Louella Matsunaga – författare

This book examines employment structure, working practice and recruitment strategies in Japanese retail in the 1990s through a case-study of one large chain store. Issues focused on include gender in the workplace, changing notions of corporate community and the impact of Japan's recent recession. In particular the research presented here challenges the view of part-time female staff as peripheral to the workforce and asks whether a rethink of the Japanese employment system is now overdue.

This book explores the globalisation of Shin Buddhism through an examination of ritual practice and its transformations in four main geographical areas: Japan, the United States, South America, and Europe.Interrogating conservative and mono-ethnic images of Shin Buddhism, linked to the preservation of Japanese identity in diaspora communities, it offers a complex picture of this form of Buddhism, as multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and ever-changing. Drawing on historical sources, as well as fieldwork conducted in sites from three continents, the study shows the dynamic and transnational routes and local transformations of contemporary Shin Buddhism. The book further considers a range of ritual expressions of Shin Buddhism, including spatiality and architecture; music; embodiment and performance; and ritual adaptations to new virtual environments since the Covid-19 pandemic. All the authors are ordained Shin Buddhist priests, as well as academics, and bring a perspective which is informed both by academic research and by their first-hand experience of Shin Buddhism, including participation in ritual training.An analysis of Shin Buddhism as a global religion, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of religious studies, Anthropology, and the sociology of religion. It will also be of interest to researchers in Buddhist Studies and Asian Religions, in particular those interested in Buddhism as a world religion and Buddhist modernism.

This book brings together the insights of theories of management and marketing to give an original view of the organizational dynamics of globalizing Asian New Religious Movements (NRMs) and established religions. Seventeen authors in this collection have recast their data on individual Asian religions and social movements to focus on the way these organizations are managed in an overseas or global context, by examining the structure, organizational culture, management style, leadership principles and marketing strategies of the religious movements they had hitherto studied from the perspective of the sociology of religion, or religious studies. The book examines strategies for global proselytization and outcomes in a variety of local ethnographic contexts, thus contributing to the scholarly work on the ‘glocalization’ of religions.