Indicators for quality of life and working life in Germany and Japan : a culture-psychological perspective

The 10th meeting of the German-Japanese Society for the Social Sciences in Osnabrück, August 2008, ended in 4 questions summarized by György Széll.These questions were:1. How would you define quality of life and working life?2. Which are according to your oppinion the main differences between Germany and Japan in this respect?3. Art there universal criteria in order to compare quality of life and working life?4. How do you evaluate international comparative rankings and monitoring in order to improve the quality of life and working life?Dealing with these questions opens the perspective to several further questions, wihich obviously cannot be answered without some knowledge on social, cultural, political, economic and psychological theories and empirical findings. That is one of the main reason , why German and Japanese social suggestions to deal with these questions are presented from a culture-psychological perspective