An Ethnography of Poverty: Socioeconomic Life of Five Sama Families in Davao City, Philippines Akihiko Ohno As a researcher who specializes in Asian-Pacific studies, it is my great honor to receive the 24th Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. I would like to express my cordial gratitude to the Masayoshi Ohira memorial foundation and the steering committee members. Asian Pacific rim countries have witnessed unprecedented industrialization during last two decades. However, in most cases, eligible workforce for modern factories was not sufficiently supplied from the outset. I once conducted an interview survey in an Indian sugar factory. The shop floor I observed there differed utterly from Toyota factory that I had visited. Discussing these two workshops as the same concept of factory is truly unsatisfactory. Then, I started survey of various factories that are supposed to appear in the process of long-term industrialization process, under the assumption that the emergence of factory workers is historical outcomes. Economics has not provided efficacious analytical framework to examine labor management, even though efficient labor management is essential for industrialization, especially for upgrading of industrial structures. Thus, I have to rely on the analytical tool of exogenous disciplines, such as industrial psychology. Recent years, however, witnessed an evolution of labor management studies in economics. By combining the two strands of discipline, I tried to shed ling on the evolution of labor management in the process of economic development. Though it was two decades ago that I started the survey, still my research is unconcluded. So far I have focused on domestic enterprises. Now I embarked on new project focusing on Japanese-affiliated enterprises to ascertain my hypotheses further. The Ohira Prize encourages me to pursue my research goal. Thank you again for the honor.