This paper is an empirical analysis of how culture, specifically tradition, affects well-being, i.e., happiness, life satisfaction, and financial satisfaction, along with socioeconomic factors in East Asia. Ordered probit regression model results show that women have higher happiness and satisfaction levels than men even in Confucian cultures in which men generally receive more favourable conditions than women. Additionally, marital status or the impact of religion had strong and positive effects on happiness and sometimes on life satisfaction but not on financial (...) satisfaction. Interestingly, tradition has a statistically significant and important effect on both life and financial satisfaction. Finally, the results show that individuals who value tradition greater also have higher levels of financial satisfaction. (shrink)

Ruyu HungNational Chiayi University, TaiwanThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, orchestrating the Philosophy of Education in a New Key regarding East Asia. In 2016 the pioneerin...

Guanxi, or social networks common in Confucian cultures, has long been recognized as one of the major factors for success when doing business in China. However, insider networks in business are certainly not confined to Asian cultures, nor is the attendant possibility for corruption. This study obtained original data to investigate current Taiwanese perceptions of (1) how guanxi is established and cultivated; (2) how guanxi actually is practiced now and people’s acceptance of it; and (3) the effects of guanxi on (...) business operations, employment/promotion, and social justice and fairness. The researchers also hope to (4) verify some arguments made by pioneering researchers. The authors speculate on how these attitudes may affect behavior in business transactions in hopes of making readers more aware of differing cultural values that may create unexpected ethical dilemmas. They suggest that professional ethical codes should provide guidance on the practice of guanxi in a Confucian society and that special emphasis or training in interpreting those codes may be required. (shrink)

1. IntroductionIn 2020, when the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certified Chinese salted pickled vegetables from Sichuan called pao cai, hina’s media, including the state-run Global Times newspaper, reported the news as if China had won the international standard for kimchi making,1 although the ISO clearly stated in the certification document that the certification did not apply to kimchi.2 This reporting provoked Koreans, and it quickly became a cultural dispute between the two countries, at least in the media and social (...) media outlets. (shrink)

This book examines Mohism as a movement in early China. To analyze how the Mohists pursued power, the author analyzes nonviolence as a goal and strategy of the Mohist movement, the Mohists' creation of strategic knowledge, and their quest for a personhood that made their activism possible.

v. 1. ttŭt ŭl sewŏra -- v. 2. Kukpŏp ŭn chiŏmhan kŏt ida -- v. 3. Punsu nŭl nŏmji mara.

This article explores the unusually high levels of cosmetic surgery in South Korea – for both women and men. We argue that existing explanations, which draw on feminist and postcolonial positions, presenting cosmetic surgery as pertinent only to female and non-western bodies found lacking by patriarchal and racist/imperialist economies, miss important cultural influences. In particular, focus on western cultural hegemony misses the influence in Korea of national identity discourses and traditional Korean beliefs and practices such as physiognomy. We show how (...) these beliefs provide a more ‘gendered’ as opposed to feminist analysis, which allows space for discussion of men’s surgeries. Finally, we critique the accepted notion of the ‘western body’, especially its position in some literature as a more unobtainable ideal for non-western than for western women. We argue that this body has little in common with actual western women’s bodies, and more in common with a globalized image, embodying idealized elements from many different cultures. (shrink)

The article presents a methodological update on the lexical profile of informal spoken English with the emphasis on movies, television programs, and soap operas. The study analyzed Mark Davies’s mega-corpora with data containing approximately 625 million words and employed Paul Nation’s comprehensive and up-to-date British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English wordlists. Data from the analyses showed that viewers would need a vocabulary knowledge at 3,000 and 5,000 words frequency levels to understand 95 and 98% of the words in scripted (...) dialogs, respectively. Soap operas were found to be less lexically demanding compared to TV programs and movies. Findings are expected to fill in the methodological gaps between vocabulary assessment and vocabulary profiling research. (shrink)

Local item dependence is one of the most critical assumption in the Rasch model when it comes to the validity of a test. As the field of vocabulary assessment is calling for more clarity and validity for vocabulary tests, such assumption becomes more important than ever. The article offers a Rasch-based investigation into the issue of LID with the focus on the two popular formats of Vocabulary Levels Tests : multiple-choice and matching. A Listening Vocabulary Levels Test and an Updated (...) Vocabulary Levels Test were given to a single cohort of 311 university students in an English as a Foreign Language context. The analyses of raw score and standardized residuals correlations were conducted. The findings found no relationship between the 4-option, multiple-choice format of the LVLT and item local dependence. However, results from score and standardized residuals correlations analyses showed a strong link between the 3-item-per-cluster, matching format and item local dependence. The study calls for greater attention to the format of future vocabulary tests and support the use of meaning-recall formats in vocabulary testing. (shrink)

This paper aims at revealing the various meanings of schools as more than built physical environments from a geographical‐phenomenological (or ‘geo‐phenomenological’) perspective. This paper consists of five sections: the first explicates the meaning of ‘geo‐phenomenology’; the second reveals the meaning of ‘environment’ and a dialectics of strangeness and intimacy through geo‐phenomenological analysis; the third examines the meanings of environment as ‘space’ and ‘place’ and the act of naming as the process of constructing meaning between humans and environment; the fourth section (...) attempts to explore the meaning of conceiving school as a particular environment; and the final is the conclusion. (shrink)