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Harvard-Yenching Library is the largest academic library dedicated to East Asian studies outside of Asia. This article describes some of the archival strategies we have developed and implemented while processing our “K-Pop Fandom Collection, 1992-2024.”

Food service workers often face physically demanding work, high rates of occupational injury, job insecurity, and limited control over their working conditions. This study examined the implementation of a workplace intervention designed to improve worker safety, health, and well-being at five intervention worksites within a contract food service company. The intervention focused on improving safety and ergonomics, work intensity, and job enrichment, and was designed to engage frontline workers, site managers, and district managers in identifying and addressing opportunities for workplace change. By examining what helped and hindered implementation, the study provides broader lessons about the organizational conditions needed to translate workplace interventions into meaningful improvements in working conditions.

Technological innovation, shifting labor markets, climate pressures, demographic change, and public health disruptions are reshaping how work is structured and experienced, with important implications for worker safety, health, and well-being. The conceptual model developed by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Center for Work, Health, and Well-being provides a systems framework for understanding these changes. It places working conditions at the center, showing how organizational policies, programs, and practices shape these conditions, while recognizing that organizations and workers are also affected by broader employment and labor patterns and social, political, and economic forces. By examining pathways across these levels, the model can guide research on how changes in the world of work affect worker health and well-being while informing organizational and policy action to design healthier jobs and working conditions.

Now more than ever, governments around the world, ranging from hyper-local to national levels, seek to deliver for their people — demonstrating through action that government is responsive to the needs of the public. We live in a world in which many people can interact with digital services on their phones, watches, and tablets, experiencing efficient and immediate services. People have come to expect this ease from providers across industries. So, when poor public service delivery occurs, not only does the government fail to meet expectations, but it can also break trust. In this environment, governments seeking to build trust amongst the public must demonstrate responsiveness by improving their delivery of public services.

Customer experience (CX) is the discipline of designing services, and improving them, from the perspective of the people who use them. It embodies a holistic understanding of how a human builds a relationship with a provider of goods and services, the context in which they act, the journeys and collective touchpoints they navigate to meet their needs, not just once, but across their lifetime.

Although CX began as a private-sector practice, over the course of three decades, it has also become an approach to delivering innovative solutions in the public sector, institutionalized through executive orders and mandates across the world and levels of government. In this paper, we mainly focus on the U.S. context, where CX was more formally structured and institutionalized by the federal government, producing a suite of tools that can be (and have been) adapted for other state and local governments. These adapted practices include the designation of “high-impact services,” standardized measurement, ongoing mixed-method feedback mechanisms, and frameworks organized around life experiences rather than government bureaucracy.

The CX approach has proven itself in both the market where it started and the United States federal government where it was applied in a new context. Yet the government people encounter most often is local — which makes the municipal level the most natural context for implementing CX to deliver immediate and meaningful gains for residents. This paper provides an overview of the evolution of the federal customer experience portfolio, sets out an approach for translating these tools into a “CX for Cities” Bloomberg Center alumni program, and describes one application by the Good Services Lab: service enhancements that shape family and child well-being.

Japanese architectural art history has traditionally characterized Nikkō Tōshōgū, the well-known mausoleum of the first Tokugawa shogun Ieyasu (1542-1616), as unique in terms of its overwhelming elaborate ornamental and architectural features. First built in 1617, and rebuilt by the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604-1651) for his grandfather Ieyasu, it has primarily been framed as an example through which Iemitsu enhanced and legitimated his own political rule. What has been largely overseen is that architecturally Nikkō Tōshōgū in fact stands not alone, but instead triggered the development of an architectural typology of Edo period (1615-1868) religious architecture with similar aesthetics that began to spread all over the Japanese archipelago from the seventeenth century onward. During the Edo period (1603-1868) not only hundreds of smaller Tōshōgū were erected in the domains all over Japan to worship Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, but the numerous mausolea of the succeeding shoguns and their wives exhibited the same stylistic traits, were made by the same carpenter families, and served similar political and religious ends. Constructed with newly developed carpentry techniques under a new building system, the impact of the mausolea building typology in fact reached far beyond the confines of the Tokugawa familial mausolea and official Tokugawa government control. They influenced regional shrine and temple construction that was sponsored by the warlords in the domains, or financed on a local level by the townspeople. Despite the Tokugawa mausolea’s significance as representative elite architecture of early modern Japan, comparable to the imperial and royal tombs of China and Korea, and their role in transforming and systemizing the building culture as a whole in early modern Japan, currently they only occupy a marginal place of a few descriptive pages in our art history textbooks. In this dissertation, I explore this neglected sphere of early Edo period architecture, visual culture, and religion by focusing on Nikkō Tōshōgū and the mausolea of the successive Tokugawa shoguns and their wives. I trace their origins and attempt to propose new ways of understanding their architectural qualities, circumstances of construction, and political and religious context based on secondary, as well as primary sources. Through this examination, it is hoped to reframe their historical understanding and resituate them into their original context in Japan, and more broadly East Asia.