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The paper aims to understand how Eastern spiritual and Western secular traditions coexist in the US commercial marketplace and what lessons spiritual messages of Eastern wisdom offer Western consumers.

The paper uses qualitative methods by engaging in close reading and analysis of the narratives on food and drink packages that have a direct reference to Eastern spirituality in the form of symbolic Eastern vocabulary and images.

The paper proposes that artful sacralization of the spiritual to brand the mundane is an additional mode of cultural production used by marketers, and that this proposed mode extends the two modes (sacralization of the mundane and commodification of the spiritual) reported in previous studies.

The relationship between Eastern spirituality and Western commercialism deserves more in-depth studies. For example, how does the Western treatment of Eastern spirituality affect its perceived authenticity and purity? Finally, what do the newly wise Westerners do with mastery of an Eastern science of life?

This work finds Western supermarkets to be emerging channels of Eastern spirituality. The author argues that narratives on food and drink packages perform as carriers of Eastern wisdom.

The author also finds that the borrowed spiritual wisdom of the East has yet to be reconciled with the prevailing secular norms of Western society.

This has been the first known academic attempt to explore the spiritual connotation of the labels on branded food and drink packages sold in Western supermarkets.

The year 2020 is an epochal moment for governance and public administration. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has upset social and economic life, including the delivery of public services, and eroded domestic and international politics. It comes in an era of uncertainty resulting from the end of the New Public Management boom and a looming breakdown of the contemporary US-defined international order. Against such a sea change, we can hardly take business as usual. Change breeds indeterminacy but also induces reimagining. Any renewal and renaissance of public management has to address the ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions of governance in a low-trust and high-risk society. Both the capacity and legitimacy of the state need to be re-empowered, but no longer through the market. The dual failure of democratic politics and bureaucratic excellence in many countries has rendered the Wilsonian politics-administration dichotomy redundant. Amid the rise of East Asia, there are growing contentions over the conceptualization of meritocracy as alternative systems of governance and public service models seem to be delivering effective rivals. Governance performance may not be predetermined by regime types within a poly-polar world. We need to search for new reconnections, new leadership, a new basis for trust and consensus, and a new public service bargain to avoid getting bogged down in old wine in re-labelled bottle, or another singular universalist paradigm.

This study aims to summarize the important contextual influences East Asian philosophy may have on marketing strategy and consumerism.

A qualitative approach is used to deconstruct (1) the literature on marketing as a contextual discipline, (2) East Asian philosophical underpinnings and their personal and institutional manifestations in East Asian marketing contexts, and (3) the implications for non-East Asian marketers. This essay includes a brief introduction to the manuscripts in this special issue.

Ancient philosophical wisdom shared by East Asian societies can shed light on how marketing activities and consumer behavior intertwine within East Asia and beyond. Three ancient philosophies (i.e. Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism) heavily influence East Asian societies through personal and institutional-level cultural manifestations in marketing contexts.

Although the three discussed East Asian philosophical schools are not exhaustive, they lay a foundation for future discussions about how alternative marketing-related theories and frameworks may complement ones grounded in western historical and cultural contexts.

This essay initiates an overdue academic discussion about relying on non-western historical and cultural contexts to globalize the marketing discipline further.

Based on ethnographic data and a textual analysis, this chapter highlights the process of “therapization” of Buddhism in Western countries, with a specific emphasis on Tibetan Buddhism in France. Referring to the paradigm of “political economy of health”, as developed in recent medical anthropology, it attempts to explore the relationships between two concepts – economics and health – that had previously been considered separately, in the context of Western Buddhism. Further, this chapter's aim is to expose a potential application of theoretical economic models in an anthropological approach of Buddhist diffusion and appropriation in the West.

The Chinese family business (CFB) is one of the most enduring and prolific organizational forms in human history. The CFB is an alternative to a modernistic organization and has been understudied in the post‐modern organizational theory literature. Compares a pre‐modern CFB transplanted to the USA with the modernistic Toyota model of greenfield start‐ups.

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature and discuss the relations between national culture, national subcultures and innovation based on three perspectives: divergence, convergence and crossvergence.

Based principally on previous studies in the “culture” and “culture and innovation” literature, this paper reviews two key sets of literature: first, the three perspectives of macro‐level cultural interaction are reviewed; second, the relationship between culture and innovation is reviewed. Hofstede's five dimensions of culture in the workplace are employed when discussing the impact of culture and innovation.

The outcome of the review suggests that the product of crossvergence (Chinese‐American culture in this case) has a high potential to be more innovative than one of the two interacting cultures (Chinese), but does not draw a conclusion regarding relative innovativeness between Chinese‐American and US culture. It is generally found that Western cultures tend to be more innovative than Eastern cultures.

This conceptual paper has implications for business strategy but does not present fresh empirical data to support its propositions.

In today's highly competitive and highly complex global environment, innovation is a key success factor in organizations worldwide. The search for talented and innovative employees should not be limited to domestic sources alone. The talent pool of Chinese‐Americans and others from multicultural backgrounds should be tapped. Ethnocentric viewpoints are outdated.

The value of this paper is its exploration of the impacts of the crossvergence of cultures on innovation.

Globalization and national competitiveness are popular issues in our economic policy debates. This paper seeks to clarify these pressing issues facing government, private sector and trade unions and focuses on alternative productivity and competitive strategies and benchmarking for competitiveness. It examines approaches to national competitiveness during globalization, the factors affecting the competitiveness policy framework and recommends a holistic national approach for competitiveness and higher productivity under globalization. This approach is to be based, among others, on an understanding of the nature of technological change in manufacturing enterprises so far. The pace at which enterprises acquire technological and other manufacturing capabilities is to be reflected in shifts in comparative advantage at the country level. Thus, national competitiveness can be proxied by manufactured export performance relative to competitors. For the economy to be more competitive and productive there are strong needs for rapid manufactured export growth, combined with sustained technological upgrading and diversification.

Service industries hold an increasingly dynamic and pivotal role in today’s knowledge‐based economies. The logistics industry is a classic example of the birth and development of a vital new service‐based industry, transformed from the business concept of transportation to that of serving the entire logistical needs of customers. Quantum advances in science, technology, and communication in the new millennium have compelled firms to consider the potential of the so‐called new “resources” (technology, knowledge and relationship networks) that are essential if firms are to operate effectively within the emerging business model, and to utilise the opportunities to innovate and gain market leadership. Through an extensive literature review, this paper examines the factors that nurture innovation in logistics services, identifies the contributions of the new “resources” and, using industry examples, examines the application of these resources to logistics firms as they assume an extended role within the new business model.