Klaipėdos universitetas

The author demonstrates how the current refugee situation reflects the crisis of values within the European Union. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the United States have revealed that some western citizens are eager to restore traditional values and extreme order as an opposition to the current idea of democracy within the EU member states which leads to libertarian tendencies, and potentially to chaos. The conflict of traditionalist and libertarian tendencies among the European Union citizens most likely will increase, and this can lead to the further European Union disintegration. The case of Latvia and related analyses have shown that some Central and Eastern Europe countries will are not willing to accept refugees. Therefore, this study uses the grounded theory approach, based on historical facts and opinions of classical authors, while explaining that healthy and wealthy society should be based on an extended or at least on a nuclear family. In this paper, a case study of Latvian citizens’ attitudes towards refugees is used to support psychological hypotheses which are mainly of the theoretical nature. In the author’s opinion, it is important to understand that real traditionalism means democracy which is based on order and hierarchy. In contrast, libertarianism leads to the democracy where the family model is not supported and the whole system of values is corrupted. The author demonstrates on historical events that such attitude can lead to destruction of the whole society, and explains why virtues and family oriented systems have been established and promoted by classical philosophers and by religions.

Japanese family firms are distinguished by various interesting yet different characteristics from their counterparts in other countries. Among these characteristics are the governing structure of the ‘ie’ system, the influencing role of ‘codes of merchants’, the adoption of non-blood sons to succeed to the business, and the long-lived phenomenon of century-old family firms. Despite numerous important studies explaining these characteristics, our essential knowledge about the rational logic behind them remains limited. Thus, to further aid our understanding of these characteristics and the logical essence, this article reviews a range of literature on institutional embeddedness, including socio-political history, cultural values, and religious influence on Japanese family firms. The article also proposes a research direction to comprehend better the institutional logics behind Japanese family firms and their behaviour.