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This chapter outlines and critiques Japan’s Furusato Nozei tax program from an economic anthropological perspective. This chapter first introduces the socio-political organization of taxes together with the social-scientific paradigms that have been brought to analyze taxation within anthropological thinking. The chapter then outlines Japan’s tax history and the Furusato Nozei, or Hometown Tax program, before critiquing the program on the basis of these social science and anthropological. This critique confirms the validity of evaluating this Japanese tax program in its orientation and operation from an anthropologic viewpoint, while also calling into question the validity of such an approach to taxation from a broader societal view, thereby contributing to a new area of research within the Anthropology of Taxation.

The chapter reconstructs the methodological trajectory of Polly Hill. Crossing the boundaries between economics and anthropology, Hill’s work was simultaneously an epistemic challenge to development economics, and a testimony to the complexity and richness of economic life in what she called the “rural tropical world.” Drawing inspiration from the process that Mary Morgan referred to as “seeking parts, looking for wholes,” the chapter explores the evolving relationship between observational practice and conceptual categories in Hill’s work on West Africa and India. It is argued that fieldwork, the central element in Hill’s methodological reflection, served two main functions. Firstly, it acted as the cornerstone of her views on observation and induction, framing her understanding of the relationship between “parts” and “wholes.” Secondly, Hill used fieldwork as a narrative trope to articulate her hopeful vision for an integration of economics and anthropology, and later express her feelings of distance and alienation from the ways in which these disciplines were actually practiced.

Is liberalism premised on an unrealistically individualist anthropology? In one regularly told story about modernity, the earliest liberals grounded their arguments for political liberty in a picture of human nature that centered on our moral autonomy, perhaps epitomized best in Kantian thought. However, a range of critics have now compellingly argued that such accounts of our agency are descriptively inaccurate, and that normative social projects beginning from such flawed foundations are thus unstable. While this paper accepts this criticism of individualist anthropologies, it proposes that this need not identify a problem with liberalism overall. To make this case, this paper turns to Adam Smith, who grounded his early advocacy of liberalism in an anthropology grounded in natural theology that depicts us as morally interconnected, rather than as autonomous, and as always morally impressionable. As it will explain, Smith presumed an account of character as integrally related to and influenced by the agent’s social context, for both better and worse. Furthermore, he wove his attentiveness to this complex interaction between the agent and their context into both his economic analyses and political proposals. Smith’s social vision thus illustrates how a strong regard for individual liberty is fully compatible with a sophisticated anthropology that recognizes our malleability as moral agents – and even with political proposals that capitalize upon this malleability. Smith’s thought thus offers useful resources for contemporary proponents of liberalism who wish to value the dignity of individuals without basing that valuation in unrealistic abstractions, or ignoring the responsibilities engendered by the fact of our ongoing moral formation by our social contexts.

The digital age requires people of all ages to communicate and organise their lives through digital technologies. The project EQualCare investigates how the growing population of older people living alone is managing this transition, how it shapes their (non-)digital social networks and what changes on a local level need to be brought about. This paper aims to give insight into the process of participatory action research (PAR) with older people in the community across four countries and reflects on experiences made by academic and co-researchers.

Following the emancipatory underpinnings of PAR, which aims to reduce inequalities through collaboration and co-design, EQualCare involved nine teams of co-researchers across Finland, Germany, Latvia and Sweden making older people the centre of policy development. Co-researchers were involved in formulating research aims, collecting data, reflecting on data, formulating and disseminating recommendations for local policy stakeholders.

Co-researchers’ motivation to invest considerable time and effort was driven by a desire to create a more equal future for older people living alone. Moreover, they were keen to involve marginalised older people and became frustrated when this proved difficult. Power dynamics played a role throughout the process but became productive as roles and responsibilities were renegotiated. Doing PAR with older people can be emotionally challenging for co-researchers when negative feelings around ageing are encountered.

The paper advances understanding on the process of PAR in ageing research by reflecting on the social, cultural and political contexts of doing PAR with diverse sets of older people.

The primary objective of this research is to chronicle how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other United States Federal Government Agencies (USFGA) agencies have played a role in shaping the trajectory of financial reporting for sustainability, with a particular emphasis on triple bottom line (TBL). This exploration extends to other indexes reporting sustainability data encompassed within financial, social and environmental reporting.

This study adopts an illustrative methodology, utilizing data sourced from governmental, business and international organizational documents.

Sustainability accounting predominantly finds its place within the framework of TBL. However, it is crucial to note that sustainability reporting remains voluntary rather than mandatory. Nevertheless, accounting firms and professional accounting societies have embraced it as a supplementary facet of financial accounting reporting.

The research highlights the historical evolution of sustainability within the USFGA and corporate entities. Corporations’ interest in accounting for sustainability performances has significantly contributed to the emergence of voluntary sustainability accounting rules, as embodied by the TBL.

Functionalist models of intercultural interaction have serious limitations relying on static and decontextualized culture views. This paper sets out to outline newer developments in anthropological theory in order to provide inspirations to a more dynamic and contextual approach for understanding intercultural communication research in cross‐cultural management (CCM).

The paper analyzes the established approaches to the cultural underpinnings of intercultural communication in CCM and examines how newer developments in anthropology may contribute to this research.

The standard frameworks for classifying cultures in CCM are based on a view of culture as static, formal mental codes and values abstracted from the context of valuation. However, this view, underwriting the dominating research stream, has been abandoned in the discipline of anthropology from which it originated. This theory gap between intercultural communication research in CCM and anthropology tends to exclude from CCM an understanding of how the context of social, organizational and power relationships shapes the role of culture in communication.

The paper proposes to substitute the view of culture as comprising of abstract values and codes as determinants of communication with concepts of culture as dynamically enfolded in practice and socially situated in specific contexts, in order to give new directions to theories on intercultural communication in CCM.

Scant research has compared intercultural communication research in CCM with new anthropological developments. New insights from anthropology are analyzed in order to open up analytical space in CCM.

Investigates the contribution of anthropology to marketing which has been thought of as being negligible. Reviews its potential as we move towards market analysis and model building strategies for marketing. Suggests that it is likely to play a role in international marketing.

Online bibliographic databases are currently available for a wide range of disciplines. At the present time, however, there is no online database devoted specifically to anthropological literature. The field of anthropology is generally divided into four sub‐fields: social and cultural anthropology; archeology; anthropological linguistics; and physical anthropology, or bioanthropology. Anthropologists in these four subfields represent a very wide range of subject interests, and the field as a whole places strong emphasis on interdisciplinary research. As a result, it is sometimes possible to perform satisfactory computerized literature searches using databases which cover the literature of related disciplines.

This paper aims to o review understandings of complexity in anthropology.

A number of works in the field of anthropology are discussed.

Anthropologists generally agree that human behavior is complex, although they differ about the meaning of complexity. For many in this era of postmodernism, it involves emphasizing cultural differences and social contexts. Earlier interests in underlying cultural meanings and structures, meanwhile, have become somewhat passé. Nonetheless, some social anthropologists, encouraged by chaos science, continue to explore hidden meanings and structures. While there is much to like in their attention to ethnographic detail, one concern is their metaphorical use of the science of chaos. Another is failure to deal with intention and agency.

Lévi‐Strauss doubts that psychoanalysis has anything substantial to contribute to anthropology. This conclusion helped to set the stage for postmodernist anthropology, and its consequences are evident in the works under review here.

The social anthropology of food and eating displays considerable diversity in theoretical approach, research strategy and substantive focus. Raises the question of whether this form of diversity is located within the discipline or whether it results from drawing on work from other disciplines. Compares selected works in social anthropology with works in sociology, a relative newcomer to the field. Reviews three “matched” pairs of studies; two each investigating attitudes between dietary complexity and socio‐economic aspects, two on gender and drink, both alcoholic and non‐alcoholic, and two on cuisines in comparative cultural and historical perspective. Proposes that the study of food and eating is an especially appropriate arena in which to develop systematically a more considerable cross‐disciplinary fertilization.