwill ambassadors for their firms, products, and services. As academicians of business education, we must also analyze these corporate wrongdoings as objectively and ethically as possible. What is wrong must be declared and condemned as wrong, what is right must be affirmed and acknowledged as right. We owe it to our students, our profession, our stakeholders, and to the business world. Contemporary American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) proposes the issue of morality in a threefold question: Who am I? Who ought I to become? How ought I to get there? The answer to every question refers to the virtues, especially to corporate executive virtues. This chapter explores corporate executive virtues, especially the classical cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice as defining and enhancing corporate executive life.

This chapter presents an exploratory study of specific experiences among Central Asian grandparents who adopt and raise their firstborn grandchild as their own youngest child. The practice, referred to as ‘nebere aluu’, is deemed an ethnonational tradition of the Kyrgyz and Kazakh people and appears to be widely accepted among men and women, young and old. Drawing on in-depth interviews with grandparents themselves, I describe this phenomenon as situated within and dynamically responding to the shifting social, economic and political context of contemporary Central Asia. Drastic transformations in the everyday lives, while destabilizing and disorienting, may have supplanted nebere aluu with unique significance. Contemporary expressions of nebere aluu point to it being a complex social system of intergenerational reciprocal care, continuity and responsibility that provides a meaningful space for reconciling conflicting ideas about family, marriage, love and child-rearing. This discursive space is open for debate and negotiations and raises important questions about power and gender politics inherent to it.

In what follows, I first unpack the context of East Asia where fast economic growth, demographic transition, shifting public policies, and historical legacies as well as emerging trends of family norms and practices jointly influence children's and youths' everyday lives and well-being. I show that albeit intraregional and intrasociety heterogeneities, childhood is part and parcel of the modernization project in this part of the world, which has attracted concerted efforts of intense investment from the state and the family, shaping a trajectory of childhood that is increasingly scholarized. I then sketch the landscape of childhood and youth studies in this region, calling for the intervention of childhood sociology as an approach to bring young people's own perspectives, voices, subjectivities, and actions to the fore. This is followed by an introduction to four compelling contributions that offer rich and nuanced insights into the pains and gains, pressures and perseverance of the growing up experiences of the young in rapidly changing East Asian societies.