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China's manufacturing has developed rapidly due to the integration of the global value chain (GVC) production division system. But the early OEM and processing can hardly meet the needs of high-quality development of the manufacturing. The "low-end lock-in" and "double squeeze" faced by China's manufacturing will impede the pace of upgrading the manufacturing. From the perspective of GVC accounting, this paper studies the industrial chain upgrading of China's manufacturing industry through four indicators: GVC participation, GVC division of labor status index, share of foreign value added in domestic exports, and manufacturing 'servitization' index, which from the value chain value added effect at the national level and industrial chain correlation effect at the industrial level, and drawing on the WWYZ method of Wang Zhi et al. (2017) and the input-output method of Leontief (1936). Through the research, it is found that the servitization level of the mid and high-tech industry and high-tech industry of China has been steadily improved, gradually getting rid of the "low-end lock-in" of developed countries and climbing to the high value added production links; Not only do the reindustrialization strategy of developed countries provide the obstacle to the upgrading of the industrial chain and value chain of China's high-tech industry, but also promote domestic talent training and technological innovation. The linkage and integration of the industrial chain of low-tech industry and low and mid-tech industry have been further improved, which plays a favorable role in relevant industry's value chain climbing and industrial chain upgrading. China's manufacturing is progressively improving its own value-added capability and international competitive advantage, further enhancing the two-way integration of the industrial chain, and gradually transitioning to both sides of the "smile curve", to achieve high-quality development of the manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of globalization, the international community has witnessed a rapid increase in the number of low-skilled workers migrating from developing countries to industrial countries. However, there remain competing approaches to the governance of lowskilled labor migration; that is, the economic theory and the rights-based approach. By utilizing the labor migration between Vietnam and Japan under the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP), this article reveals the limitations of these two approaches in governing the migration of low-skilled workers. Moreover, through examining the Memorandum of Cooperation on the Technical Intern Training Program signed by the Vietnamese and Japanese governments in 2017 and its contribution to the TITP, this article suggests that to regulate labor migration properly, it is essential to uphold the rights-based approach and consider labor migration as a transnational issue that should be addressed at the international level; that is, through the bilateral or multilateral instruments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Triple Helix Model and the Future of Innovation: A Reflection on the Triple Helix Research Agenda. 2000), The dynamics of innovation: from National Systems and "Mode 2" to a Triple Helix of university - industry - government relations. Multi-level governance is essential for managing the new emerging forms of innovation partnerships that may be more complex than the traditional Triple Helix ones, especially when they aim at impacting on paths of regional innovation and development. The models and approaches based on the concept of the Triple Helix (Leydesdorff and Etzkowitz, 1998) have followed a co-evolution path with the major theories of innovation systems (national and regional innovation systems etc.) and have been integrated in most innovation theories, whether explicitly admitted or not. [Extracted from the article]

The current, prevailing narrative on the WIPO-WTO relationship refers to "forum-shifting". The idea is that developed countries moved from WIPO to WTO in order to obtain stronger IP protection at the international level by joining trade talks with IP negotiations. As a result, WTO would have become the main international forum for trade-related IP issues. This paper argues that the forum-shifting narrative, despite its merits, may fail to catch the complexity of WIPO-WTO relationship. Moreover, long-standing issues, as well as recent developments in trade and IP, demonstrate that the two Organizations have been characterized by continuity and constitute in reality interdependent, complementary fora. This is not to deny the differences existing between WIPO and WTO nor to discard the merits of the forum-shifting theory. Nonetheless, it is argued, it is time to move beyond it in order to grasp the implications of the WIPO-WTO relationship towards future international economic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What influences Taiwanese public opinion on immigration? Taiwan faces the same immigration challenges as many other developed nations, where the demand for immigrant workers produces a domestic backlash. Our study addresses to what extent public opinions on immigration are influenced by two factors: the skills of immigrants and their place of origin. Our results show, besides the preference for skilled labour, that public opinion on the three Southeast Asian immigrant groups varies considerably, with the strongest negative reaction to Indonesian migrants. As Taiwan prides its progress on human rights among East Asian democracies, the results suggest the need for targeted policy efforts to overcome public biases towards Southeast Asian immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents the evolution of the Triple Helix thematic using social network analysis. Our research covered 1,122 publications from the Web of Science database between 1995 and 2022. To analyze the data, we adopted the CiteSpace software, from which we interpreted the general properties of the co-citation network and the countries' network. We also explored a set of nodes' centralities to identify relevant publications and countries. The results showed two trends related to the literature relevance across different innovation systems. The first one is a possible theoretical replacement by authors who publish mainly about relationships between entities in economically developed countries that are leaders in innovation, whose research migrated from the Triple Helix model to the Quadruple Helix model. The second trend relates to the studies' continuity based on the prior model by authors investigating innovation systems in less advanced technological ecosystems with newborn or young relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of the studies exploring the relationship between socioeconomic factors and crime levels are confined to major industrialized nations. As a post-Soviet, transitional economy with a predominantly Muslim population, Azerbaijan provides a different setting to explore how socioeconomic indicators affect police-recorded violent and property crime levels across cities and districts. This study finds a positive relationship between GRP per capita, the proportion of pupils admitted to university and population size property crime levels. The relationship was linear in all cases. The geographical units with more social benefit (pensions, disability, and family care) recipients had lower acquisitive crime levels, though the significance was marginal. The higher the number of targeted social assistance recipients for poverty alleviation is, the higher the rate of violent crime is, which differs from the findings of similar previous studies. Overall, socioeconomic predictors were significantly better in explaining variations for offences against the property (r=.481) than violent crimes (r=.073). These findings suggest that different crime types are better explained by different economic indicators in the Azerbaijani context. Furthermore, the study shows that most of the covariates function in ways which are observed in the societies covered by the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In today's globalised world, giving consular protection to an increasing number of overseas citizens has become a common challenge to foreign ministries. China, as the most populous country witnessing fast economic development, is facing more severe challenges in this field. Since the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, China's consular protection has demonstrated new trends such as involving more actors in service delivery, constructing a co-ordination network, legalizing the management and taking targeted preventive measures. Compared with developed countries, 'whole government involvement' is the most prominent feature of China's consular protection practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), gender inequality is the loss in potential human development that occurs due to differences between the genders in achievements with respect to health, empowerment, and labor market participation. These differences in achievements typically favor men. Gender inequality is especially visible in the Arab world. We compare gender inequality in Arab countries with that in non-Arab countries, especially developed countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). We argue that crossnational differences in gender inequality reflect cross-national differences in patriarchy, in particular differences in how men use their power over women to limit their agency or ability to make decisions for themselves. We set out a causal model to account for cross-national variations in gender inequality. Direct causes include fertility rate, per capita income, polygamy, OECD country, and corruption. Gender inequality in Arab countries is highly variable due to large differences in per capita income and is elevated because of polygamy and corruption. Arab countries can enact policies that would reduce gender inequality, especially improvements to women's secondary and higher education. We analyze gender inequality in the Arab world and address the following questions: Is gender inequality greater in Arab countries? Among countries in the world generally, what differences in patriarchal practices contribute to differences in gender inequality? Where are Arab countries found with respect to such practices? What policies in Arab countries would reduce gender inequality? Our focus is upon cross-national differences in gender inequality, not upon differences in gender inequality within societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By focusing on the elderly suicide rates, this study lays out the different suicide regulation and prevention policies of three developed countries – Japan, the Netherlands, and South Korea. The main goal is to compare and analyze how these policies, with disparate ways of handling suicide, influence elderly suicide rates in relation with their countries' respective differing suicide determinants. By applying the 'Method for Synthesizing about Public Policies' created by Morestin, Gauvin, Hogue, and Benoit to check the status of efficiency and of any issues of public policies, it concludes that South Korea shows promise, while Japan's suicide rates have certainly been scaling down. Conversely, in terms of the use of euthanasia, suicide rates in the Netherlands have been continuously rising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recurring debates about the impact of the brain drain— the developing world's loss of human capital to more developed countries—has motivated estimation of the magnitude of the phenomenon, most recently by the World Bank. Although frequently cited as a key contributor to Africa's wanting development record, what constitutes the "brain-drain" is not always clearly defined. Today, in the absence of an accounting system, resolution of the definitional and measurement question depends on relative comparisons of measurement variants, which will identify definitional shortcomings by clarifying the merits and demerits of these variants, and thereby suggest corrective imputations. This paper compares the World Bank's approach to a chronological precedent (Dodoo 1997) to clarify the value of variant comparisons. The resultant implications for corrections are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an original proposition for debate in the fields of African studies, transnationalism, environmental studies, and technology studies. Essentially, the paper posits that, for a few key reasons, Sub-Saharan Africa will not likely have an opportunity to experience industrialization with the reigning "destructo-industrial" technologies pioneered by Europeans and Americans. An industrial experience appears achievable for Sub-Saharan Africans only in the context of a new ecological economy. Not only are there no unassailable national frontrunners in this future area, but Sub-Saharan Africans have a credible opportunity of being among the leaders in the future. The process would commence with "brain circulation," the movement of Africans into rich, technologically advanced countries to have their human, economic, and social capital enhanced, some of which to be reinvested in their respective homelands, particularly in ecological industrial areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the contradiction of economic globalization and environmental health. Despite the emergence of a significant environmental movement, the ecological health of many democratic industrial nation-states remains poor and the overall environmental health of the planet is declining rapidly (Brown 2000). The first section of this paper reviews literature that suggests that the inability of democratic industrial nation-states to reduce environmental degradation results from compromising environmental health in the interests of capital accumulation by regulating rather than eliminating environmentally destructive behaviors. The failure of democratic industrial nationstates to achieve environmental health is being exacerbated further by the creation of a globalized capitalist system managed by a variety of international free-trade agreements and the World Trade Organization. In the second section, we examine decisions made by these new managers of capital over the interests of environmental health. In the last section of this paper, we deconstruct the ideological tenets of global capitalism as they pertain to achieving environmental health and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adult prison population in the U.S. is one of the most important, marginalized, yet misunderstood groups within the country. Not only is the population larger than those of other industrialized nations, but the prisons themselves also tend to be more punitive in nature. While there have been many proposed reasons for this, ranging from differences in the "American Character" to the increasing severity of mandatory sentencing guidelines, explanations of the American prisoner setting remain thin. One area that has relevance to this topic but in which there has been little research is the language used to describe prisoners. This language is replete with images of nonhuman animals. Examples and explanations of this phenomenon are provided through the inspection of the lexicons and argots ("prison slang") for animal themes, and implications regarding implicit power relationships and the effects on both prisoners and nonhuman animals stemming from this language are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the current recession in industrialized countries and the resultant dim prospects for exports from small Pacific island countries, mobilization of foreign exchange earnings assumes considerable importance. The dependency of Samoa and Tonga on inward remittances is well known, as the two Polynesian island countries in recent years have been among the first top ten remittance recipient countries of the world. This paper examines the long-run nexus between economic growth and inward remittances during a three-decade period (1981-2008). The paper also discusses some important policy implications arising out of the study's findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a bid to attract foreign investment, Third World countries are increasingly concluding Double Taxation Treaties with capital-rich countries, based on either the UN model treaty convention or the OECD model. Using the example of the dividend Article in the Uganda-Netherlands treaty, the discussion in this article illustrates the increased use of tax treaties to shift income from developing to developed countries. By essentially reducing the tax rate on dividend income to nil, that treaty significantly erodes Uganda's tax base. Such agreements raise concern, especially when one takes into account the fact that investment decisions are often driven by factors external to tax, meaning that reduced tax rates do not guarantee increased investments. Worse still, because developing countries are net capital importers, the benefits accruing from such treaties are often one-sided. The paper calls for a rethinking and redrafting of the UN model convention to ensure that the taxing rights of Third World countries are strengthened. In addition, since the practical reality is that developed countries often base their agreements (even with developing countries) on the OECD model, there is a need to amend the latter model to take this reality into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper (1) examines whether there is a bilateral relationship between HIV/AIDS and economic development; (2) estimates the impact of HIV/AIDS on economic development; and (3) identifies some of the factors affecting the spread of HIV/AIDS. Analyses are based on data from 39 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1989-1998. HIV/AIDS negatively impacted economic development, with no evidence of a reciprocal relation. Expenditures on health and education as well as political freedom had positive impacts on development, but negative impacts on HIV/AIDS incidence. Expenditures on female education impacted development and HIV/AIDS incidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses in a comparative framework the relations between construction of collective identity and those of state-civil society relations in three modern settings--namely, in a general way Europe, the United States and Japan--the three major modern industrialized societies, with a brief comparative glance at Latin America. This analysis is based on the assumption first that collective identity is not naturally generated but socially constructed: it is the international or non-intentional consequence of interactions which on their turn are socially patterned and structured. Collective identity depends on special processes of induction of the members in the collectivity, ranging from various rites of initiation to various collective rituals, in which the attribute of "similarity" among its members as against the strangeness, the differences the distinction of the other, is symbolically constructed and defined. Constructing boundaries and constructing a basis for trust solidarity and communal equality are two aspects of such processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a paper that examines the relationship between complexity of societies and extended familism in the light of sociologists Meyer F. Nimkoff and Russell Middleton's comparison between modern industrial society and simpler hunter and gathering societies. The basis of Nimkoff and Middleton's position resides in their argument that the hunter-gatherer society, lacking resources for preserving and storing food, requires a greater sense of individualism, independence, training in achievement, and need for mobility in order to subsist. On the other hand, they suggest that the availability of unpaid labor in the more sedentary agricultural communities favours the extended family. In industrial society, however, they argue that there is a limited need for family labor and a need for competence in order to obtain employment in non-family agencies. By comparison, modern industrial society with the advent of capitalism, machinery, media, information technology, the intervention of institutions in family life, has generated a fluidity in family lifestyles, in the role of the family, and in the nature of a household.

The article discusses issues related to inflation, politics and social change. Inflation at a very high rate, or even at a moderate rate for a long period of time, is closely linked to sociopolitical crisis. This paper stems from a long-term, comparative and multi-disciplinary project to investigate inflation as well as stagnation processes in several industrialized countries. The games societal actors play, and the ways in which they play these games reflect the constraints and loop-holes, the reward and penalty structures into which the social system locks them. The complex, modern system of institutionalized income distribution games--at the sector, national, and international levels--tends to produce inflation and unstable development. At the same time, it limits the capacity of most societal actors--to understand the nature of the social system and the games they are locked into playing and to develop means or strategies to intelligently restructure the social system and the "rules of the game" whereby social decisions and transactions are carried out.

This article builds on recent literature to argue that emerging economies are simultaneously norm takers and norm makers involved in a two-way socialization process with developed countries. It does this by tracing China's engagement in negotiations surrounding the norm of common but differentiated responsibilities within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change between the 2007 Bali conference that set out to negotiate a post-Kyoto Protocol climate agreement and the 2015 Paris conference that succeeded in doing so. In making this argument, I push against the predominant unidirectional and dyadic models of normative change by illuminating the more complicated role emerging economies are playing in this process. The article further distills a typology of normative change from the literature to help us understand how and why emerging economies engage in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the efficiency and need for the development of information and communication technologies (ICT) in developing nations. Efforts to bridge the digital divide between developed and developing countries; Examples showing fruitfulness of ICT; Problems faced by developing countries in their access to the global information economy by ICT regimes and technologies.

The article discusses an ontological model of class consciousness. Recent publications on class consciousness treat the working class in Western European countries in a comparative form. This is properly related to the traditional Marxian prediction which insisted that in the well-developed capitalist countries, class consciousness is inevitable. However, the relevant empirical studies do not agree with the Marxian prediction. Yet, although the studies differ from each other by the alleged degree of class consciousness reported, they share some common elements concerning the defining criteria of the phenomenon. In this connection they suggest an ontological perspective. The general hypothesis departs from Marxist orthodoxy in a crucial point of Marxist theoretical perception: class consciousness is perceived as probable rather than inevitable. As well, it is conceived as a socio-psychological phenomenon which is assessed at certain points of time and in certain situations. Thus, the working class might become conscious of its class fate, but this is not accounted for by objective conditions alone; much more attention is given to the cognitive factor, that is, to the psychological component of class formation.

This article analyzes how low-income state agreement has been produced for contemporary international climate change treaties. These treaties have dramatically weakened the legal framework for action on climate change, with likely unequal impacts in the poorest countries. The case demonstrates that theories of international cooperation are not fully equipped to explain the processes through which low-income states offer their consent to multilateral agreements. This article develops and applies to this case a neo-Gramscian framework of negotiated consent, which reveals three mechanisms in the production of low-income state consent: material concessions, norm alignment, and structural conditioning. This approach views international cooperation as a process of strategic power relations co-constituted by strong and weak states, in coordination with nonstate actors. As such, it is useful for bridging the agent-structure divide prevalent in cooperation theory and sheds light on the durable nature of inequality in international governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the equality of large and small United Nations member states by comparing the universal periodic review experiences of China and Nauru. It notes that China and Nauru are subject to the same process irrespective of size, political structure, stage of development, internal security, and willingness to engage with international human rights bodies. It says that nations large and small are equally treated in terms of universal periodic review. It stresses that states themselves are self-limiting in their contributions to interactive dialogue, often striving to be constructive in supporting the less developed nations with advice, while being more critical of developed states.

Abstract Contrary to Popper's classic article with this title, it can be argued that the principal failure of Western analyses of communism was not the failure to predict the collapse of most of the communist regimes in and around 1989 but more a failure of prophecy, in the sense of a more speculative theory of the contradictions of those regimes and their unsustainability. The reasons can be found in the polarisation between overblown theories of totalitarianism and excessively bland comparative approaches couched in terms of the, then popular, theories of industrial society and, often, convergence. There were also methodological reasons arising from the positivist shibboleths of factual documentation, with the consequence that dubious statistics were considered better than none, and value-freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the implications of a multilateral global governance system in the twenty-first century with the rise of emerging powers. Topics include the representation of developing countries such as China and India in international organizations, diplomacy and international cooperation between countries, the role of the G-20 large economies on the international system, and issues of accountability and responsibility for world leaders. It is suggested that the cooperation of the G-20 countries could result in solving problems of legitimacy and efficiency or could result in a governing body like the United Nations (UN).

Although the ideas of the knowledge society and knowledge-based economy originate from the 1960s and 1970s, they became popular as a policy idea especially at the end of the twentieth century. Developed and less developed countries alike portray the path towards the knowledge society as the way forward, bringing economic prosperity and social advancement. In adapting to this move towards knowledge societies, universities apply specific organizational forms that have gradually evolved into global models. This spread of globalized models shows an inherent tendency towards processes of convergence, isomorphism, or homogenization. On the surface, a convergence of higher education and science policies seems to have occurred in the past decade or so. A closer look at organizational practices, however, might reveal more local variation in the adoption of these global university models for the knowledge society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the publication of a seminal book by the UN Development Programme in 1999, the concept of global public goods has become a key theme in the debate on international development. Supporters argue that an adequate provision of GPGs can help manage the negative consequences of globalization; moreover, considering that these goods provide benefits to both developed and developing countries, resources should be additional to foreign aid. Resistance has come both from developed countries, which question the issue of additionality, and from developing countries, which raise the issues of diversion of resources and the international decisionmaking process. This article shows how this concept has emerged and has been dealt with by policymakers in the Financing for Development Conference in March 2002 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in August 2002. It also analyzes the work and final report of the International Task Force on Global Public Goods established by France and Sweden in April 2003. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the theological underpinnings to rule of law development programmes. The article reveals the metaphysics of First World development practices in the Third World in order to suggest that international lawyers ought to consider carefully their approach to development practices. The article focuses in particular on rule of law development programmes and what has become known as the 'will to reform' dilemma amongst lawyers attempting to encourage changes in the legal cultures of programme recipients. The article examines how rule of law reforms constitute legal subjectivity at both the national and individual level and demonstrates how development, as a Western concept, enables these reforms to call the legal subject into being in the same way that the Word of God has been used to call Christian subjectivity into being with a promise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion on the e-transaction law and online dispute resolution in the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is not far behind developed countries in keeping a good pace with the e-commerce revolution. In fact, it is paving the way for others through the emirate of Dubai which has enacted an e-transactions law, and successfully established both the Dubai Internet City and the Dubai International Arbitration Center.

Published studies have examined patterns of police strength in only a handful of industrialized, and mostly English-speaking, democracies. There are primarily two reasons for this. First, practical limitations, especially language, make it difficult to collect international data on police strength. Second, even when such data are available, they are often riddled with errors related to erratic reporting and other reliability and validity problems. Perhaps the most important source of these problems is simply confusion among researchers and/or survey respondents about the meaning of the term "police." We begin by reviewing existing research and theory on police strength. Using a new data set compiled from multiple sources, we then explore differences in police strength, both between nations (cross-sectionally) and over time (longitudinally). After summarizing what is and what remains to be known about police strength from a comparative perspective, we close with an explicit agenda for future theory, research and data collection on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can developing countries effect outcomes in their favor in negotiations with developed countries? This article shows that as global politics move toward a multi-issue `diffusion of power' in which states and other actors interact in a considerably less hierarchical fashion than one characterized by a state-centric security-dominated distribution of power, developing countries are afforded negotiation processes they lacked earlier. First, the negotiation environment is changing. Developing countries are negotiating in scenarios increasingly marked by pragmatic `rules of the game' rather than authoritative or confrontational scenarios of earlier periods. Developing country alternatives have also improved in the diffusion of power. Second, developing countries can now use a host of negotiation tactics effectively. These include inclusion/agenda setting, trade-offs/issue-linkages, coalition building, technocratic and legalistic strategies and direct lobbying in other countries. The article emphasizes the links between issue-specific power structures and negotiation processes and draws attention to the underlying historical context in which these structures and processes arise. Several examples from bilateral and multilateral negotiations are introduced in the article although these examples do not constitute empirical proof of this article's conceptual arguments. In conclusion, given diffusion of power and the resulting pluralism, developing countries are not completely resigned to global liberalism without effecting anything in their favor. Global liberalism is thus not just a top-down process – it can be amended from below. Negotiations matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the methods and theories in comparative urban research. Urbanization refers to the growth and spread over a given territory of the human population living in cities, the distribution of human activities in urban occupations, the absolute or relative growth of specific large cities in a given country or region, and the distribution of cities of various sizes across a country or region. This is a broad definition which allows consideration of issues relating to the variable pace of urban growth, the changing occupational structure of urban areas, and research on giant cities and primate/non-primate urban hierarchies. The global growth of cities during the twentieth century arguably represents the most massive geographic movement of human population since the origin of the human species. Between 1920 and 1980 the total population of the earth's urban areas skyrocketed from 36 million to over 180 million people. Significantly, the locus of urbanization has moved from the economically advanced nations of the West to the world's underdeveloped areas.

The article focuses on educational credentials and the labor market in Japan. Japan is one of the highly industrialized nations in the world. The idea of the industrialism suggests that, as societies industrialize, the principle of allocation of social positions will shift from particularistic criteria, such as social origins, to universalistic ones, such as education. Japan is often viewed as a highly meritocratic industrial society where there is a tremendous competition for educational achievement and elite positions are occupied by those who succeed in the educational competition . The popular notion that the results of educational competition determine success in the labor market in Japan is referred to as the thesis of educational credentialism or the idea of Japan as an educational credential society . This idea basically implies that the opportunities for education are open to all the individuals in the society and that educational credentials are the major determinant of socio-economic achievement in the Japanese society. A number of empirically verifiable propositions may be derived from this notion of educational credentialism in Japan.

This article presents information related to religio-philosophical roots of feminist discontent. One is intrigued by the fact that literature of feminist discontent is more prolific in contemporary industrial societies rather than non-industrial societies and that this literature became more prolific in the nineteen sixties and seventies when the existential reality of women's life in Europe and North America was more comfortable than ever before. Now it is tempting to impute relative quiet amongst women in other ages and other parts of the world to false consciousness and hope that once women become conscious of their predicaments, they will be up in arms. Such a hope is plausible, but it is a little presumptuous to believe that enlightenment eluded women for years and then struck all of a sudden in the industrial era. The persistent intrigue has led the author to comparative philosophy and religion: 1. to a critical examination of the concepts of equality and freedom; 2. to an examination of the position of the individual in cross cultural thought; 3. to a comparison of the position of the mother in kinship based and non-kinship based societies.

The article presents a study on a cross-national analysis of politics, class and growth in social security effort. Between 1965 and 1975 most nations experienced an historic expansion in the proportion of the national product spent on social security programs. Although there have been several studies of social security development in recent years, a number of important issues have not been given adequate attention. First, most previous studies have considered indicators associated with one or two of the theoretical perspectives considered in the present study, but few have attempted to be comprehensive. Second, most previous studies suggest that variation in social security spending is basically an issue for industrial nations, not for developing nations. Growth in social security expenditures is becoming an increasingly important issue for developing nations as well. Third, most studies to date have been based on cross-sectional data. The present study is the first to carry out a longitudinal analysis that includes developing nations.

The article presents a debate between crisis and crisis perception. According to the author, crisis is a rather vast field. First, it will be limited essentially to the Western part of the world, the "first" world--of course seen in a global context. Second, at least to start with, the approach will be in economic terms, then somewhat broader, but not so broad as to include, for instance, possible, even likely, military outcomes. And third, the crisis will be discussed in terms of symptoms, diagnosis and prognosis. For the economic crisis of the First World a set of indicators have been presented. The indicators are divided into those primarily expressed in the money system, relating to monetary values, their ups and downs, and those that apply primarily to the real system, to physical quantities and qualities, in the economic system and in social structures. There is also a second division, in terms of indicators that apply to the country as a whole, those that apply to the bureaucracy and those that apply to corporations.

The article examines the convergence thesis as it relates to the social welfare sector. Convergence theory proposes that industrial nations are becoming more and more alike despite different cultural and historical legacies and diverse political and economic systems. The term "social welfare" as it is used here refers both to social welfare effort by national governments and to social welfare outcome as reflected in "quality of life" measures. At issue is whether or not the politically and culturally diverse industrial nations are, as convergence theory predicts, becoming more and more alike with regard to social welfare. A number of recent studies support the convergence thesis as it relates to social welfare by illustrating the relative importance of economic development rather than political or historical variables in determining social welfare levels. Sociologists argue that welfare-state development is only weakly related to political system and ideology. They found that economic development, through its effect on the age structure of the population, is a more powerful determinant of social welfare progress than either political system or political ideology.

The article compares accessibility, primarily in terms of social origin, to high-ranking occupations and to identify changes in such accessibility within and between modern industrial societies. As the professions are invariably identified among the highest ranking occupations in terms of educational requirements, income and prestige, reflecting tile high value placed on the services associated with them, there should be some concern to identify who has access to these professions since access relates to the quality of services provided. The article studies two higher and two lower ranking profession. There is evidence of a trend over time in the direction of equalizing opportunities to enter the four professions. While the improvement measured in relation to white-collar origin is scarcely dramatic, the change for physicians and lawyers was from about four to five times to two and one-half to three times the expected percentages. Greater improvement for these two professions appeared in relation to elite origins where the change was from twelve to fourteen times to three to five and one-half times the expected percentages. Changes in the direction of proportionality were less marked for social workers and secondary school teachers.

Robert Park, leader of the dominant Chicago school of sociology, felt that the city, in the very process of its growth, "creates diseases and vices which tend to destroy the community" "In place of the simple, spontaneous modes of behavior which enable the lower animals to live without education and without anxiety," he argued, the city creates men "compelled to supplement original nature with special training and with more elaborate machinery until life, losing its spontaneity, seems in danger of losing all its joy." The peasant who comes to work in the city, Park held, is the proto-typical case for observing the threat to individual integrity inherent in urban life. "Man, translated to the city," he remarked, "has become a problem to himself and society in a way and to an extent he never was before." To resolve the controversy as to whether migration and subsequent modernizing experiences in developing countries are or are not deleterious to mental health, and to determine under what conditions such harmful influences as may result can or cannot be counteracted, required data in a form and on a scale not previously available The materials collected by the Harvard Project on the Social and Cultural Aspects of Development permit a substantial advance in the assessment of the effects of migration, industrialization, and urbanization on psychic adjustment.

None of the problems facing the developing areas in our time is as potentially dangerous to their long term growth and stability as the steady migration of the skilled and talented in these areas to the industrially advanced countries. Particularly the U.S. has been a principal beneficiary of this migration and increasingly the question is beginning to arise whether current U.S. policies of technical assistance to the new nations are not being nullified in large measure by the departure from the new nations of those whose abilities are most needed in development. The Committee's report and its earlier published findings have intensified official American concern over and widened the scope of public debate on the "brain drain" problem and on the related issues of the adequacy of present U.S. immigration and foreign technical assistance policies, especially toward the new nations. For example, the anomaly of the U.S. providing various kinds of medical aid to underdeveloped areas, while at the same time "draining" these areas of their trained medical manpower, has been emphasized by one U.S. expert in medical education in whose opinion the present influx into the U S of foreign physicians represents a value to the U.S.

After several decades of continuing experience with structured interview surveys in the advanced industrial nations in which they originated, a great deal of knowledge has been accumulated on this technique, to the point that it has been codified in a number of standard texts. With the diffusion of the formal survey beyond its point of origin, however, it has become apparent that much less is known about the possibilities and limitations of this technique for the underdeveloped areas of the world. A first draft of the interview schedule in English was developed in the United States during the Spring of 1963. Later, after consulting with several mestizos and Indians in Vicos, a revised final draft was prepared and translated into Spanish by the author. The Spanish version was in turn translated into local Quecbua, a task that was accomplished in three stages by two Vicosinos and three mestizos, one of whom was the anthropologist of the Cornell Peru Project stationed in Vicos. The items were therefore classified according to whether they were asked in the early or in the late stage of the interview, with the breaking point occurring about half-way through the interview in terms of the number of questions completed and in terms of elapsed interview time.

This article outlines the main problems of the Belgian blue-collar worker. It is based on literature published in Belgium during the last ten years and emphasizes the sociological aspects of these problems. In all industrialized countries there is a general shift of human activities towards the tertiary sector. It seems from this article that there is a paucity of sociological data on Belgian blue-collar workers. Sociological analyses are still relatively undeveloped and the research findings are patchy, they deal chiefly with concrete facts and are thus limited and tied to specific problems. Hence, in the analysis of the sociology of the Belgian blue-collar workers there exists neither a school nor a range of ideas that could be styled actionalist, functionalist or structuralist. However, in Belgium, as in most highly industrialized countries, the necessity for a thorough and coherent study of the sociology of blue-collar workers is obvious and it is to be hoped that progress in this direction will be made.

Since the end of the Second World War, Africa has changed considerably and this change is continuing. Industrialization is playing a major part in this change and is breaking down the traditional organization of society. This process has gone further in South Africa than anywhere else, white settlers, using African labor, have built up a thriving industrial country. Industrialization is also proceeding in other countries, such as Zambia, but in East Africa what industries there are based on mineral deposits and the processing of agricultural and forest products. Of the three East African countries, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, Kenya is the most industrialized. This can be attributed to the fact that Kenya was a settled colony and a modern agricultural sector was developed by these white settlers, leading in turn to the development of industry. This survey of blue-collar workers in East Africa indicates that in Kenya and Uganda most of them lead a dual existence, spreading between the shamba or traditional society and the modern industrial sector and its different value structure. There is evidence that the shift from the traditional society is taking place but it has a considerable distance to go. This dual or transitional sector is undoubtedly dynamic and the tribalized society in which most of the people live can certainly be considered to be static. Whether social harmony can exist indefinitely in such a situation is problematic.

The article discusses sociological aspects of the prestige attached with different occupations with reference to comparative sociology. Several studies conducted in the U.S. before 1940 were apparently directed to the problem of determining whether in fact there was a general ranking of occupations which the American public would recognize. Even if Philippines society is not highly industrialized it is clear that after many years of Spanish, American, and some Japanese occupation, it is a society which is ordered in terms of a modem productive system and the same appropriate general set of values and motivations permeate the system. In a study amongst 214 graduates and students of Business Administration at the Bombay University, Bombay, India, it was found that there was a high degree of agreement in the social grading of occupations in England and India. The subject people in certain "colonial" societies, within certain limits, evaluate occupations in the same general way as respondents in more fully industrialized countries do. They do this in spite of the fact that there is usually a considerable cultural gap between the subject people themselves and their colonial rulers.

The article presents information on the changes in family and the position of older persons in Germany. A comparison of empirical knowledge about modern society with the picture of social life that one can derive from different literary sources of the past reveals basic changes in the structure of the family. This comparison also reveals basic changes in the role and status of the old. It appears that these two tendencies are strongly interrelated the changes in the role and status of the old affect the structure of the family and the changes in the family in turn affect the position of the old. The focus will be upon the changes in the family as far as they affect the old. However, at least passing consideration should be given to some changes in the relative position of the young and the old in the society. In pre-industrial civilizations, in which the economic and social conditions remained almost unchanged from one generation to the other, experience was most important for the functioning of the society. Since experience accumulates with increasing age, older persons were accorded positions of high prestige and respect. By contrast, in modern industrial societies, characterized by rapid technological progress, experience has lost much of its value. It is adaptation that is now of ever increasing importance for the maintenance of the social system. The loss of status and respect for the old as a consequence of the decreasing value of experience is accentuated by the difficulty old people have in preserving adaptability with increasing age.

This article presents information regarding Colloquium on Urbanization in Southeast Asia organized by the University of Biefeld, Germany in January 1983. The article lists down papers presented in the colloquium. The list includes "Some Remarks About the Evolution of the Economic Development of Surabaya," by M. Charras, "Small Town Markets and the Urban Economy in Kahupaten Minahasa," by U. Mai, and "Ethnic Identity in the City, the Case of the Bugs Community in Surabaya."