In Canada and elsewhere around the world, Indigenous Peoples are struggling to rebuild their "nations" and improve the socioeconomic circumstances of their people. Many see economic development as the key to success. Recognizing the challenges they face in attempting to compete in the global economy on their own terms, Indigenous people…

The roles of universities have evolved over the last twenty years. Universities were once regarded as focusing on two key roles--teaching and research--which were exogenous to, and independent from, specific economic and social development imperatives. Today, it is increasingly recognised that universities perform important roles as enablers, even…

The social, economic and political systems of former communist countries have faced considerable changes since the late 1980s. Most countries in Eastern and Central Europe have undergone their own individual brand of transition from a centrally planned, command system to a more or less liberalized, Western-style market economy. Many observers…

Routes to economic development attract considerable attention in community and rural sociology. Social scientists draw increasingly on studies of social capital and environmental surroundings as they examine the factors that facilitate and inhibit economic development. However, few empirical analyses exist that analyze the impact of the…

Political-economic sociologists have long investigated the dynamics and consequences of international trade. With few exceptions, this area of inquiry ignores the possible connections between trade and environmental degradation. In contrast, environmental sociologists have made several assumptions about the environmental impacts of international…

When the author decided to start a college for cartoonists in Vermont, he knew he would be tapping into an unprecedented excitement about graphic novels in the literary, publishing and art worlds. What he did not know was that he would also be tapping into the energy swirling around New England's so-called "Creative Economy," which…

This article describes the contract signing of a cooperation proposal between Shanghai and Suzhou, and between Shanghai and Zhejiang to build a "Yangzi delta" cooperative system that would mutually benefit the three cities. The contract signing was carried out to push ahead the sharing of education resources in the Yangzi delta, to…

While working on the development of literacy in Portugal and comparing it with other European societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I not only saw how late Portugal had been in achieving this process, but also how inaccurate the available numbers about it were. I decided that as part of securing a better understanding of the…

As accountability pressures have increased on community colleges, they have been challenged to demonstrate their value to the communities they serve. One role commonly included in community colleges' mission statements in Tennessee and nationally is support of local economic development. The purpose of the study was to assess the importance and…

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic wellbeing, with a particular focus on the role of educational quality. It concludes that there…

This report is a summary of discussions that took place at the Young Leaders' Forum held in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (PEI), on March 9-10, 2007. The event was part of the Rural Dialogue, an on-going, two-way discussion between the Government of Canada and Canadians from rural, remote and northern regions. Launched in 1998, the Rural…

This report evaluates the contribution of public higher education to raise educational attainment and the challenge of aligning postsecondary education with evolving educational needs of the state's diverse population. Report conclusions include: (1) The educational attainment of California's population is growing more slowly than the national…

The article traces the policy history of Kenya over more than 40 years (1963-2006) in order to tease out the tensions between the key themes of its own national agenda and the priorities of its principal development partners. The national concerns with the education-and-employment connection and with the orientation of schooling towards skills for…

Based on one of the most widely used datasets by foreign-based sociologists, this paper examines the rate of returns to education in rural China. Compared with the previous studies that showed rather low rates in rural areas throughout the 1980s, this study finds a considerably higher rate in 1996. A chief contributor is the rapid non-agricultural…

This article revisits and reinterprets my previous paper. It is a snapshot of the lifelong learning system building in selected Asian countries, reflected in the mirror of the Asian Financial Crisis in the 1997s and the aftermath of that event. I reconsidered the arguments (1) the economic recession had delivered a global dimension of lifelong…