A Hong Kong native who joined the expatriate dominated civil service of that territory, the author describes the institutional barriers he encountered. Prejudice and frustrations notwithstanding, he eventually reaches the top level of the service.
Starting as an income tax assessor, Eric Ho worked successively in expenditure control, fisheries, external commercial relations, and communications between the government and the people. He emerges as policy co-ordinator for education, health, welfare and manpower services, and then returns to the trade and industry field. Next to this, he...

This publication brings together the work of several writers in documenting and understanding the consequences of state-formation on ethnicity in Malaysia and Singapore, thirty years after the two nations went their separate paths.

This interdisciplinary book by a group of Asian and European scholars provides a deeper understanding of globalization as an historical process with special attention to the regional and national contexts. Globalization, this book demonstrates, has its roots in civilizational dialogues and interchanges.

In this volume, anthropologists and sociologists address the issue of changing forms of local social security in Indonesia, pointing to increasingly exclusivist tendencies that leave the poor and weak out. It provides rich data from cases studies in urban and rural Java.

Examining modernity and religion this book disputes the widely-spread secularization hypothesis. Using the example of Singapore, as well as comparative data on religion in China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, it convincingly argues that rapid social change and modernity have not led here to the decline of religion but on the contrary, to a certain revivalism. Using qualitative and quantitative data collected over a period of twenty years, the author analyzes the nature of religious change in a society with a complex ethnic and religious composition. What happens when there...

The contributors to this edited volume, covering a range of social issues ranging from family and aging to sexuality and culture and the arts, critically examine the relevance of social policy as it is understood in the West; and addresses the question of whether Singapore's response is unique.

Through close readings of contemporary made-in-Singapore films (by Jack Neo, Eric Khoo, and Royston Tan) and television programs (Singapore Idol, sitcoms, and dramas), this book explores the possibilities and limitations of resistance within an advanced capitalist-industrial society whose authoritarian government skillfully negotiates the risks and opportunities of balancing its on-going nation-building project and its "global city" aspirations. This book adopts a framework inspired by Antonio Gramsci that identifies ideological struggles in art and popular culture, but maintains the...

After 1991, India after decades of stifling its own economic growth, has reformed its economy and has implemented its Look East policy to enhance its economic, business and trade linkages with East Asian economies. At the same time, Singapore has reached its own domestic limits to economic growth and is encouraging its companies to invest overseas to create its "external economic wing." Collaboration in information technology (IT) formed the key to initiating economic cooperation between Singapore and India. India has excellent IT talent but inadequate infrastructure to tap this talent for...

Drawing on sociological perspectives, this book provides an important insight into social change and its impact on marital expectations. Marriage stability is influenced by women's changing expectations of their roles in the family, notions of romantic love and expecations of the ideal spouse, preparedness for parenthood, and work demands.

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieua (TM)s relational concepts of the a ~fielda (TM) and a ~habitusa (TM), the book offers an alternative conceptual framework to appreciate the police response to marital violence in the Singapore context.