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Du Bois's interest in the Japanese empire points us in the direction of examining non-Western imperial policies and discourses and how they relate to racialization. For Du Bois, Japan was an exemplar of a nonwhite empire. This chapter reconstructs a Du Boisian conception of race that identifies it closely with ethnicity, against the belief that the African-American intellectual held on to a merely biological conception of race. I argue that his thought evolved towards a social-construction approach in which race must be understood historically and in particular global contexts. By analyzing Japan's policies and discourses around the boundaries of the Japanese, I explicate how Japan carried out a process of self-racialization owing to its dialectical relationship with the West. It also racialized its colonial subjects in a process of in-group delineation according to Japan's imperial imperatives. The case of the Japanese empire demonstrates how a global/transnational approach to racialization is valuable. It also evinces how white supremacy and universalism are not the only logics of imperialism. Moreover, it shows that Du Bois believed white supremacy could be transcended. However, Du Bois was too idealistic about Japan's empire, ignoring how oppressive nonwhite imperial rulers can be toward their subjects even when there are phenotypical similarities between them.

Previous studies as well as anecdotes have indicated that parental involvement in adult children’s marital conflicts is fairly common in Korea. This study attempts to explain how in-law conflicts – arguably a structural outcome of the traditional Confucian family – lead to marital disruption in contemporary families.

This study adopts the hypotheses of the corporate group, mother identity, and gendered-role expectations, which are instrumental to understanding the social context in which the legacy of the Confucian culture interacts with the knowledge-based neoliberal economy to revive in-law conflicts. Divorced-couple data are from in-depth interviews and court rulings, and their analysis illustrates the trajectories of marital breakdown.

The findings provide support for the hypotheses. Parents, especially mothers, who heavily invested time and money in their children’s education and career building meddle in their marriages in hopes to ensure the best returns to their investment. Normative prescriptions of gendered roles provide references for the parents regarding the roles of their children and children-in-law, and the gaps between their expectations and perceived reality trigger parental meddling and in-law conflicts. Adult children who are indebted to the parents for their status formation may acquiesce to the parental intervention.

In the traditional patriarchal family, in-law conflicts were restricted to mother- and daughter-in-law relationships, but are now extended to mother- and son-in-law relationships, reflecting a paradoxical twist in gender-role expectations. This chapter suggests that heavy parental investment in their children can have an unexpected consequence increasing the probability of adult children’s marital disruption.

This chapter aims to build a systematization of the current theoretical and empirical academic contributions on smart working (SW) in the organization studies domain and to examine which are the main paths that researchers are concerning themselves with, with specific attention being paid to the new meaning that the work itself has acquired in the model proposed by SW. Particular consideration is devoted to an analysis of the characteristics of the present debate on this construct and the meaning of SW, identifying two different – and contrasting – approaches: one considers it as a totally new concept; the other is notable for its continuity with previous arrangements such as telework. Further, some relevant concepts, strictly related to that of SW in working environments are considered. In the last part of the chapter, some key points for further research are proposed to create stimuli for discussion in the community of organization studies and HRM scholars and among practitioners, given from the perspective of deepening the change in progress, the relevance for which there is general consensus.

Purpose: The aim is to explore how family relations are affected by societal changes in relation to informal and formal caregiving and self-determination of older adults.

Design/methodology/approach: Care managers (CMs)/social workers (SWs) (N = 124) participated in a comparative vignette study including Japan, South Korea, and Sweden. Systems theory was used.

Findings: Japanese CMs/SWs clearly describe their efforts to create networks in a relational way between formal and informal actors in the community. South Korean CMs/SWs balance between suggesting interventions to support daily life at home or a move to a nursing home, often acknowledging the family as the main caregiver. In Sweden, CMs/SWs highlight the juridical element in meeting the older adult and the interventions offered, and families primarily give social support. Regarding self-determination, the Japanese priority is for CMs/SWs to harmonize within the family and the community. South Korean CMs/SWs express ambivalent attitudes to older adults’ capability for self-determination in the intersection between formal and family care. Swedish CMs/SWs adhere to the older adult’s self-determination, while acknowledging the role of the family in persuading the older adult to accept interventions. The results suggest emerging defamilialization in South Korea, while tendencies to refamilialization are noticed in Japan and Sweden, albeit in different ways.

Research limitations/implications: In translation, nuances may be lost. A focus on changing families shows that country-specific details in care services have been reduced. For future research, perspectives of “care” need to be studied on different levels.

Originality/value: Using one vignette in three countries with different welfare regimes, discussing changing views on families’, communities’ and societal caregiving is unique. This captures changes in policy, influencing re- and defamilialization.

Corruption was a serious problem in Singapore during the British colonial period and especially after the Japanese Occupation (February 1942–August 1945) mainly because of the lack of political will to curb it by the incumbent governments. In contrast, the People’s Action Party (PAP) government, which assumed office in June 1959 after winning the May 1959 general election, demonstrated its political will with the enactment of the Prevention of Corruption Act (POCA) in June 1960, which strengthened the capacity of the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) to combat corruption effectively. Indeed, Singapore’s success in curbing corruption is reflected in its consistently high scores on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) from 1995 to 2012 as the least corrupt country in Asia. Singapore was ranked first with Denmark and New Zealand in the 2010 CPI with a score of 9.30. Similarly, Singapore has been ranked first in the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) annual surveys on corruption from 1995 to 2013. Why has Singapore succeeded in minimizing the problem of corruption when many other Asian countries have failed to do so? What lessons can these countries learn from Singapore’s experience in combating corruption? This chapter addresses these two questions by first describing Singapore’s favorable policy context, followed by an identification of the major causes of corruption during the British colonial period and Japanese Occupation, and an evaluation of the PAP government’s anti-corruption strategy.

While the origin of Korean Industrial Relations goes back 150 years when the country opened its seaports to foreign countries, it didn’t emerge as a field of study until 1950s when academics began to write books and papers on the Korean labor movement, labor laws, and labor economics. In this paper, we sketch this history and describe important events and people that contributed to the development of industrial relations in Korea. Korean industrial relations in the early 20th century were significantly distorted by the 35-year-Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). After regaining its independence, the U.S. backed, growth-oriented, military-based, authoritarian Korean government followed suit and consistently suppressed organized labor until 1987. Finally, the 1987 Great Labor Offensive allowed the labor movement to flourish in a democratized society. Three groups were especially influential in the field of industrial relations in the early 1960s: labor activists, religious leaders, and university faculty. Since then, numerous scholars have published books and papers on Korean industrial relations, whose perspectives, goals, and processes are still being debated and argued. The Korean Industrial Relations Association (KIRA) was formed on March 25, 1990 and many other academic and practitioner associations have also come into being since then. The future of industrial relations as a field of study in Korea does not seem bright, however. Issues regarding organized labor are losing attention because of a steadily shrinking unionization rate, changing societal attitude toward labor unions, and the enactment of new and improved laws and regulations regarding employment relationships more broadly. Thus, we suggest that emerging issues such as contingent workers, works councils and tripartite partnership, conflict management, and human rights will be addressed by the field of industrial relations in Korea only if this field breaks with its traditional focus on union and union–management relations.