This cutting edge work offers an alternative perspective on existing paradigms of modernization and development that originated in the West from the vantage point of non-western, late-modernizing societies. It considers how East Asian philosophical ideas enrich the reformulation of the concept of development or societal development, and how influential principles of traditional culture such as yin-yang dialectic interact with modern ideas and technology. It addresses the significance of alternative discourses as culturally independent scholarship, and the problems of pervasive mechanisms of social, political, economic, and cultural dependence in the global academic world.

Dr Kim Kyong-Dong is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Seoul National University, South Korea. The preeminent sociologist in Korea, he has devoted his career to analyzing and comparing "east" and "west" issues from a cultural perspective. After gaining his PhD at Cornell University in the US, Professor Kim was a visiting scholar in the US, Taiwan, France and a Fellow  at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Washington, DC, as well as President of the Korean Sociological Association. He has widely published in English, Korean, Japanese and French on issues of development and modernization, social change and industrialization, sociological theory, education and religion.