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AbstractThe preoccupation with power in mainstream Western social theory can be challenged from a number of perspectives. In this paper, I consider some alternative ways of conceptualizing ways-of-being in society that are implicit in a number of Asian traditions of thought and, in particular, in Buddhism and Gandhian ideas. In this paper, I challenge the necessity for a power-based approach to social relations. I suggest both that the models of society emerging from Foucault and other major Western theorists are examples of culturally bound local knowledge that have significant negative influences on the conception of alternative social possibilities, and that the resources for such alternatives lie not only in Western forms of utopian thinking but in existing Asian traditions — the full sociological implications of which have not yet been explored or worked out in detail.

'Japanese Consumer Behavior: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers' by John McCreery is reviewed.

AbstractThe social sciences in Asia face a peculiar theoretical challenge. Heirs to ancient civilizations and traditions of thought and cradles to all of the great world religions, they nevertheless perceive themselves as suffering from a "theoretical deficit". High theory is almost entirely Western and in fact largely European in provenance. This essay is directed to the possibility of constructing an Asian variety of cultural studies as a response to the hegemony of European social theory, and as an attempt to redress the balance of theory-power in the world intellectual economy.

Intense debates have taken place in Japan about the country's role in the post-war world system and the question of whether Japan has achieved the modernity that makes it a member of and player in that system. These debates, however, have largely centred on a discourse of uniqueness, defined in cultural (and culturalist) terms. This domination of a single interpretative framework has suppressed alternative analyses of Japanese modernity. Some of the most significant of these alternative voices take the central question to be one not of culture, but of ethics. Some significant Japanese social theorists, including Maruyama Masao, a discussion of whose ideas forms the core of this paper, have argued that Japan has either not achieved true modernity or has only achieved a distorted version of it (and has certainly not attained to postmodernity), because as a civilization it has never evolved subjectivity understood as the appearance of the morally autonomous individual. Such ideas resonate interestingly with the ideas of some prominent western theorists of postmodernity and its ethics, especially with the work of Zygmunt Bauman. The debate between Bauman's characterization of `postmodern ethics' and Japan poses fresh ways of rethinking Japanese modernity and puts new questions to western Japanology.

Debates over Japan's role in the postwar world system, & the question of whether Japan has achieved the modernity that makes it a member of & player in that system, have largely centered on a discourse of uniqueness, defined in cultural (& culturalist) terms. This domination of a single interpretative framework has suppressed alternative analyses of Japanese modernity, eg, that the central question is one not of culture, but of ethics. Some Japanese social theorists, including Maruyama Masao, whose ideas underpin the analysis here, have argued that Japan has either not achieved true modernity or has only achieved a distorted version of it (& has certainly not attained postmodernity), because as a civilization it has never evolved subjectivity understood as the appearance of the morally autonomous individual. Such ideas resonate with some Western theorists of postmodernity & its ethics, especially Zygmunt Bauman. The debate between Bauman's characterization of postmodern ethics & Japan poses fresh ways of rethinking Japanese modernity & puts new questions to Western Japanology. 37 References. Adapted from the source document.

This paper examines the issue of criminality as it is expressed in social policy in Singapore. This small South‐east Asian country is characterized by great social and ethnic diversity, high rates of economic growth, but low crime rates. The relationship between these is pursued by examining the authoritarian political system and the social policies that have arisen from this to socialize and discipline the ethnically disparate and class‐divided population. A brief survey of the social structure of Singapore, the role of colonialism in shaping the legal system, the legal measures introduced during the pre‐independent anti‐colonial and anti‐communist struggles and the adoption of many of these by the new government of independent Singapore as weapons of social control introduces the paper. This is followed by an examination of the single‐minded pursuit of developmentalism and security in the post‐independent period and of the emergence of crime in political discourse as the paradigm of social disorder and self‐exclusion from the developmental state, and the relationship of these to the dominant political problem of the management of ethnicity and social differences expressed as concern with classification, a commitment to socio‐biology and the constant attempts to define a field of "Asian values" based on a local reading of Confucianism as the basis of social cohesion. The essay concludes with a discussion of the relationship between Singaporean images of social order and the pursuit of a distinctive form of positivist modernism and the question of whether a "Singapore model" is applicable elsewhere in the world.