Full Description
This book is about generating types of societies by the degree of individuals' satisfaction with life domains, aspects, and styles via factor analysis. It adopts an evidence-based approach in typologizing and a bottom-up rather than a top-down perspective. Thus, the book's position is against Hegel (freedom for one person), Marx (the Asiatic mode of production), Weber (Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism), Wittfogel (Asiatic autocracy), and Rostow (Western-led modernization). These classical and modern authors tend to see Asian societies with somewhat fixated eyes and categorize Asian societies in a top-down manner.
When random-sampled respondents are questioned about their satisfaction with daily life in terms of life domains, aspects, and styles, public policy and institutions as well as survival and social relations are inevitably touched upon—the latter two being the key dimensions common to the World Values Survey and other cultural surveys. This book proposesa new mode of typologizing societies, Asian or non-Asian, not immediately familiar to human geographers, cultural anthropologists, or sociologists, but revealing many complex unknowns with the easy-to-learn typologizing method.
Contents
The Need for a Bottom-Up Perspective about Asian Societies.- The Need for an Evidence-Based Approach to Asian Societies.- Two Methodological Issues.- Attending Holistically and Analytically.- Are Asian Societies One Type.- Choosing Indicators and Typologizing of Societies.- Factor Analysis Results.- Twenty-Nine Types of Asian Societies.- Strength and Weakness of the Proposed Typology.- Corroborative Analysis and Empirical Validation.- Conclusion.
