Well known as a scholar of Asian culture, de Bary examines the concepts of self-understanding and self-cultivation in neo-Confucian thought from the 12th to the 17th centuries, in relation to the social, political, and scholarly roles of educated men in late imperial China. Rejecting the notion that.

Examines the development of the philosophy, culture, and civilization of ancient China and discusses the history of Taoism and Confucianism.

This study investigates the differences in he way bribery and extortion is perceived by two different cultures — American and Greek. Two hundred and forty American business students and two hundred and four Greek business students were presented with three scenarios describing a businessman offering a bribe to a government official and three scenarios describing a businessman being forced to pay a bribe to an official in order to do business. The Reidenbach-Robin instrument was used to measure the ethical reactions (...) of the two samples to these scenarios. Results indicate that ethical reactions to bribery and extortion vary by (a) the nationality of the person offering the bribe, and (b) the country where the bribe is offered. In addition, Greeks perceived some of the scenarios as being less unethical than did Americans. (shrink)

This paper views corruption as a form of contracting amenable to analysis from the viewpoint of transaction-cost economics. Concepts such as transaction, bounded rationality, opportunism, and asset specificity are shown to apply to cases of corruption. Both market and parochial corruption are hypothesized to vary in accordance with changes in the specificity of assets invested to support the corruption transaction. Evidence from a number of different studies tends to support the hypothesized relation. The implications of the transaction-cost perspective are developed (...) for policy makers and directions for future research are suggested. (shrink)

This study investigates the differences in the way bribery and extortion is perceived by two different cultures — American and Nigerian. Two hundred and forty American business students and one hundred and eighty Nigerian business students were presented with three scenarios describing a businessman offering a bribe to a government official and three scenarios describing a businessman being forced to pay a bribe to an official in order to do business. The Reidenbach-Robin instrument was used to measure the ethical reactions (...) of the two samples to these scenarios. Results indicate that ethical reactions to bribery and extortion vary by (a) the nationality of the person offering the bribe, and (b) the country where the bribe is offered. In addition, Nigerians perceived some of the scenarios as being less unethical than did Americans. (shrink)

Bribery has previously been viewed as a two-party transaction between the bribe-offerer and the bribe-taker. But there is a third party: the one who has a prior claim on the bribe-taker's loyalty. Breaking the first contract in response to the offer of a bribe is alienation of agency (a category that strictly includes bribes): alienation of agency is the additional immorality of bribery beyond any immorality of the act solicited by the bribe.

This paper views corruption as a form of contracting amenable to analysis from the viewpoint of transaction-cost economics. Concepts such as transaction, bounded rationality, opportunism, and asset specificity are shown to apply to cases of corruption. Both market and parochial corruption are hypothesized to vary in accordance with changes in the specificity of assets invested to support the corruption transaction. Evidence from a number of different studies tends to support the hypothesized relation. The implications of the transaction-cost perspective are developed (...) for policy makers and directions for future research are suggested. (shrink)