Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Cultural Region/Asian'

Educators who teach international students English as a second language (ESL) or English speakers teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in universities in non- English speaking countries in the Asia-Pacific region are often challenged to develop culturally appropriate curriculum for a diverse group of learners. Prompted by educational policy over the past two decades, the technological infrastructure in most universities throughout the world has advanced. Innovative tools for language learning have been developed for computer-assisted instruction. The purpose of the present study was to assess to what extent teachers use multimedia in EFL/ESL university classrooms in relation to the theoretical underpinnings of constructivism as well as Rogers' (1995) theory of diffusion of innovations and adopter categories. Further, the study aimed to ascertain what factors contribute to or discourage teachers' use of multimedia in tertiary level English language teaching classrooms. A mixed- method research design was used and both quantitative and qualitative data were collected. One hundred and seventy-nine English-language teachers from five universities in the Asia-Pacific region were interviewed and data were collected on their use of multimedia. Complex relationships were found among teacher-held educational and cultural values, teaching experience, formal computer professional learning, nationality, institution, region, age, gender, and collaboration with colleagues. Results showed that even with adequate access to hardware, software, technical support and computer professional learning, most teachers in the study made limited use of multimedia in the EFL/ESL classroom. As well, the results indicated that teachers in all three universities in Taiwan used multimedia in the EFL/ESL classroom less than teachers in Australia and in Thailand. Teachers who endorsed constructivist teaching methodologies tended to use multimedia more. Also, teachers with fewer than ten years teaching experience tended to use technology in teaching more. Data showed the use of integrated technology by teachers usually diminished as teachers got older. However, results showed that teachers who engaged in professional learning tended to use multimedia more regardless of age. Future directions in technology integration and recommendations for creating and sustaining a culture of technology at educational institutions are offered. Suggestions for professional development to encourage the integrated use of technology in English language teaching programs are outlined.

The rise in prominence of transregional security threats has heightened an awareness for an interdependent outlook on security threats, often requiring regional solutions to insure stability. The Asia Pacific security environment is not exempt from these security threats. Strategic challenges such as terrorism, environmental security or nuclear proliferation pervade the region and transcend its countries’ borders. Amongst a myriad of regional security institutions and dialogues with a focus on the region, the sub-regional security dialogue between the European Union (EU) and New Zealand administers an effective contribution to stability in South East Asia and the Pacific. This thesis explores the volume of the EU and New Zealand security dialogue in the Asia Pacific region. The amount of interaction that takes place and the quality of dialogue produced is analysed through constructivist and regionalist tenants; the security-focused identities of each agency is investigated and compared, in order to elucidate the ‘reality’ of the securitybased consultation. It is argued that continual social and political interaction between the EU and New Zealand will formulate a specific security identity and encourage further stability and peace in the Asia Pacific region. Thus, the research question can be formulated as what volume and form of cooperation exist between the European Union and New Zealand on security issues pertaining to the Asia Pacific region, and what efforts have been made to maintain, deepen and improve the relationship since 1999?

It is understood that national culture has an impact on organisations but what is not well understood is the extent to which this occurs and how it occurs. This thesis examines how employees working in a major multinational corporation (MNC) in the Asia Pacific Region (APR) perceive work commitment. Multinational corporations use ethnocentric and largely American constructs and measures in all areas of staff performance, including work commitment. This study is situated within the service sector where the work commitment of employees is increasingly posited as an important element of achieving competitive advantage. This is an applied research study that seeks to both further the understanding of work commitment in a cross-cultural context, namely the collectivist cultures of the APR, and to provide answers to questions that the management of the MNC in question had regarding the applicability of their American-developed measure of work commitment. The MNC in this study is one of the largest hotel chains in the world, employing 154,000 employees. The methodological approach adopted was a mixed methods sequential exploratory study, with triangulation of data that included: surveys, interviews, focus groups, forced choice questionnaires and expert panels. The final analysis of data was conducted using the MNC's employee survey (n=19950) of APR countries. A hallmark of the research is the extensive use of triangulation or multiple methods within a mixed methods approach. Cross-cultural studies are fraught with methodological problems, and triangulation of data is considered to be essential to overcome a range of problems, associated with the use of traditional survey methods. This is an insider investigation as the researcher was an employee of the MNC, called Merico for the purposes of this thesis, to maintain the organisation's privacy. The first stage of the study revealed the dimension of collectivism as being of importance to employees in the APR. The familial-type organisational culture Merico created a degree of isomorphism because it aligned more readily with the collectivist values and orientations of employees. In the second stage, the research explored work commitment and discovered that in the APR there was a different set of understandings of work commitment compared to the one used currently by Merico. Through integrating the findings from both stages of the study a new framework of work commitment, called the 'Work and Organisational Kinship' (WOK) framework, was developed. The WOK was then tested against the American model through using the existing employee survey that Merico conducted in 2000 and a new index of work commitment, called the WOKI was proposed for use by Merico. The relevance of this study is that it shows that the 'one size fits all' approach to work commitment will no longer provide a sound approach for managing performance within a competitive market place. The research shows that there are differences between drivers of work commitment and outcomes in the APR compared to those of the US and Australia. Performance management in Merico is heavily rewarded by work commitment. To misunderstand work commitment in the context of the APR and to measure it in a culturally insensitive manner, and then apply reward systems accordingly, poses major problems in performance management. The WOK framework introduces two constructs called 'organisational kinship' and 'service loyalty' that are critical to creating a geocentric approach to work commitment in the APR, and in Merico.

Television is increasingly both global and local. Those television industries discussed in this thesis transact in an extensive neo-network of flows in talents, financing, and the latest forms of popular culture. These cities attempt to become media capitals but their status waxes and wanes, depending on their success in exporting their Asian media productions. What do marital arts dramas, interactive game-shows, children's animation and teenage idol soap operas from East Asian television industries have in common? Through the systematic use of TV formatting strategies, these television genres have become the focus for indigenous cultural entrepreneurs located in the East Asian cities of Hong Kong, Singapore and Taipei to turn their local TV programmes into tradable culture. This thesis is a re-consideration of the impact of media globalisation on Asian television that re-imagines a new global media order. It suggests that there is a growing shift in perception and trade among once-peripheral television industries that they may be slowly de-centring Hollywood's dominance by inserting East Asian popular entertainment into familiar formats or cultural spaces through embracing global yet local cultures of production. While TV formats like Survivor, Millionaire, Big Brother and American Idol have become profitable and powerful franchises globally, in East Asia, the size of TV format trade is actually eclipsed by the regional trade in East Asian popular cultural commodities from martial arts novels and films, manga and romantic fiction, to popular music. These commodities have become the source of remaking local television culture into tradable cultures as local TV programmes use formatting practices to circulate within their region. The many faces of formatting in television are explored through four case studies - from Hong Kong (TVB's Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre), Singapore (Robert Chua Productions' Everyone Wins, Peach Blossom Media's Tomato Twins) and Taipei (Comic Ritz Production's Meteor Garden). Conceptualised as Asian media productions, these TV programmes are sites for examining individual agency, the network flows of popular culture and structural changes of their respective broadcasting fields. This thesis argues that TV formatting practices can become a currency for neo-networked media producers to create a medium of cultural exchange that sets up the possibility for a common market for cultural trade in East Asia. However, the ease with which TV formatting practices and re-sale of TV programmes are copied lower barriers for competition and often this tends toward over production. Over-exposure kills many new genres of production and discourages investment in the research and development component of creating TV formats for trade. Change in East Asian television industries is also aided by media conglomeration, global access through satellite TV, the Internet and increasingly digital entertainment, media de-regulation and pro-development policies. A number of factors and conditions that accompany the rise of TV formatting in East Asia (such as the role of independents vis-a-vis big local players, the emergence of copyright issues and marketing celebrities) contribute to the innovations that result from adapting formatting practices to local contexts, and suggest how each city's television industry attempts to address the rise of tradable cultural commodities that are increasingly made for pan-Asian consumption.

This thesis presents an independent, sediment-based record of landscape change within an agricultural hinterland. Established historical and archaeological sequences document the primary occupation of Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka’s ancient capital, beginning ca. 400 BC and lasting until it was largely abandoned in AD 1017. Anuradhapura is located in the island’s dry zone, which depends almost completely on the unpredictable Northeastern Monsoon for water. Oral history and historical narratives have long held that large-scale irrigated rice cultivation took place in the hinterland to produce an agricultural surplus that sustained the urban and monastic populations. However, until the onset of the Anuradhapura Hinterland Project in 2005, the archaeological record of the hinterland was undocumented, leaving existing narratives untested. The geoarchaeological research presented here was undertaken as part of the Hinterland Project, in order to document the chronology and cultural and environmental processes that contributed to the formation of this irrigated landscape. Optical dating of sediments demonstrates that the onset of large-scale irrigation began ca. 400 BC, and the construction of new works continued until Anuradhapura’s late occupation period. Sampled reservoirs and channels began to infill, indicating widespread disuse, within ca. 100 years of Anuradhapura’s abandonment. Soil micromorphology and bulk sediment characterisation document hinterland habitation, water management, and cultivation activities prior to the establishment of large-scale irrigation. This work illustrates the coping strategies that people employed to deal with the vagaries of the dry zone environment and demonstrates that hinterland land use changed throughout the primary occupation period. Although largescale irrigation works infilled relatively rapidly, cultural activity and land use re-emerged following this period of disuse.

Sikh leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale’s militant and masculinist discourses were embraced by Punjabi Sikhs because of his presence as a charismatic authority, a concept first developed by sociologist Max Weber to understand the conditions surrounding and personal qualities of a figure which attracts followers. The rebellion he led in Punjab resulted from his radical exploitation of issues concerning the Sikh community. Religion was wielded as a tool, legitimizing Sikh violence as commanded by the Gurus. Radical interpretations of Sikh scripture and folklore were initially preached to rural, less educated crowds. While his sermons brought out their frustrations with the government, his charisma allowed him to manipulate young men, his largest demographic of supporters, into embracing violence. This study analyzes Bhindranwale from the perspective of the people that supported him. By identifying multiple social factors through which to understand Bhindranwale’s reign, this study exhibits his importance in understanding Sikhism in Modern India.

This text provides an environmental justice analysis of the stories of the people who lived in the Owens Valley, who watered its land and cultivated its crops—pine trees, apple trees, and kabocha alike. Telling the personal stories of challenge and resistance that manifested alongside the oppressive forces of military and state domination provides the opportunity to align forcibly relocated, exploited and incarcerated people’s struggles throughout time. This text starts with The Nü’ma Peoples who were the first humans to live in the Owens Valley and continues with the struggle for empire between rival colonial empires of agriculture and distant urban cities. Its final chapters end with an in-depth and personal exploration of the unconstitutional incarceration of 117,000 people of Japanese ancestry in the United States during World War II. All the while it weaves in poetry, art and grassroots stories of resistance. It is a call to action for Environmental Studies and Ethnic Studies Departments to link the critical analysis within their disciplines to tell more accurate histories.

Работа посвящена анализу динамики развития двусторонних взаимоотношений между Японией и Социалистической Республикой Вьетнам в начале XXI в. На основе широкого круга источников и литературы, включая двусторонние документы, вьетнамские и японские средства массовой информации, а также актуальные публикации российских и зарубежных исследователей, определяются основные направления отношений, особенности и результаты сотрудничества. Подчеркивается важное место вьетнамско-японского взаимодействия в системе безопасности в Азиатско-Тихоокеанском регионе и ценность сотрудничества для обоих партнеров, невзирая на проблемы.
The author analyses the development of bilateral relations between Japan and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in the beginning of the 21st century. A wide range of primary and secondary sources is used, including diplomatic documents, Vietnamese and Japanese mass media, and research publications of experts from different countries of the world. The work systematizes the basic aspects of bilateral relations, defines their specific features and results. The important role of relations between Vietnam and Japan in the system of international relations in Asia-Pacific is emphasized, as well as its significance for both partners, in spite of various problems.