The paradox of powerful children: children as subjects of social fear and instigators of social change in The Girl with All the Gifts

Women in Asia: Tradition, Modernity and Globalisation surveys the transformation in the status of women since 1970 in a diverse range of nations: Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, India, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Burma. Within these 13 national case studies the book presents new arguments about being women, being Asian and being modern in contemporary Asia...Recent social changes in women's place in society are untangled in recognition that not all change is 'progress' and that not all 'modernity' enhances women's status. The authors suggest that the improvements in women's status within the Asian region vary dramatically according to the manner in which women interact with the particular economic and ideological forces in each nation...Each contributor has focussed on a particular country in their area of expertise. They present innovative arguments relating to the problem of 'being women' in Asia during a period of dramatic social and political changes. Each national case study explores key social and economic markers of women's status such as employment rates, wage differentials, literacy rates and participation in politics or business. The effects of population control programs, legislation on domestic violence and female infanticide, and women's role in the family and the workforce are also discussed. The book poses questions as to how women have negotiated these shifts and in the process created a 'modern' Asian woman...Specialists from a variety of disciplines including history, anthropology, sociology, demography, gender studies and psychology grapple with the complexities and ambivalences presented by the multiple faces of the modern Asian woman. Complete with a list of recommended readings and a web-site with links to electronic resources, the book will be of particular interest to undergraduate students of Asian studies and women's studies as well as scholars and postgraduate students interested in comparative women's studies.

The result of study is expected to be utilized by both formal and non formal education and civil society organization to strengthen civic education or citizenship education which can build critical awareness of society of silent majority. By strengthening of the emerging social movements and changes, it is expected that people can become more critical in their political participation. Further implications, the public increasingly empowered in negotiating public interest, controlling power, and making the country or the government more civilized. Indeed, an important point to be underlined is that the study that have tried to synthesize or to discuss the liberals and also non-liberals approach which will provide neither empathetic knowledge nor critical knowledge in viewing of the relational relationship between civil society, social movements, and change. The result of the study took the civil society as crucial actor in building constructive opportunities for social changes. Furthermore, the study did not consider positivistic to civic role in democracy development since empirically they did not affect positively in democracy as well as non-liberal view. at the same time, the result of study an avoid the negative non-liberal view of civil society and demonstration changes concerning the destruction of mine symbols such as investor post, elite residents of pro-investor, and mining tools which is a form of the radical movement in opposing the mine. This movement was selected as a negotiating tool of powerless people in order to claim a succeed or struggle agenda. Different from the elite or educated middle classes who usually choose diplomacy and negotiation, powerless community tend to choose the mass radical movement. social movements in opposing the mine is successful to force investors to stop the project and also the district government to review the policy of mining exploration in accordance with criticism of citizens which belong to not pro-people.

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, more than forty scholars from Central and Southeast Europe (CSE) came together at the University of Graz in Austria to take stock of the social changes that have been going on since 1989/90. The conference in 2014 was the starting point of this issue of the International Journal of Sociology, which covers a wide range of topics: patterns of social networks, social and institutional trust and political participation as well as wage dynamics of East–West commuters. This introduction outlines basic data and theories on the economic and democratic transition in CSE to serve as a frame for the articles presented in this issue. They are country case studies from Croatia, Hungary, and Slovenia and country-comparative studies dealing with East European-Austrian border regions. Altogether, the issue aims at raising international attention to new findings regarding social, structural, and sociocultural changes in the CSE countries.

Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia

Reviewed by: Coeds Ruining the Nation: Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media by Julia C. Bullock Diane Wei Lewis Coeds Ruining the Nation: Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media by Julia C. Bullock. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Pp. xvi + 227. $79.95 cloth, $24.95 paper, $24.95 e-book. In 1872, the Education System Order (Gakusei 学制) prepared the way for Japan’s modern school system, calling for compulsory education and a national network of public schools. By 1907, all Japanese children—irrespective of gender—were required to attend school for at least six years. Educational mandates had a particularly significant [End Page 341] effect on Meiji women’s literacy and employment rates, which continued to rise in the Taishō period. Girls’ schools not only produced new teachers in the expanding school system; they also gave women the rudimentary education to become store clerks, bus drivers, clerical workers, waitresses, and telephone operators. This increase in women’s educational rates contributed directly to the explosive growth of women’s magazines and the rise of the new urban middle class.1 However, women still faced formidable barriers, for, despite increased access to education, the Meiji Civil Code (1898) and doctrine of “good wives, wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo 良妻賢母) cemented expectations that education should prepare women for their domestic and reproductive roles. These expectations persisted during wartime—and even increased, despite a deepening labor crisis.2 After 1945, the Allies introduced policies to suppress militarism and eradicate “feudal” tendencies in Japanese society. Women’s education and political participation became a top priority, although during this period, too, expectations that women’s primary responsibilities lay in homemaking and child-rearing guided policy. General Douglas MacArthur famously voiced support for “emancipation of the women of Japan through their enfranchisement—that, being members of the body politic, they may bring to Japan a new concept of government directly subservient to the well being of the home.”3 The Allies mandated that compulsory education be coeducational to ensure equality between the sexes and facilitate democratization—but this “equality” was subtly gendered. Taking the longer history of women’s education in Japan into account, Julia C. Bullock examines arguments for and against post-war coeducation in Coeds Ruining the Nation: Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media. This lucid and compact study draws on materials from the Gordon W. Prange Collection (University [End Page 342] of Maryland) to analyze popular discourse on coeducation (danjo kyōgaku 男女共学) from the immediate postwar period to the mid-1960s. In particular, Bullock traces how the ideology of gender complementarity—“separate but equal” (p. 14) social roles for men and women—influenced educators’, parents’, and students’ attitudes toward coeducation. First, Bullock argues that “the ideological underpinnings of this good wife, wise mother system of education stressed an idealized form of complementarity in sex roles that remained influential in the postwar decades, in spite of Occupation-period reforms that sought to promote equality of educational opportunity” (p. 23). Second, she points out that while objections to coeducation reflected fears that such arrangements would lead to sexual experimentation among youth, there was in fact deeper concern for “the potential for coeducation to erode gender norms and role distinctions” (p. 31). Third, she contends that young people who navigated the transition to coeducation were generally more open to the possibilities of this new arrangement than their parents and other adults were. The book begins with an overview of preparations and negotiations related to the Fundamental Law of Education (FLE, 1947), drafted at the behest of the Allies, which mandated nine years of compulsory and coeducational schooling. The finished law also provided (weak) endorsement for coeducation beyond mandatory schooling, at the high school and university levels. Following the introduction and a background chapter on the FLE (chap. 1), each chapter focuses on a distinct kind of print material: newspaper articles (chap. 2), cartoons (chap. 3), students’ essays in youth-association and school newsletters (chap. 4), roundtables featuring student participants (chap. 5), and literature, magazine articles, and films that fueled the mid-1950s moral panic surrounding juvenile delinquency (chap. 6). It is worth noting that chapters 2...

The debates on the Internet, as well as on ICTs, still largely revolve around the promises of a more democratic and better society, and inquiries whether these promises have proven true. Considering the fundamentally social nature of communication technologies, it cannot be claimed that there is an enclosed process for ICTs; even though the “profit-led” trends have predominant position over these technologies. As was emphasized by Raymond Williams, communication technologies are not static and totally predictable processes, rather they are shaped by social relations and struggles [10]. In this respect, manifesting emancipatory praxes in order to build “alternative” ways for communication and contributing to a critical understanding on the possibilities of ICTs in order to form a “counterhegemonic” discourse are crucial. In this framework, the study examines Capul TV, one of the nonprofit “alternative” communication spaces/platforms of the Gezi Resistance in Turkey, by focusing on Raymond Williams’ understanding on the relationship between communication technologies and social change. This study aims to contribute to a Marxist materialist position on the relationship between communication technologies and social change in order to achieve a critical and holistic analysis on the emancipatory and revolutionary potentials of ICTs. Such a questioning seems especially important when the increasing academic inquiries on the relationship between “social movements” and “alternative” usages of ICTs are taken into consideration.

Women in Australian Politics: Maintaining the Rage against the Political Machine

This new comparative analysis shows that there are reasons to be concerned about the future of democratic politics. Younger generations have become disengaged from the political process. The evidence presented in this comprehensive study shows that they are not just less likely than older generations to engage in institutional political activism such as voting and party membership - they are also less likely to engage in extra-institutional protest activism. Generations, Political Participation and Social Change in Western Europe offers a rigorously researched empirical analysis of political participation trends across generations in Western Europe. It examines the way in which the political behaviour of younger generations leads to social change. Are younger generations completely disengaged from politics, or do they simply choose to participate in a different way to previous generations? The book is of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of political sociology, political participation and behaviour, European Politics, Comparative Politics and Sociology.

Moral Panics, Social Fears, and Media: Historical Perspectives. Siân Nicholas and Tom O'Malley, eds. New York: Routledge, 2013. 246 pp. $140 hbk.What triggers and feeds fear in society? That is challenging question addressed in Moral Panics, Social Fears, and Media, and, as title suggests, media are often culprit. Here, Siân Nicholas and Tom O'Malley have edited a worthy collection of essays that define and illustrate useful theoretical construct of moral panic, a term first coined in 1970s by Stanley Cohen, who noted, Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panics. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests. . His idea grew out of explosion of cultural studies work of late 1960s and 1970s, especially as ideas about power and its relationship to language and discourse came to dominate a great part of debate. Of course, these social inflamed by media often result in public calls for social elites to take action that, as O'Malley noted, reflects a 'fundamentally inappropriate' response to a perceived threat. What sets this particular collection apart from contemporary applications of theory is its emphasis on past media behavior and how it effected social change, revealing that (news) media can be placed firmly at centre of historical accounts of social change and can be directed in certain ways.The book's three parts and thirteen chapters neatly delineate theoretical definitions from their application. The book's first part provides ample explanation about what constitutes a moral panic and its various transformations since Cohen's first articulation. Chas Critcher, a preeminent scholar in this area, stresses that Cohen's model and all subsequent variations are hardy and useful for studying media and media behavior over time and across national borders. However, as editors warn, blanket application of any moral panic model must be thoughtfully executed because relationship among the media, moral panics and social fears is far too complex to apply whenever social manifest themselves. The second part explores media as object of panic, and final chapters concern media promotion of social fears.The chapters concerning new media technologies as objects of fear serve to remind, as Gabriele Balbi, observed, This capacity to scare has characterized advent of all media and also (and above all) so-called new media. While Balbi's work focused on introduction of telephone in Italy, another chapter examined cinema as an object of fear, especially when its content expressed ideas that a dominant group found threatening. …

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Gender and Employment: A Global Lens on Feminist Analyses and Theorizing of Labor Markets

SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 390 down by the sort of obfuscating jargon so beloved of social scientists. This, it should be stressed, has nothing to do with the quality of the contributors’ English, which is uniformly excellent; it has more to do with the baffling terminology and impenetrable style that too many of them choose to employ. There are exceptions: the articles by Müller, Holmes and Enyedi stand out for their clarity. Given the importance of the subject-matter, and the urgency of making it a matter of general concern, the collection as a whole has to be reckoned a missed opportunity. University of Exeter Ian D. Armour Kalmus, Veronika; Lauristin, Marju; Opermann, Signe and Vihalemm, Triin (eds). Researching Estonian Transformation: Morphogenetic Reflections. University of Tartu Press, Tartu, 2020. xxi + 358 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. References. Appendices. Index. €20.00. Can a whole country comprise a single case study of ‘planned’ social change over three decades? This is the challenge set by the present volume, which aims to trace the pathway followed by Estonia from the fall of the Soviet empire to the present day. The enterprise stands on two pillars. First, the authors deploy a massive corpus of survey data, coming from various waves of research conducted since 2002, whose focus is on both structural change and its perception by the Estonian population. This involved reconstructing the demographic landscape and the emergent forms of social stratification in the country, as well as drawing a profile of changing life-worlds and lifestyles, political participation, culture and media consumption, and more. The second key point is the attempt to provide a unifying interpretation of this huge data set — and of the related ‘large processes’ — through an overarching conceptual framework, namely Margaret Archer’s ‘morphogenetic approach’, thereby revealing the transformative patterns of Estonian society. The project seems particularly timely, and the chosen theoretical approach especially suitable. Transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy as a theme for social science has come in various historical waves, and the guiding idea of most studies has been to model ideal pathways from closure to openness, often from chaos to stability. As regards Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet empire, the story has been told in two opposing ways. Heroic narratives describe the epochal success of countries making their way from beingSovietsatellitestobecomingmembersoftheEuropeanUnionandAtlantic Alliance. Therefore, their developmental path is characterized as a process of liberation, emancipation, modernization, Europeanization, Westernization. Counter-narratives see the same process as a sequence of failures, emphasizing REVIEWS 391 the excessive social hardships, growing inequalities and undaunted corruption that here are seen as the true hallmarks of that historical play. According to this gloomy view, the social and cultural trauma of transition was never overcome, which also explains the current ‘populist’ surge in some countries. Failure is alternatively attributed to the legacy of the Soviet past, in the form of a persistent ‘civilizational incompetence’ (recalling Piotr Sztompka’s wellknown verdict), or to the backlash of brute Westernization. In either case, most studies fail to account for the specificity of the inner socio-cultural dynamics in each country, beyond the alternative between Westernization and nostalgia. Moreover, social science still has to account for the processes leading various East European countries from shared beginnings to divergent ‘post-colonial’ paths, avoiding the deceitful linearity of ‘master trends’. The present book addresses these research gaps, offering an original way to examinetheEstonian‘successstory’.Thechoiceofthemorphogeneticapproach as the methodological key to interpretation is profoundly consequential. The challenge lies in the fact that the authors throw this conceptual framework like a net over their data sets, in order to capture the underlying patterns, while the data collection was originally inspired by other theories. However, such a decision is not merely ad hoc, but results from the authors’ journey through social theory, which led to an appreciation of a conceptual framework that is particularly sensitive to transformations and diachronic transitions. In this sense, such a démarche amounts to what Niklas Luhmann called the method of ‘theoretical variation’ as hermeneutics of social facts. From this vantage point, four main internal mechanisms of change are identified: neoliberal reforms, digitalization, ethnic divide and generational dynamics. These are coupled...

Political consumerism and lifestyle activism contribute to social change in Western democracies. Acts such as buying organic food, exchanging clothes, or cycling to work are part of contemporary action repertoires. Today, these forms of political participation define what it means to be a citizen. Yet, few studies question underpinning understandings of social change and democratic decision-making processes at the core of these forms of political participation. In this chapter, we ask: What are the mechanisms and procedural understandings of social change associated with political consumerism and lifestyle activism? First, we discuss how these forms of participation contribute to contemporary action repertoires. Then, we analyze mechanisms associated with social change and conceptions of collective decision-making processes. We argue that political consumerism and lifestyle activism are associated with unequal political participation and that they lack a procedural understanding of democracy that allows the inclusion of different segments of society in decision-making processes.

The Lebanese scene has witnessed important developments since the onset of the garbage crisis, particularly in the translation of ‘civil society’ activism and political disaffection into ‘alternative’ realms of political mobilization and participation. The social movement scene witnessed for the first time on such a large scale the multiplication of campaigns denouncing the political order. However, groups’ contending strategic and ideological orientations raised tensions between tendencies hoping to focus singularly on the garbage crisis and others hoping to place the crisis within its larger structural context. The Hirak’s (movement) inability to affect change compelled several activists towards reformist agendas through the electoral process and logic of gradual ‘change from within.’ The most prominent electoral initiative sought to reclaim the city and representative politics under the name (‘Beirut, My City’). The municipal electoral campaign, however, sidelined contentious political issues and structural inequalities vested in the city in favor of an accommodating developmental programe. Following months of deliberation, Beirut Madinati decided to ‘remain at the local level’, while some of its members joined force with other groups to form nationwide parliamentary electoral alliances, alongside a nascent ‘political party experiment,’ Sabaa (Seven). Exploring the recent developments in ‘alternative’ collective action in Lebanon, this research makes use of a content analysis of Facebook campaigning posts and interview data to study actors’ contending relations to ‘the political.’ The research concludes that rather than reconcile citizens with political participation, nascent groups that claim to represent ‘alternatives’ to the ‘corrupt’ political parties and sectarian political order, instead advance a consensual understanding of politics and social change that is more techno-moral and less contentious.

The study was conducted to determine whether socioeconomic modernization affects political participation at Barangay 27, Cagayan de Oro City from C.Y. 2000 to 2010. This is necessary to create a projection of political participation of the residents in Barangay 27 in the future. Economic development can bring many changes in a society. Among them and the most important one is that it usually creates a condition that affects the level of political participation. Among many theories that offer to explain the empirical connection between economic development and political participation is the Modernization Theory by Seymour Martin Lipset which provides the common idea that the process of economic development leads to clusters of social changes that will drastically alter the class, organizational, cultural, and social structure of a nation and how these are associated with new forms of political participation. Using simple statistics, the study discovered that the socio-economic profile of Barangay 27 from C.Y. 2000-2010 had increased gradually. This due to the increased number of business establishments in the area and the increased migration of people from other places to the said area, thus improving political participation. The study found out that there exists a relationship between socio-economic modernization and political participation through this socio-economic development in Barangay 27 political participation in terms of voters’ turn out is therefore anticipated to increase until 2019 elections.

INTRODUCTION A social elite might be defined as an aristocracy of birth, wealth and of influence, the latter made up of the key decision makers in both the public and private sectors of society. Traditionally ‘notables’ had been landowners and land remained a privileged form of investment. A process of interpenetration of ‘traditional’, partly noble, and ‘modern’ elites had long been under way, however. Economic and social change and the growing wealth and complexity of capitalist society facilitated an expansion of the elite to absorb increased numbers of businessmen, bureaucrats, and professionals. Thus, opportunities for upward mobility led to a partial renewal of the social elites, although its scale remained limited by the importance of inheritance as the main source of wealth and status. Moreover, although the ultimate symbol of success was no longer entry into the nobility, and economic achievement counted for more, cultural values derived from the ‘ancient’ landowning class continued to define social mores . The renewed experience of revolution in 1848 and the intense ‘social fear’ it revived also served to encourage the development of ‘class’ consciousness and a greater sense of solidarity. Elite membership thus depended on the mutually reinforcing combination of economic, social, and political power, which gave its members both status and authority. It was made possible by the possession of wealth, which financed a particular lifestyle and culture. It was signified by acceptance within supportive family and social networks.