Social Well-Being, Development, and Multiple Modernities in Asia

This book presents an integrated international exploration of social well-being from a comparative standpoint: how it is framed, how it is perceived by the people, and how it is exploited by the state. It provides a genuine multicultural and multidimensional understanding of social well-being in an Asian context by showing the strength of comparative analysis. The idiosyncrasy of an individual society is reinterpreted through the universality of harmonized data analysis and imaginative discussion of the findings. The book offers the reader a deep understanding of how social well-being is framed in eight Asian countries, how it is contextualized in each society, and how it is correlated with the concept of development and sustainability. Articulated by carefully chosen examples, historical background, and interpretation of the latest data analysis, this book is highly recommended to readers who seek to understand the relationship among the well-being of individuals, national development, and global sustainability.

Auteur

Jaeyeol Yee is a professor of sociology at Seoul National University and an international project member at the Center for Social Well-being Studies, Institute for the Development of Social Intelligence, Senshu University. He has contributed to the harmonization of social well-being surveys in Asia as the director of the Korea Social Science Data Archives. His research interests include social quality, social well-being, social capital, disaster and safety issues, and sociological theory construction.

Hiroo Harada is an adjunct research fellow at the Center for Social Well-being Studies, Institute for the Development of Social Intelligence, and a professor emeritus of Economics at Senshu University. He was the chair of the MEXT-Supported Program for the Strategic Research Foundation at Private Universities entitled "Forming a Social Well-being Research Consortium in Asia" from 2014 to 2019. His research interests are in the fields of public finance, taxation, regional economy, public choice, and social capital/well-being.

Masayuki Kanai is a research fellow at the Center for Social Well-being Studies, Institute for the Development of Social Intelligence, and a professor of sociology at the School of Human Sciences, Senshu University. He was the secretary-general of the MEXT-Supported Program for the Strategic Research Foundation at Private Universities entitled "Forming a Social Well-being Research Consortium in Asia" from 2014 to 2019. His research interests include subjective well-being, social capital, and social inequality in comparative perspectives.