In any highly industrialized country, especially one which relies mainly upon private enterprise for its economic development, the managerial system assumes a position of critical importance. It has been widely recognized in this connection that practices and policies developed by management are principal determinants of employer-employee relations and, in turn, affect significantly the outcome of many economic, social, and political problems that emerge in the process of industrialization. Close examination of management in varying cultural and national settings helps to understand the nature of conflicts existing in modern industrial societies and may furnish clues to their solution. A recent study comparing present-day business management in Western Europe and the United States represents a first step in this direction. This article deals with Japan—still another nation in which modern industrialization operates largely under a system of private enterprise the characteristics of which contrast sharply with America.

It is an essential feature of merit bureaucracy that there must exist within the institutional framework of government some method of guaranteeing that fixed standards of recruitment, promotion, and discipline are applied without discrimination to all members, or potential members, of the public services. In the Federation of Malaya, as in most Commonwealth countries, institutional machinery intended to satisfy this requirement of merit bureaucracy takes the form of public service commissions. It is the purpose of this study to trace the development of these institutions in Malaya, to outline briefly the organization, composition, and procedures of the commissions, to point out social and political factors in Malaya which affect the application of the principles underlying the institutional machinery, and to comment on the future of the service commissions in the Federation.

The historical study of Western medicine in nineteenth-century Siam has emphasized the dichotomy between Western medicine and traditional Thai medical practice. The former is often represented as a monolith, and the epistemological transformation of Western medicine during the nineteenth century is glossed over without sufficient attention. Pasteurian medicine, especially the idea of germs, was introduced to Siam by the American missionary Dan Beach Bradley. Its introduction spurred a process of negotiation with both pre-Pasteurian Western and traditional Thai medicine. In its pre-Pasteurian and Pasteurian variants, Western medicine was constituted as a new medical practice and disciplinary regime in Siam. As a discursive instrument of state hegemony, the ideas, structures, policies, and institutions of Western medicine furthered the understanding and management of virulent epidemics, the institution of the sanitary system, the shaping of new concepts of population and a healthy workforce, and not least, the framing of a medicalizing project to police people's bodies pursued by the Thai state in the 1930s.

Georges Dumézil's research on the myths, legends, rites, and social structures—in short, what he calls the “ideology”—of the Indo-Europeans has had, for the most part, considerable impact upon recent scholarly interpretation of the various Indo-European traditions. This holds not only for articles and monographs on specific matters. Better measure might be taken by noting the favorable discussion of his views and results in works whose intent is introductory or popular: Proinsias Mac Cana's Celtic Mythology (London, 1970), E. O. G. Turville-Petre's Myth and Religion of the North (New York, 1964), H. R. Ellis Davidson's Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Penguin Books, 1964) and Scandinavian Mythology (London, 1969)—of whom none of the above are to be associated with Dumézil's “school”— and in responses pro and con by Iranicists. What one misses is a similar impact upon studies in two areas: Rome and India. And this is a remarkable and ironic fact, for it is Dumézil's work on these two pillars that, if one may say so, has fashioned the entrance to his edifice. It is not my intent to talk about Rome, but it is my impression that the situation is comparable to what one finds in the recent introductory and panoramic works on Hinduism: either no recognition of Dumézil's contribution at all (Thomas J. Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition [Encino, Cal., 1971], Veronica Ions, Indian Mythology [London, 1967]), or facile dismissals (Robert C. Zaehner, Hinduism [London, 1966]).

It is remarkable how few commentators or analysts raised the alarm before the great financial crash of 2008. One who did was a journalist for the Financial Times called Gillian Tett. It may be germane to the understanding of why Gillian Tett perceived dangers in the reckless behavior of bankers that her colleagues did not, that she was educated not as an economist, but as a social anthropologist. In the course of earning her PhD in social anthropology, Tett spent a year milking goats in Tajikistan, an experience she insists helped her to understand the behavior of the bankers and other financial actors, and to predict the crisis, to widespread derision and hostility from bankers and treasury officials, two years before it happened.

Mr. Chairman; My Friends:

I much appreciate your invitation to speak today. And I appreciate it even more as the result of coming to know so many of your members in these last years. Our disposition is to attach a good deal of importance to practical economic, political, social, and diplomatic experience in areas of overseas study. I, by contrast, have emerged from these last years, which have been fairly rich in practical experience, with a much enhanced respect for the role of scholarship.

In September, 1972, twenty-three scholars from the United States, Taiwan, and Canada met at Asilomar, California for a conference on “Taiwan in Chinese History.” Sponsored by the ACLS' Joint Committee on Sino-American Intellectual Cooperation in the Humanities, it was intended to stimulate interest in research on Taiwan history and show what it could contribute to the field of Chinese history as a whole.

Chu Hsib (1130–1200), one of the greatest Chinese thinkers since Confucius and Mencius, and the most important in the last eight hundred years, synthesized Neo- Confucianism and built his own philosophy on a new basis. This philosophy—which dominated Chinese thought from the fourteenth century on, Korean thought since the fifteenth century, and Japanese thought since the sixteenth century—began to attract European attention in the seventeenth century. At that time, Catholic missionaries in China quarreled over the translation of “God” as Shang-tic (Lord-on-High), and over the interpretations of the Chinese term t'iend (Heaven). Consequently, they began to study Neo-Confucian thought. The publication, in 1715, of the Hsing-li ching-ie (Essentials of Neo-Confucianism) had a strong impact on them; Chu Hsi and other Neo-Confucian thinkers gradually occupied the minds of Catholic missionaries.