Social Science Ebooks

This paper introduces a men’s studies approach to Vietnamese gender studies. It explains the value of incorporating studies of men’s lives and experiences into gender and women’s studies. It argues that the study of gendered conflict and power is necessary to understanding Vietnamese gender relations. This understanding must be contextualized within the social processes of negotiation, cooperation, and reconciliation that are so essential to the cultural fabric of Vietnamese social life. This approach, which integrates women and men’s studies, can have effective theoretical and practical consequences for changing men’s relationships to men and women in both private and public spheres. It integrates men as partners in a movement for social change that seeks expanded roles for women in all sectors of the society, expanded roles for men in family life, and includes men as critical participants in solving current gender and social problems.

Bangor's "Little City" is an eight-block area of former farmland laid out on a grid surrounding an active city park. It is a quiet neighborhood of tree-lined streets, tucked between the hustle and bustle of Center Street on the east, a busy thoroughfare dominated by a private Catholic hospital, and Kenduskeag Avenue on the west, a major route leading from outlying towns to downtown Bangor. Little City is filled with two- and two-and-a-half story single-family houses on small lots from the turn of the twentieth century. The area maintains a sense of secluded leisure, imparted by families gathering in the park and children riding their bicycles in the streets. Real estate agents currently instruct home-buyers that the neighborhood is one of the choice locations in Bangor (figure 1).

This research advances an evolutionary growth theorythat captures the pattern of life expectancy in the process of development, shedding new light on the sources of the remarkable rise in life expectancy since the Agricultural Revolution. The theory suggests that social, economic and environmental changes, that were associated with the transition from hunter-gatherer tribes to sedentary agricultural communities, and ultimately to urban societies, affected the nature of the environmental hazards confronted by the human population, triggering an evolutionary process that had a significant impact on the non-monotonic time path of human longevity.

How media evolve – and what older media can do to survive the advent of new competition – are the underlying questions of this article. We shall present a ‘natural life-cycle model of new media development’, applied to the internet, based on processes and elements found in previous theories, studies and models that had each emphasized discrete aspects: audience types, media leadership, historical development, convergence processes and others. Our study adds a few stages that have not been discussed previously, analyses different stage-to-stage possibilities, incorporates audience adoption rates per stage and presents a complete graphic model: birth, penetration, growth, maturation, defensive resistance, adaptation, convergence or obsolescence.

In recent years, East Asian states have been intensifying efforts to integrate their economies
with each other mainly through bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs). Their efforts, nonetheless, are not confined to the East Asian region. The move towards institutional integration with ‘extra-regional’ states such as Australia, Chile, India, Mexico, New Zealand and the United States has also gained momentum. Intra-and inter-regional economic cooperation schemes including FTAs are now forming a complicated multilayered structure in East Asia.