I think Tongdong Bai's Confucian Meritocracy requires a lot of idealisation. Feasibility aside, should we realise the conditions for Confucian Meritocracy to work, we would have created the ideal situation for democracy to function properly. This challenges the purported advantages Confucian Meritocracy enjoys over democracy.

The article addresses the issue of empirical investigation of individualization in life-course. The theory of individualization implies that the significance of social structure in individual life-course diminishes, giving way to the agency of personal preferences and skills. Thus, the theory raises an issue of structure-agency dynamics in life-course, and poses a methodological challenge for research design to take both social structualization and individual action into account. Empirical research on individualization varies in how it meets this challenge. The review streamlines the (...) main topics, the analytical tools, and the empirical evidence from this research. We identify three main currents in empirical research on individualization. Firstly, the research is concerned with the changing role of agency in life-course, raising a question of its significance vis-. (shrink)