Intergenerational Exchanges in East Asia: A New Look at Financial Transfers

Adult children’s financial support for parents, which has been considered a primary representation of filial values in East Asian society, is not sufficient to understand contemporary familial reciprocation. To fully understand the detailed structure of intergenerational exchange in this region, this study proposes a new two-way typology to look at how parents both give and take with adult children. Using the 2006 East Asian Social Survey, the authors found a high frequency of financial exchange between generations, especially upward transfer, in South Korea, Taiwan, and China. Japan is a case more distant from the Confucian ideal type of family due to high prevalence of independence between parents and children regarding financial exchange. Cross-country differences are much remarked. The limited effects produced by gender and sibling orders in financial transfer show the decreasing influence of patriarchalism in East Asia.

SMEs in the 4th Industrial Revolution

Apart from the emergence of new technologies, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by demographic developments that will provoke fundamental changes in the labor markets of many industrialized countries. This situation will especially affect small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that are based in rural regions with rapidly increasing numbers of retirees and an equally rapidly shrinking population of young people. If these companies want to maintain their levels of production in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they will need to pursue new creative strategies for attracting the best talents. All of this is true for Saxony, a highly industrialized German region with a large percentage of SMEs that is hit hard by declining birth rates and high levels of emigration, and the East Asian society of Taiwan that faces similar challenges. At the same time, many well-educated members of the young generation in both regions feel disrespected, underpaid, and without prospects.

Religion in the Global East: Challenges and Opportunities for the Social Scientific Study of Religion

This essay is based on the Presidential Address at the East Asian Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Inaugural Conference on 3–5 July 2018 in Singapore. It discusses some aspects of the key concepts, some of the distinct characteristics of religion in East Asia, and some implications for the social scientific study of religion in general.

Musical Taste And Social Structure In Taiwan

Research in the comparative cultural sociology of musical taste has been confined to Western societies. The present study tests hypotheses from Western research in a culturally different, East Asian society, Taiwan. The 1992 Taiwan survey asked a representative sample of the population which of ten types of music they liked or disliked. To a large extent, the Taiwan findings replicate those in the West. For example, high status, younger people are more likely to be omnivores, liking both highbrow and lowbrow music, while low status, older people tend toward the univore pole. The ten types of musical taste can be clustered into three more general, culturally distinct taste audiences.