This chapter expands reader horizons across four diverse Asian cultures – India, Japan, China and Singapore – and challenges predominant Western perspectives about sustainability. The concept of ‘glocal’ resonates in these Asian countries as a way to respond to both local and global environmental needs. These cultural contexts and the required border-crossings significantly enrich and deepen understandings for all about what it means to live sustainability.

As an industry situated between globalization and transnationalism, K-pop has become a “glocal” economic transaction that re-localizes the regional markets across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Because K-pop’s glocal enterprise was made possible due to the internet via smartphones, social networks, and user-generated media, some scholars in Southeast Asia have noted K-pop’s major players as new forces of cultural imperialism. With Z-Pop Dream as a case study, this chapter explores how K-pop’s lesser known producers respond to such criticisms by experimenting beyond K-pop’s established system of idol production, consumption, and circulation. Part audition reality show and part idol management system, Z-Pop Dream is a multinational venture that recruits trainees in Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines. Accordingly, its fan consumer base is also from the seven countries. Piggybacking on K-pop’s transnational success, Z-Pop Dream sells their business model as the next step to making K-pop more accessible to non-Korean fans, cover dancers, and trainees dreaming of becoming idols. Examining how Z-Pop Dream ’s new glocal business model informs, interacts with, or resists an established transnational rhetoric of K-pop, this chapter explores how its rhetoric of “One Asia” underscores the line between national and transnational.

The Arab-Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan) has long been at the center of cultural, social, and geopolitical changes in the region, which have been central in shaping the development of psychological practice and science in the region. The region has been at the cross section of multiple foreign influences (French, British, US, Arab), all of whom have impacted academia. This resulted not only in multiple ideologies and schools of psychological thought that remain until today, but also in a trilingual academic system that further deepens the disconnect among psychologists and test-takers in the region. Additionally, the Levant’s experience of occupation, trauma, diaspora, and political instability has led to an increased need and interest in mental health services and displaced populations, and hence the measurement of related constructs. More recently, with increased funding for research on such populations, non-Arab researchers have gained a renewed interest in the region, which has led the way to increased collaborative efforts in the development of psychometric tools. This chapter discusses how these contemporary historical developments have impacted testing-related practices academia, research, and practice in clinical, educational, and industrial/organizational practice.

This chapter looks at the projects that the Elmhirsts instigated on their estate to promote agricultural and industrial revival and democratic participation. It positions Dartington amid the many interwar rural reform ventures with which it cross-pollinated, from the New Deal in America and Sriniketan in India to Rolf Gardiner’s Springhead and government smallholding schemes in Britain. Dorothy and Leonard’s philosophy of rural regeneration – attempting to combine ‘microscopic’ support for community life with the ‘macroscopic’ approach that was international in its outlook – prefigured and helped shape the phenomenon central to the later twentieth century. The sociologist Roland Robertson calls this ‘glocalisation’: a process by which local community is reconfigured, and even strengthened, by global forces. The gradual migration of the Elmhirsts’ vision of Dartington – from a self-governing, holistically integrated collective to an outpost of centralised social planning – dovetailed effectively into plans for national reconstruction during and after the Second World War.

There have been similarities and differences in results of psycholexical research across cultures, and it is difficult to understand whether these are due to real cross-cultural differences and similarities, or to methodological influences. Two approaches have been typically used: a global approach that follows a variation of the original lexical paradigm, and a local approach that is indigenous in methods and assumptions. We provide examples of how a combination of sources, a GloCal approach, is more likely to yield a comprehensive picture of personality in any language by combining global and local approaches, informed by a thorough understanding of the language and culture studied. The GloCal approach allows the researcher to a) identify shared and unique components of the personality conceptions and structure across methods in a culture, b) ensure that the lexicon used is relevant to the culture, and comprehensive, and c) increase the ecological validity of stimulus materials in personality inventories.

Chapter 10, The Cultural Diplomacy of Imaginary Fact, theorises the exhibition in the 2013 South Africa Pavilion at the International Art Biennale in Venice as a unique instance of cultural diplomacy. Imaginary Fact plays a paradoxical role in the process of nation building because it presents a dual image of a nation struggling with ongoing internal complexities, while projecting a collective narrative of a state that has undergone a difficult transition and come out the other side to re-assert itself in the international community.By examining South Africa’s conception of cultural diplomacy presented in government white papers, I show how the official image of South Africa as a global competitor (a transitioned nation) sits uncomfortably with the artists’ image of South Africa as a transitioning nation circumscribed by ongoing challenges to human rights.I argue that this establishes a glocal (global–local) image of the state which is in tension with South Africa’s foreign policy agenda.