The International Scope Review

Julia Archer is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas, USA. She received her M.S.W. and Ph.D. in Social Work from the University of Denver. She has extensive experience conducting clinical social work in a variety of settings, including private practice,community clinics, psychiatric hospitals, and wilderness therapy formats. Professor Archer currently teaches graduate courses in direct clinical practice, diversity, and postmodern practice theory. Her research interests focus on the social, interpersonal, and economic well-being of women and their families in multiple cultural settings. She has conducted research and written journal articles exploring survival strategies and social capital among women heads of household with African Caribbean women in Trinidad & Tobago and African American women in Kansas City, Kansas.

Pierre Bourdieu is the most illustrious sociologist in recent history. His work employed methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines, from philosophy and literacy theory to sociology and anthropology. He is best known for his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he tried to connect aesthetic judgments to positions in social space. The most notable aspect of Bourdieu's theory is the development of methodologies combining both theory and empirical data that attempt to dissolve some of the most troublesome antagonisms in theory and research, trying to reconcile such difficulties as how to understand the subject within objective structures. Bourdieu also pioneered methodological frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field, and symbolic violence. Bourdieu's work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics. It builds upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Norbert Elias, among others.

Dr Omar C. Bourouh received his B.A. in Sociology from the University of Constantine, Algeria, in 1976 and continued his studies in the fields of Sociology of Work and Social Stratification at the American University, Washington D.C., earning his M.A. in 1980 and Ph.D. in 1985. Since that time he has taught sociology at the University of Tizi-Ozou, Algeria, at The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., as a visiting professor, and currently at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Dr Bourouh's areas of interest include race and ethnicity, international development, and immigration. He has authored several articles and gave numerous presentations in international conferences on these subjects. He is currently conducting research on social capital and integration of Arab immigrants in Canada, and is working on a book manuscript about social change and development in the Arab world.

Pattamaporn Busapathumrong is currently the Head of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Asian University, Bangkok, Thailand. She graduated from Thammasat University, Thailand with a BA (Hons) in Sociology and Anthropology. She obtained a Master's degree in Anthropology from Stanford University, USA, and a Doctoral degree in Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Her studies in the U.S. were funded by the King Anandha Mahidol Scholarship. Her professional experience includes working in a Child Advocacy Unit and in the Defenders' Association of Philadelphia, teaching at Thammasat University, and consultancies to the United Nations and UNICEF. Her publications and current research areas cover social work and social welfare, social development, welfare mix model, and women's studies.

Alfred Cheung-Ming Chan is a Professor in Sociology, Director of the Asia-Pacific Institute of Ageing Studies, and Chair of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China. Professor Chan studied from 1974 on psychiatric nursing, sociology, social work and criminology at the University of London, UK. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Surrey; his thesis work was dedicated to elderly depression. He came back to Hong Kong in 1986 to teach at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and later joined Lingnan University.

Professor Chan has published on health and social care issues, particularly gerontology and community program evaluations. His recent work includes ageing and long-term care policies in Asia and the Pacific, health and social care development, elderly people’s quality of life, healthy ageing campaigns, and public service consumer satisfaction surveys. He holds a fair number of public offices including being a member of the Elderly Commission and a member of the Residential Care Homes Appeal Board. He is also a consultant to the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific on ageing issues.

Alexi Ivanov Danchev is Professor in Economics in the Department of Economics and Administrative Sciences of Fatih University, Istanbul, Turkey. He graduated from the University of Technology in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and has worked at the Institute of Economics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. During this period, he published articles and monographs on the exogenous aspects of the economic growth in the developed economies and the role of technological progress. He is among the first scientists devoting studies on the endogenous aspects of economic growth as well (Decomposition of Solow residual 1979). He was honoured by national and international rewards, such as the Academic Award in the field of social sciences of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the International Premium for "significant research achievements in the field of social sciences” of the Academies of Sciences for Social Sciences in Socialist Countries as examples.

During the 1990s, he participated in joint projects at the Centre of Social and Economic Research on Global Environment (CSERGE) at the University College London, UK. Since then he concentrates his research work on valuing environment and cultural monuments and on social capital, its genesis and impact on sustainable development. The results of his studies have been presented in prestigious international conferences organised by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the COST working programs, NATO funded conferences, and The Social Capital Foundation. Dr Danchev also has experience as a journalist and a presenter for the Bulgarian newspapers, radio and TV. He is a member of the editorial board of the international journal European Environment, UK.

Maya Khemlani David is attached to the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya, Malaysia, where she teaches Communication within and across Cultures, Languages and Conflict Resolution, and Language and Human Rights. Dr David has a special interest in the role of language in interculltural communication as well as establishing and maintaining national unity.

She has presented over 60 papers in 19 countries and written about 55 papers which appear as chapters or journal articles in both local and internationally refereed publications. She is the co-editor of a book on Language and the Media and is co-writing a book Language Maintenance and Shift Studies in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei. She is a Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Linguists, United Kingdom, and a Research Fellow with UPSI University, Malaysia.

Robin Gauld has degrees in public administration and policy from the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong was a comparative study of health system restructuring in Hong Kong and New Zealand. Presently, he is a Senior Lecturer in Health Policy in the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in health policy and public health, and coordinates postgraduate studies in health management taught in conjunction with the Otago Business School. Prior to joining the University of Otago, he taught at the City University of Hong Kong.

His current research interests include: comparative health policy in advanced Asia, e-government and health informatics, and various policy issues within the New Zealand health system. Dr Gauld is author of over 60 refereed journal articles and book chapters. His books include Revolving Doors: New Zealand ’s Health Reforms (2001), The Hong Kong Health Sector: Development and Change (2002, coauthored with Derek Gould), Continuity amid Chaos: Health Care Management and Delivery in New Zealand (2003, editor), Comparative Health Policy in the Asia-Pacific (2005, editor), and Dangerous Enthusiasms: E-government, Computer Failure and Information System Development (2006, coauthored with Shaun Goldfinch).

Geert Hofstede is an influential Dutch researcher on the interactions between national cultures and organizational cultures. A Doctor of Social Science from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands (1967), he has been a Professor of Management at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management in Brussels, a Co-founder and Director of the Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation, Tilburg University, and is an Emeritus Professor for Organizational Anthropology and International Management at Maastricht University. Professor Hofstede elaborated perhaps the most comprehensive model of the cultural national differences based on a large research project across subsidiaries of a multinational corporation (IBM) in 64 countries. This research and subsequent studies identified and validated five independent dimensions of national culture differences: power distance, individualism, masculinity vs. femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term vs. short-term orientation. Hofstede is the author of several famous books including Culture's consequences (1980) and Cultures and Organizations, Software of the Mind (2005).

Patrick Hunout is the President and the Founder of The Social Capital Foundation. He is a senior researcher and policymaker whose aim is to improve our knowledge of the transformations of the industrial countries, helping thus shore up the moral, social and economic context. His work explores four main hypotheses: the strategies of the upper class of society are a major explanatory factor of the current transformations of society; these strategies bear simultaneously on three main fields: economic, ethnic, and interpersonal; the development trends are similar in all countries whatever their original culture; these trends have a destructive effect on the social link in all societies. This work has been the basis of the TISR model.

Patrick Hunout is Doctor in Social Psychology (1985, University of Paris). He has run international and cross-cultural research projects in the fields of Capital/Labor Relations, Economic and Monetary Policies, Migrations and Interethnic Relationships, and Personal Relationships. As examples, he worked on job evaluation and culture (1987-1992), national management styles and their cultural connotations (1997), the links between the euro and the making of a new European Leviathan (1999), the meaning and effect of the immigration policies in Western societies (1999-2000-2002), the weakening of social cohesiveness in Western societies (2003-2004), the individualist affluent society (2003-2006), and the orientation of the future social order (2008).

Currently, his interests bear on the best ways to organize an autonomous civil society, to achieve a democratic fiscal policy, and to implement a prosperous social market economy.

Ronald F. Inglehart is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, USA. He is Director of the World Values Survey, a global network of social scientists who have carried out representative national surveys of the publics of over 80 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing 85 percent of the world’s population.

In The Silent Revolution (1977) and Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (1989), Inglehart examined changes in religious beliefs, work motivation, political conflict, attitudes toward children and families, and attitudes toward divorce, abortion, and sexuality. He discovered a major intergenerational shift in the values of the populations of advanced industrial societies. In Modernization and Postmodernization (1997), Inglehart argued that economic development, cultural change, and political change go together in coherent and, to some extent, predictable patterns - thus developing a similar approach to the TISR model. Inglehart theorized that industrialization leads to related changes such as mass mobilization and diminishing differences in gender roles.

Inglehart's 2007 book, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, reexamines the secularization thesis. A growing proportion of the population, in both rich and poor countries, is thinking about the meaning and purpose of life. It is argued that in developed countries, the established churches are losing their ability to tell people how to live their lives, but spiritual concerns, broadly defined, are becoming increasingly important.

Kenji Kosaka received his B.A. and M.A. in Sociology from Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, Japan, and is Ph. D. in Sociology from the University of Pittsburgh, USA. Currently, he is a Professor of Sociology at Kwansei Gakuin University. He has been a President of the Asia Pacific Sociological Association (APSA).

Pr Kosaka’s main publications bear on formal theory in sociology (2000, Tokyo, in Japanese) and social stratification in contemporary Japan (1994, in English). His main interests lie in mathematical sociology, social stratification and social mobility, and applied sociology. He was a visiting scholar at various universities and institutions, e.g. in Melbourne, Australia, Guildford, U.K., and Beijing, China.

Brent Mack Shea is Professor of Sociology at Sweet Briar College, Virginia, USA. He received his Ph. D. degree in Sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Dr. Shea was a National Institute of Mental Health Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Psychiatry at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. He has held visiting appointments at the State University of New York, Yale University, and the University of Michigan. He is a Scientific Collaborator at Centro di Studi per l'Evoluzione Umana, an interdisciplinary think tank located in Rome, Italy.

His research has focused on the relation of social stratification to psychiatric disorder which he has presented at meetings of social scientists, psychiatrists, and epidemiologists throughout Western Europe, and in the United States and Japan. He is author or co-author of numerous book chapters, journal articles, and professional papers, most recently in the field of social psychiatry. He is co-editor of Social Psychiatry across Cultures: Studies from North America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. Professor Shea is a former Vice-President of the Executive Board of the International Sociological Association Mental Health and Illness Research Committee. He is Vice-President of Ius Primi Viri, an international association concerned with the application of social scientific research to human rights education.

tOtto STEIGER†, Executive Member

Otto Steiger was a Professor of Economics, especially Monetary Theory and Macroeconomics, at the University of Bremen, Germany. He received his Master in Economics at the Free University Berlin, Germany in 1968 and his Ph.D. degree in Economic History at Uppsala University, Sweden, in 1971. He has been a founder of and a visiting professor at the International Summer School of Centro di Studi Economici Avanzati, University of Trieste, Italy in 1980-1988, and a guest professor at Rutgers University and The New School for Economic Research, New York in 1978-1979, at Latvijas University, Riga, Latvia in 2002, and at Mid-Sweden University, Oestersund, Sweden and Université Lumière Lyon 2, France in 2003. He has been consulted by the Austrian Ministry of Finance in 2000 and an advisor to the German Ministry of Economic Development and Co-operation (BMZ).

Otto Steiger has been invited four times as qualified person by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in economics in 1989-1992. Two of his books, one on the history and theory of population (1979, with Gunnar Heinsohn and Rolf Knieper) and one on the economics of property (1996, with Gunnar Heinsohn, English version 2004), have been selected for a German encyclopedia of the most important treatises in the history of economics (2004).

He has written and edited 12 books and published more than 200 articles in German, English and Swedish on the history of economic ideas, macroeconomics, theories of money, development and property, and history and theory of population.