In the contemporary globalising society, citizenship has re-emerged as a key educational, social and political concept. Despite an extensive body of literature on citizenship, traditional assumptions have been called into question by worldwide social and cultural changes. In contemporary debates, a variety of educational, social and political influences have been recognised as significant to citizenship formation. Within those discussions however, there has been scant attention to the contribution that Eastern social philosophies can make to the debates. In response to this need, this study has set out to investigate whether an analysis of key elements of Confucianism can inform current discourses on citizenship formation and examines the role that Confucian understandings of education might fulfill in that formation. Confucianism has been selected because it long has been recognised to promote a well developed civic ideal which can be related to the worlds of education, business and government. The research has been conducted through a hermeneutic analysis of the principal Confucian texts, particularly The Analects, to identify concepts that frame the Confucian perspectives on citizenship, and then examines the extent to which they can inform and address problematic issues in the contemporary debates on citizenship. The value of this methodology is its capacity to accommodate the characteristics of this cross-cultural and cross-temporal study and offers a method for validating its interpretative and philosophical nature. The research indicates that these Confucian concepts can make a substantial contribution to the emerging global literature about citizenship formation, and offers solutions to some of the contemporary problems of individual and organizational citizenship. Confucian responses to some of the problematics of citizenship have been discussed by focussing particularly on some of the key challenges inherent in the relationships between citizenship and ind