Vol. 3 No. 2 (2021): Journal of Asian Social Science Research

Editors’ Preface
JASSR, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2021

It is with great pleasure that we present Journal of Asian Social Science Research (JASSR) Volume 3, Number 2, 2021. The articles gathered in this issue speak to a moment of profound disruption, but they do so with analytical clarity, empirical care, and a sustained concern for the human consequences of institutional and technological change.

Taken together, the contributions in this volume offer a compelling portrait of societies responding to crisis while being reshaped by longer transformations in governance, communication, labour, and everyday life. Although the pandemic forms an important backdrop to several of the articles, the issue is not defined by emergency alone. Rather, it reveals how moments of crisis often bring into sharper view the deeper structures through which inequality, adaptation, power, and social creativity are organized.

A central thread running through this issue concerns the question of institutional capacity and public response. The article on overseas training and the performance of the Bangladesh Civil Service examines how professional development may strengthen the quality of public administration, while also exposing the policy and management limitations that prevent such efforts from reaching their full potential. In a different but related register, the article on the COVID-19 infodemic in Indonesia reminds us that governance today involves not only administrative action, but also the difficult task of navigating complex information environments in which misinformation circulates across micro, meso, and macro levels of society. Read together, these contributions show that effective public institutions depend not simply on formal authority, but also on learning, coordination, systems thinking, and the cultivation of trust.

This issue also gives welcome attention to vulnerability, inclusion, and the ethics of public policy. The literature review on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people with intellectual disabilities offers a timely and necessary reminder that crisis responses are never neutral in their effects. Policies designed without adequate attention to disability risk reproducing exclusion precisely where protection is most needed. By foregrounding access to education, healthcare, and public services, the article calls for a more inclusive understanding of wellbeing and rights, and in doing so expands the moral and analytical horizon of the issue as a whole.

Another notable strength of this volume lies in its exploration of how digital technologies reorganize social and economic life in uneven ways. The study of small and medium enterprises in Depok highlights the adaptive potential of digital platforms in sustaining community networks of consumption during the pandemic. It shows how entrepreneurial actors mobilize technology not merely as a tool of transaction, but as a means of building shared taste, connection, and economic continuity under conditions of restriction and uncertainty. Yet this promise of digital adaptation is held in productive tension with the article on YouTube content creators, which offers a more critical account of digital capitalism by tracing the alienation experienced by creators whose labour generates value in systems that distribute reward unequally. Together, these articles remind us that the digital sphere is never a neutral space. It is a site of opportunity and asymmetry, creativity and extraction, visibility and dispossession.

What gives this issue its coherence, then, is a shared attentiveness to the changing relationship between institutions, technologies, and human agency. Whether the focus is civil service reform, pandemic misinformation, disability inclusion, small business resilience, or digital labour, each contribution examines how social actors navigate systems that are at once enabling and constraining. The issue therefore offers more than a set of discrete case studies. It presents a broader reflection on how contemporary societies manage uncertainty, distribute resources, and negotiate dignity in environments increasingly shaped by both crisis and connectivity.

As editors, we are especially encouraged by the range and seriousness of the scholarship represented in these pages. The articles in this issue are united by a commitment to socially grounded inquiry, and they demonstrate the continuing importance of research that is empirically attentive, conceptually thoughtful, and responsive to the lived realities of our time.

We hope readers will find in this volume not only valuable analyses of particular cases, but also a deeper invitation to think across fields, scales, and experiences. In that spirit, we extend our sincere thanks to the authors for their thoughtful contributions, to the reviewers for their care and intellectual generosity, and to our readers for sustaining this journal as a shared space of reflection, dialogue, and scholarly engagement.

Best regards,

Asep Iqbal