Executive summary Dramatic forces of change are sweeping the banking industry. The age of the empowered customer is here, changing the way financial products are being created, delivered, sold and serviced by banks. Relationships with clients, partners and regulators are more complex than ever. The digital world has leveled the competitive environment and the inflexibility of a traditional bank...

In an 80-country panel since the 1960s, the convergence rate for per capita GDP is around 1.7% per year. This “beta convergence” is conditional on an array of explanatory variables that hold constant countries’ long-run characteristics. The introduction of country fixed effects generates a much higher—and, I argue, misleading—convergence rate. In a much longer time frame—28 countries since 1870...

Mainland China has undergone profound changes dating back to the nineteenth century, including a contemporary period of rapid modernization that began in the 1980s. The result has been dramatic social, cultural, and economic shifts impacting the daily lives of Chinese people. In this paper, we explore the psychological implications of sociocultural transformation in China, emphasizing two centr...

Small rural Alaskan communities face many challenges surrounding rapid social and ecological change. The role of local subsistence resources may change over time because of changes in social perception, economic need, and cultural patterns of use. We look at the Bering Sea’s Pribilof Islands, comprising two very small communities, and investigate the relationship between the local residents and...

BACKGROUND The traditional medicine (TRM) of Korea and China share the same cultural tradition for thousands of years, and has experienced modernization process with respect to their distinctive social, cultural, and political influences. The purpose of this study was to analyze the attitude of Korean and Chinese TRM doctors on the current situation and future perspectives of the TRM education....

The Peranakans, also known as the Straits-Chinese, played an important role in shaping Singapore’s history. They originated from the intermarriages between early Chinese settlers and the indigenous Malay. This blending of the Chinese and Malay ways of life formed a rich, multifacet culture, which added yet another dimension to Singaporean society. However as this colorful culture slowly fades a...

It is often assumed that in the historical transformation to modern industrial society, the integration of women into the economy occurred everywhere as a three-phase process: in pre-modern societies, the extensive integration of women into societal production; then, their wide exclusion with the shift to industrial society; and finally, their re-integration into paid work during the further co...

The more homogenized population taken over by the Republic immediately after the Ottoman was being canalized towards the goal of national identity and the historical and cultural structure of the nation was being readdressed and redefined. Modernization and Westernization history of the new Turkey, which started with Ottoman reforms and took its final form with the Kemalist nationstate, politic...

Western conceptions of child development and the models of early education they engender predominantly shape services for young children in the first eight years of life all over Africa. This chapter brings a reconceptualist perspective to the critique of Kenya's continuing failure to ground early childhood programs and services in local cultural conceptions, developmental values, childrearing ...

This report describes a hitherto-isolated culture in northern Pakistan that has recently under­ gone rapid exposure to the outside world. Rapid change in Karimabad, a town of 4,600 peo­ ple in the Hunza Valley, has caused conflicts between cultural inertia and the forces of progress and modernization to surface and produced visible instances of cultural persistence and adap­ tation. For example...