This article examines the portrayal of non-North Koreans in North Korean textbooks to assess the influences on the formation of North Korean identity, and how such identity formation is important in Kim Jeong-il's retention of power. This study not only looks closely at textual representations; it also examines how political and ideological changes in North Korea had a critical influence on the…
This article examines the local implementation of the national Joint Regulation 2006 on places of worship in Indonesia. It focuses on the case study of the Protestant Christian Batak Congregation, which became one of the first churches to successfully challenge the authority of a local leader to cancel its permit to build a church. I begin by exploring the history of the regulation of permits f…
The term satoyama gained currency in Japan in postwar decades as a term that describes a sphere of encultured nature that has traditionally existed on the periphery of rural settlements, but which is increasingly threatened by industrialisation, urban development, rural depopulation and changing lifestyles. Satoyama is appealing as a concept because it represents a sphere in which nature and …
Tagame Gengoroh (1964-) is a Japanese manga writer who specialises in erotic gay male SM themed comics. Though prolific and having a substantial cult following in his native Japan, parts of the US and Europe, his work has not received the academic attention it deserves. This essay explores how Tagame constructs masculinity in three stories set in the context of wartime Japan. By drawing on seve…
Unlike economic capital, which is visible and easy to calculate, social capital is intangible and difficult to assess. Although both types of capital are crucial in determining social relations and social behaviour, little solid research has been done on the latter. This paper attempts to use the rags-to-riches story of Sir Robert Ho Tung, a first-generation Hong Kong Eurasian entrepreneur who …
A central but often unasked question in political and sociological scholarship concerns the conditions that precipitate cooperation on large-scale transnational energy projects, especially among developing and emerging economies. Using the example of two multi-billion dollar pipeline systems - the Trans-ASEAN Natural Gas Pipeline (TAGP) Network in Southeast Asia and Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC…
Research on memory of public events consistently reveals generational effects, where individuals remember best the events from their critical years of adolescence and early adulthooda phenomenon attributed to privileged encoding or retrieval of memories due to primacy of experience. Prior research, however, has not decoupled the youthful period from transitional experiences more generally, r…
The passage of time is fundamentally experienced through peoples interaction with their social worlds. Life-course scholars acknowledge the multiple aspects of time-based experience but have given little attention to age identity in a dynamic context. Drawing from a stress-process model, we expected that turbulence within peoples family relations and health declines would produce increases in…
Interactional research on advice giving has described advice as normative and asymmetric. In this paper we examine how these dimensions of advice are softened by counselors on a helpline for children and young people through the use of questions. Through what we term advice-implicative interrogatives, counselors ask clients about the relevance or applicability of a possible future course of a…
The gender gap in entrepreneurship has typically been understood through womens structural disadvantages in acquiring the resources relevant for successful business ownership. This study builds on resource-based approaches to investigate how cultural beliefs about gender influence the process by which individuals initially come to identify entrepreneurship as a viable labor-market option. Draw…
In 1966 the U.S. Supreme Court wrote, The basic purpose of a trial is the determination of truth.1 This is Larry Laudans guiding premise in his essay on legal epistemology. Without ascertaining the facts about a crime, he writes, it is impossible to achieve justice, since a just resolution crucially depends on correctly figuring out who did what to whom.2 Thus, he continues, it is en…
The most powerful response to growing skepticism about the intelligibility of the idea of private ownership has been cast in terms of an owner's rights to the exclusive use of an object. In these pages, I argue that this response suffers from three basic deficienciesrather than merely explanatory gapsthat render it unable to overcome the specter of skepticism. These deficiencies reflect a sha…
This article focuses primarily on the emotion of guilt as providing a justification for retributive legal punishment. In particular, I challenge the claim according to which guilt can function as part of our epistemic justification of positive retributivism, that is, the view that wrongdoing is both necessary and sufficient to justify punishment. I show that the argument to this conclusion rest…
This article explores the relationships between legal proof and fundamental epistemic concepts such as knowledge and justification. A survey of the legal literature reveals a confusing array of seemingly inconsistent proposals and presuppositions regarding these relationships. This article makes two contributions. First, it reconciles a number of apparent inconsistencies and tensions in account…
States typically issue compellent threats against considerably weaker adversaries, yet their threats often fail. Why? Expanding on a standard model of international crisis bargaining, I argue that a theory of reputation-building can help shed light on this puzzle. The model casts reputation as a strategic problem, showing that challengers issuing compellent threats have incentives to anticipate…
The interest in theory is greater than we anticipated. However, in looking at the role of theory in action research, there are more questions than answers. With few exceptions, the way in which theory is built from experience remains elusive. How is it done? It seems that frameworks are useful in making sense of the world. But which frameworks? What do they leave out? How accessible are they to…
Participatory action research (PAR) draws theoretically on the concepts of symbolic interactionism, particularly with regard to the collaborative construction and production of meanings. This article describes how action research builds meaningful theory at the local level thereby enabling researchers, researcher-participants and their local partners to foreground shared local understandings to…
In this prologue to the special issue on theory in action research we provide a context and an introduction for the articles that follow. We begin by sketching in some of our shared ideas on theory in action research and some of the differences between our own approaches. Then, after briefly describing the process of preparing this issue, we provide a succinct pointer to each article in the issue.
This article considers how feminist theories have and can contribute to action research, while acknowledging some of the tensions that arise when applying and building feminist theories. While feminist theorizing undoubtedly occurs in some action research, whether it is named or not, the gap appears to be in linking local knowledge to existing theoretical frameworks. Feminist theories, even tho…
The goal of this article is try to retrieve the idea of `good theory' that provides accessible and useful tools for practitioners, academics, and other participants in action research. In doing so, we advocate the importance of explicit theory building and testing as an integral part of action research practice. The association of theory with positivist research methodologies has resulted in th…