Limited research has been devoted to investigating assumptions about competition dynamics established through a neoliberal lens. Advocates argue that competition fosters innovation and benefits consumers by incentivizing private enterprises to develop better products or services at competitive prices compared to their rivals. Critics argue that competition exacerbates inequality by disproportionately rewarding high achievers. Rewarding high achievers reflects the meritocratic aspect of competition, which has been widely assumed to be rooted in the individualistic culture of Western countries. Contrary to this assumption, the ideology of meritocratic competition thrived in ancient collectivist Asian countries. Moreover, the assumed linear relationship between individualism, competition, and inequality is contradicted by economic literature, which suggests more individualistic nations display lower income inequality. Despite extensive economic and cultural examination of competition, competition’s political dimensions remain understudied. This interdisciplinary book challenges conventional assumptions about competition, synthesizing evidence across economics, culture, and politics.

Using the World Value Survey from Wave 2 (1989–1993) to Wave 7 (2017–2020), Study 1 demonstrates that individuals in individualistic regions exhibit more anti-competition attitudes compared to those in collectivist regions. Additionally, individuals in authoritarian, socialist, and collectivist Asian regions show the highest level of pro-competition attitudes, followed by those in democratic, capitalist, and individualistic Western regions and those in democratic, capitalist, and collectivist Asian regions. Study 2 reveals that competition is more likely to be endorsed by individuals who prioritize the individual’s responsibility over the government’s responsibility, value private ownership of businesses over government ownership of businesses, emphasize hard work for success, and prefer income incentives over income equality. Moreover, individuals with higher levels of materialism and self-determination are also inclined to endorse competition. Notably, variations exist in the relationship between individual difference variables and attitudes toward competition among the regions.

The dominant assumptions positing a linear relationship among individualism, capitalism, competition, and inequality are often rooted in the perspectives of social scientists, whose focus is frequently confined to the West in modern times. I argue that these dominant assumptions have been formulated without sufficient opportunities or willingness to consider societies with cultures and systems different from those of the West. In this regard, this book challenges these dominant assumptions by presenting compelling counter-evidence that (1) competition occurs in every society throughout history whenever humans seek to survive and thrive; and (2) competition does not necessarily lead to inequality, but often serves as a tool to mitigate it, as competitions prevent absolute hegemony and allow individuals to challenge incumbent powers or privileged groups across cultures, systems, and eras. This closing chapter encourages readers to reassess their existing beliefs about the sources and consequences of competition and to strive for a deep understanding of competition arenas that they may choose to enter or inadvertently launch.

Among Americans in the nineteenth century, literary interest in the image, idea, and practice of “community” extended beyond any conventional historical understanding of national togetherness. The abiding conception of community that obtained in the United States between the American Revolution and World War I was also informed by an emergent theory and practice of communitarianism. This was especially the case for those contemporaries who regarded the changes to an increasingly modern society and economy from a collectivist, and typically socialist, perspective. Across a range of early national, antebellum, and postbellum phases of the communitarian experiment in the United States, American writers gave expression to communitarianism’s unique reformist program through a variety of genres and political positions. Among the former were works of fiction, nonfiction, and polemic. Among the latter (in both book and short-form formats) were writings by several generations of authors and journalists that reveal a complex array of interpretive positions and ideologies, ranging from advocacy at one end of the political spectrum to skepticism at the other. The differences in their politics notwithstanding, many of the era’s communitarian-minded writers shared a desire to shape the course of events in American life with their work.

Collectivism symbolizes Japanese culture for many people in the world including Japanese themselves. The “collectivistic Japanese” are alleged to have the following characteristics: They feel at ease only in a group; they merge into their group and thus lack individuality and autonomy; they are indistinguishable from one another; they conform to their group and cooperate with the group members even at the sacrifice of their own individual interests; their obedience to their group leads to the hierarchical authoritarian society. However, these characterizations are mostly based on casual observations and personal experiences instead of systematic acadmic investigation. In psychology, nevertheless, two influential studies generalized the contrast between Western culture and Japanese culture in collectivism and individualism to the contrast between Western culture and all the other cultures.

People who may identify as LGBTQ+ and other sexual, affectional, intersex, and gender-expansive (SAIGE) identities around the world face political oppression and social discrimination, including arrest, violence, and murder. In countries that have made strides toward affirming and including SAIGE rights, discrimination and social exclusion still exist. This chapter discusses colonialism, postcolonial theory, and increased awareness of counseling theory related to SAIGE individuals globally.

This chapter seeks to illustrate from the bottom up the role that social justice played in establishing and maintaining authoritarian rule in Czechoslovakia under National Socialism and state socialism. The author investigates how notions of social justice were included in the social practice of both regimes and how the working population responded to these policies. By analysing legal disputes, this chapter explores the critical space between rulers and ruled to assess when and how notions of social justice were articulated in Czechoslovakia. In their opposition to the ‘injustices’ of past governments, such as those wrought by social inequality and economic suffering, both National Socialists and Communists drew on a language of social justice to articulate their own visions of a new order. However, their respective notions of social justice differed radically: from social justice defined in racial terms, typical for New Order movements, to social justice delimited by social class and attained for all members of the ‘socialist working society’. The main difference that emerged from the transition from the Nazi to the post-war Communist regime was a shift from the language of individual rights to a language related to the collective, to society, and to the state.

Cultural groups address the initiation, development, and maintenance of romantic relationships and marriage in diverse ways. Western values, beliefs, and populations have dominated theory and research, which has led to a relatively monocultural science of relationships. This chapter explores the developing literature on East Asian ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to suggest avenues for further investigation of culturally-defined relationships. We first focus on relatively broad social, ideological, and institutional factors that shape the East Asian Confucian cultural model of marriage in comparison to Western models of relationships. Then we review research linking distinctive East Asian ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving to culturally valued practices, attitudes, and behaviors in romantic relationships and marriage.

Communist morality was created by revolutionary leaders and thinkers in the early twentieth century to serve the greater goal of building communism in the entire world and was regarded by both the communists and the Western left-wing as antithetical to the corrupt morality of capitalist societies. It is by nature a statist ethical system that always prioritizes the interests of the state and relies on state ownership of the means of production to enforce its moral principles. This essay starts with the moral interiority of socialist subjects, focussing on the transformative impact of communist morality on individuals and their motivations to accept or prescribe the newly imposed ethics by the state. Then it closely examines the official discourses of communist morality in the former Soviet Union and China and their moral practices through the social engineering project of creating the socialist ‘New Person’. The concluding section argues that the emphasis on collective identity and the centrality of institutional sociality determine the relevance of communist morality in the world today.

Staff genuinely seeking to improve their cultural competency can make a lasting positive impact on intergenerational migrant and refugee families seeking or coming into contact with their services. Collectivism, intensified patriarchy, white privilege, and neoliberalism are all critical lenses for understanding how to work well with them as they parent in a new land. These issues are discussed by drawing on the authors’ lived experiences and recent research. Australia and New Zealand (Aotearoa) are multicultural societies. In Australia approximately 21% of people speak a non-English language at home and in New Zealand 25.9% have an ethnicity that is not European or Māori (Stats NZ, 2019). Naming this group is challenging. In Australia, for example, ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’ (CALD) superseded ‘non-English speaking background (NESB) as the official term used in social policy in 1996 because it was seen as better for drawing attention to culture and not just language, and for not homogenising the people and generations it intends to encompass.

Chapter 3 examines business cultures in East Asia, explores their origins, and identifies characteristics that may assist in designing and implementing competition law and policy. It is argued that authoritarianism, paternalism, and collectivism engender dependence on and subservience to corporate authority. Further, business groups (SOEs in China, zaibatsu and keiretsu in Japan, and chaebol in Korea) have played an important role in industrialization. The chapter underlines the links between culture at the level of society and at the level of business communities and enterprises, the norms and practices of such enterprises, and their competitive effects. Given these links, it would be constructive to take account of elements of culture in developing and implementing a well-designed competition law and policy. The chapter discusses six dimensions that should be taken into account in competition law: competition goals, the enforcement of competition law against government-linked companies, the management of family firms, the enforcement of competition law where business groups are prevalent, the design of compliance programmes and the promotion of ‘competition culture’ in East Asia.

Chapter 17 aims to give an integrated account of how subjectivity and intersubjectivity are coded in Korean sentence endings, how such suffixes are diachronically derived from their source constructions, and what typological and socio-cultural factors motivate the emergence and proliferation of such suffixes. The chapter surveys how suffixes index the speaker or both the speaker and addressee as an integral component in their semantic structure. It then examines how such (inter)subjective inflectional suffixes have diachronically been grammaticalized from non-subjective source constructions. The chapter shows that in Korean and in other languages, subjectification tends to lead to intersubjectification and not vice versa. Finally, the chapter argues that the relatively extensive diversity of inflectional suffixes in Korean, especially intersubjective suffixes, is due to two facts: 1) typologically head-final syntax and a typical agglutinative morphology and 2) the time-honored cultural values of hierarchism and collectivism as well as recent dynamic socio-economic mobilities in Korean society and culture.