Emphasis on descent and kinship in analysis of traditional Chinese corporations, a legacy of structural-functional theory, mistakes the analyst's theoretical categories for native culture. In this paper, the author attempts to sort out some of the resulting conceptual muddles, and he proposes a more rigorous analytical framework for discussing the range of organizational variation in traditional Chinese corporations. Analysis of ten representative cases from Ta-ch'i, Taiwan, reveals greater flexibility of corporate form and function than structural-functional theories would predict. Close attention to the cases also reveals the absence of any compelling reason to treat the “Chinese lineage” as analytically or culturally distinct from the entire range of Chinese formal associations (hui). To understand what is uniquely Chinese in Chinese corporations, past emphasis on differences in formal group-membership requirements must be complemented by attention to the cultural values and norms of operation that transcend such differences.

The new materialism underlying economic modernization in post-Mao China rests on the principles of the primacy of productivity over ideology, use of incentives based on material interests, and acknowledgment of economic and social complexity. An impressive array of political reforms has accompanied the vast changes in economic policies that these principles have inspired. These include legal and constitutional reform, a decrease in public interference in the private lives of citizens, an increase in mass voice in most organizations, and a strengthening of the people's congress system. The reforms are intended to contribute to modernization by institutionalizing orderly participation by intellectuals and the masses. The capacity of such reforms to limit arbitrary power through institutional and electoral checks is rendered ambiguous by the continued hegemony of the Chinese Communist Party.

Studies of twentieth-century Japanese politics have largely ignored the impressive continuities between the prewar and postwar periods. Most accounts of the Occupation emphasize external American initiatives while dealing with the established Japanese leadership in rather one-dimensional terms. This article focuses on a dynamic group of prewar Japanese bureaucrats who survived the Occupation purge to play a key role in the postwar government's controversial labor policies. As higher civil servants of the Home Ministry (and the Ministry of Welfare after 1938), they had been responsible for formulating a policy toward the interwar labor union movement that mixed social reform and control. The author describes the ways in which these “social bureaucrats” perpetuated themselves and their distinctive approach to social stability in the postwar era. Their influence continues not only in the postwar Ministry of Labor but, more surprisingly, within the highest ranks of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

This article discusses two collections (seventy-seven titles) of reprints edited by Ramon H. Myers. He does not provide an interpretative essay for either collection; his choices for inclusion are reviewed in terms of the opinions that he has expressed in a textbook and in other works. The choices reveal that Myers, along with other specialists, views 1895 to 1937 as a key period in which the old socioeconomic order disintegrated and a new order took shape. Scholarly interest concerning those years has focused on the nature of the agrarian crisis, the impact of foreign trade and investment, the contribution of the Chinese bourgeoisie, and the role of the new Nationalist government. The author discusses the views of Myers and others on these topics, and, in addition, the author points out that these collections suggest that another topic—the expanded control of foreign governments over the economic affairs of the Chinese state—is worthy of investigation.

Japan's Modern Myth is a scathing attack on those Japanese academics who shape current attitudes toward the Japanese language. They are portrayed as ignorant of linguistic science and as incapable of producing a sound comparison of Japanese with other languages. The book also attacks the Japanese media and the Japanese government for propagating the unscientific, racist theories of these academics. The belief that Japanese is too difficult for foreigners to master and its obverse, that Japanese must pay a heavy psychological price to master a foreign language, are only the most serious of the various notions attacked in Japan's Modern Myth.

The five books discussed in this review article deal either with famine or with related issues concerning access to food in South Asia. Famine is a powerful but distorting lens through which to look at any society. Both the causes and the consequences of famine reveal important social and cultural facts about parts of South Asia at particular times. More important, the analysis of famine is inseparable from the problems of agricultural technology, inequality, and dependence in normal times. The underlying argument of this article is that famines raise questions about the changing relationship between the structures of enfranchisement and the realities of entitlement in the societies in which they occur.