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The origins of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have been widely attributed to the work of scholars, and business managers as well, in North America and Western Europe. Inevitably, however, as the economic interaction of individual firms and entire nations has grown over the past several decades — call it globalization — so too has the concept and the practice of CSR spread throughout the world. It is certainly time to explore how CSR is being incorporated into the practice of business management in other regions and other countries. Therefore, in this chapter we will focus on Asia: specifically on Japan, South Korea, India, and China. It is interesting for academicians to understand how CSR is being absorbed and adapted into the business cultures of these four countries. Perhaps of even greater importance, it is vital that business managers know what to expect about the interaction between business and society as well as the government as their commercial activities grow in this burgeoning part of the world.

For each of these four countries, we will provide an overview of the extent to which CSR has become a part of the academic community and also how it is being practiced and incorporated in everyday management affairs. We will see that there are very significant differences among these countries which lead to the natural question: why? To answer this question, we will use an eight-part analytical framework developed specifically for this purpose. We will look at the history, the dominant religious beliefs, the relevant social customs, the geography, the political structures, the level of economic development, civil society institutions, and the “safety net” of each country. As a result of this analysis, we believe, academicians can learn how CSR is absorbed and spread into commercial affairs, and managers can profit from learning more about what to expect when doing business in this increasingly important region.

This paper aims to unveil the business‐government‐society relationship in China, as compared with that in the USA.

Three cases – the Chinese milk scandal, the beef recall, and the peanut butter scandal in the USA – are presented and contrasted.

The business‐society‐government relationship in China sets itself apart from that in the USA, largely due to its one‐party political system and the Confucian tradition. The relative lack of independent watchdogs and advocacy groups and the relative lack of independence of the media make it more difficult for irresponsible behavior by powerful corporations to be exposed in China. Further, paternal local governments can sometimes play an enabling role to companies engaged in irresponsible behavior under their protective wings.

With little extant research in the area of corporate social responsibility in the Chinese context, future research can build on this research and further test the relationship with quantitative data.

The research provides insights into the context of business operations in China and thus has significant practical relevance.

The paper is the first to explore the business‐government‐society relationship in China.

Education reform has increasingly become a top political priority in most countries, as education is thought to be the solution to social and economic challenges. While some of these reforms were successful, others had no impact at all and ended in failure. In the past two decades, Kuwait has continuously attempted to reform its education system, aiming to shift its economy toward a knowledge-based economy by improving the skill sets of its human capital. However, these attempts ended with failure. The aim of this chapter is to provide an explanation of the causes behind the failures by documenting and analyzing the recent reform project, which was launched in 2010 in collaboration with the World Bank. Due to the Ministry of Education’s (MOE’s) lack of official documentation related to the reform process the ethnography approach was used to develop critical documentation of reform process. The ability of educational institutions, including the MOE, to lead and manage educational reform is a crucial factor that affected the sustainability and success of the reform. Consequently, the success of any reform requires the government to prioritize top policies, implements certain social changes, and ensures skilled human capital is incorporated into the educational institutions.