Culture is dynamic. But in cultural (ethnic) groups certain elements of culture such as cultural values relating to the family are regarded indispensable for social order, and therefore for the survival of the society. Accordingly those concerned strive to maintain social order by rediscovering what they regard as traditional cultural values. The thesis of this study is: the process of the development of cultural values relating to the family can be defined as "Spiral Involution"; namely a development through interparticipative stages, each stage (past or present) participating in the other, as impulse to further development. Therefore the proposition of this study is: dialogal-value-system-concordance, a conscious intervention by those concerned through dialogue towards optimal social order.

This volume offers an accessible synthesis of research, theories, and perspectives on the family processes that contribute to development.

The increasing focus on children's welfare has given rise to tremendous growth in the field of child psychology, and the past decade has witnessed significant advances in research in this area.

Dissatisfaction with the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as an indicator of a country’s development or a population’s wellbeing led to the development of the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). The GPI is an aggregate index of over 20 economic, social and environmental indicators, and accounts for both the welfare benefits of economic growth, and the social and environmental costs which accompany that economic growth. The result is better information about the level of welfare or well-being of a country’s population. This book measures the GPI of Hong Kong and Singapore from 1968 to 2010. It finds that for both countries, economic output (as measured by the GDP) has grown more than welfare (as measured by the GPI), but important differences are also found. In Hong Kong, the GPI has grown for the whole period under consideration, while in Singapore the GPI has stalled from 1993. This is in line with most countries and is explained by the "threshold hypothesis" which states that beyond a certain level of economic development the benefits of further economic growth are outweighed by even higher environmental and social costs. The book argues that the growth of Hong Kong’s GPI is due to its favourable relationship with China and in particular its ability to export low-wage jobs and polluting industries, rather than successful domestic policies. A stalling or shrinking GPI calls for alternative policies than the growth economy promoted by neoclassical economists, and the book explores an alternative model, that of the Steady State Economy (SSE).

With a focus on nine different national contexts, this book explores contemporary family diversity. With attention to the different welfare states and cultures of care in each setting, it problematizes the pre-eminence of research and policy centered on heteronormative families, showing the extent to which family diversity exists cross-nationally in relation to different gendered and "family-friendly" policies. Considering variations in family forms, including differences in the number and marital status of parents, their gender, sexual orientation and biological relationship to the children (adoption), multicultural families, and families created by technological assistance or surrogacy, it presents demographic information, alongside quantitative and qualitative research, across a number of advanced countries. A contribution to our understanding of the diversity of family forms, how diversity is lived in families, and what family diversity means in various international policy contexts. The Changing Faces of Families will appeal to scholars with interests in the sociology of the family. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Within a few years the European Union will be enlarged from fifteen to twenty-eight member states including Turkey. Do the new countries fit into the European Union or does the enlargement lead to a cultural overstretch? Using survey data Cultural Overstretch describes the cultural differences between twenty-eight European countries.

Using experimental surveys as a primary source, Kim and Kim compare a wide range of developed countries to assess the determinants of generalized social trust. With data from Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the Netherlands, and the United States, Kim and Kim present a detailed picture of trust at the individual level, across different ethnic groups, and across different regions with economic and cultural distinctions. They focus on a range of concepts, including generalized trust and familism; causal relationships among cultural values, particularized trust, and institutional trust at the individual level; and relationships between culture, wealth, and governance at the macro-level. In doing so, they consolidate substantial quantitative data with rigorous theoretical analysis and advance our understanding of social trust and prosociality in general. A valuable resource for researchers and advanced students in political science, sociology, and social psychology around the world.

Publisher description

This book brings in the focus on the borders between different contexts that need to be crossed, in the process of education. Despite the considerable efforts of various groups of researchers all over the World, it does not seem that traditional educational psychology has succeeded in illuminating the complex issues involved in the schoolfamily relationship. From a methodological perspective, there is no satisfactory explanation of the connection between representations and actual practice in educational contexts. Crossing Boundaries is an invitation to cultural psychology of educational processes to overcome the limits of existing educational psychology. Eemphasizing social locomotion and the dynamic processes, the book try to capture the ambiguous richness of the transit from one context to another, of the symbolic perspective that accompanies the dialogue between family and school, of practices regulating the interstitial space between these different social systems. How family and school fill, occupy, circulate, avoid or strategically use this space in between? What discourses and practices saturate this Border Zone and/or cross from one side to the other? Crossing Boundaries gathers contributions with the clear aim of documenting and analysing what happens at points of contact between family culture and scholastic/educational culture from the perspective of everyday life. This book is in itself an attempt to cross the border between the "theorizing on the borders" (and how “the outside world” and “the others” are perceived from a certain point of view) and “the practices" that characterize the school-home interaction.