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This paper critically analyses the urban memory and heritage interpretation of postcolonial Harbin, a city in China that was founded by the Russians in 1898. It investigates the role and making of Russian colonial heritage in contemporary Harbin with a detailed case study of the Harbin Railway Station

Research methods include archival analysis, observation and semi-structured interview. In-depth interviews were conducted with local people, architect/urban planners and officials.

Local people of different generations with different backgrounds have different interpretations of the recently made colonial heritage of the Harbin Railway Station. The urban memory of Harbin has been consistently re-forming with both nostalgia and amnesia. Younger generations tend to regard the colonial heritage as their own heritage and a symbol of Harbin's cultural character without considering much about its related colonial history. In today's Harbin, colonial heritage as the “colonial past presencing” is more about a feel of the Europeanised space rather than the actual historical events of the period, and colonial heritage making becomes a tool for urban development and revitalisation at the institutional level. However, due to the paradigm shift in China's urban development, Harbin is facing new challenges in dealing with its colonial heritage.

Harbin is an under-researched case in terms of urban heritage studies. This paper offers a new entry point for understanding the westernisation and colonial heritage making in the contemporary China more deeply and thoroughly and helps to see the trend of China's urban development more clearly.

This paper is a historical review of the development of private primary and secondary education in Hong Kong from 1841-2012. The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolving relationship between the state and private schools in Hong Kong.

This paper utilizes sources from published official documents, public data available on government websites, archival documents and newspapers. The authors also carried out a few individual interviews with legislators, government officials and principals who were familiar with the history of private education in Hong Kong.

The colonial Hong Kong Government adopted laissez-faire policy in greater part of its rule until 1970s. The year 1978 marked the period of “state control” until the 1990s when privatization and deregulation emerged as a world trend in the governance of education. The role of government changed to that of “supervision” instead of “control.” Further, it is shown that the change of sovereignty did not avert the trend of decentralization, deregulation and privatization in education which is entrenched in the management of public affairs in human societies.

The findings provides an illuminating look into the development of a society and how it grapples with the fundamental questions of the degree of social control and proper use of political power in a colonial setting.

This study aims to explore the role of the Indian merchant class in 19th-century colonial India in addressing the social concerns of disability. Specifically, it addresses why and how business engaged with disability in colonial India.

This study’s methodology entailed historiographical approach and archival investigation of official correspondence and letters of business people in 19th-century colonial India.

Using institutional theory, the study’s findings indicate that guided by philanthropic and ethical motives, Indian businesses, while recognizing the normative and cognitive challenges, accepted the regulative institutional pressures of colonial India and adopted an involved and humane approach. This manifested in the construction of asylums and the setting up of bequeaths and charitable funds for people with disability (PwD). The principal institutional drivers in making of the asylums and the creation of benevolent charities were religion, social practices, caste-based expectations, exposure to Western education and Victorian and Protestantism ideologies, the emergence of colonial notions of health, hygiene and medicine, carefully crafted socio-political and economic policies of the British Raj and the social aspirations of the native merchant class.

In contrast to the 20th-century rights-based movement of the West, which gave birth to the global term of “disability,” a collective representation of different types of disabilities, this paper locates that cloaked in individual forms of sickness, the identity of PwD in 19th-century colonial India appeared under varied fragmented labels such as those of leper, lunatic, blind and infirm. This paper broadens the understanding of how philanthropic business response to disability provided social acceptability and credibility to business people as benevolent members of society. While parallelly, for PwD, it reinforced social marginalization and the need for institutionalization, propagating perceptions of unfortunate and helpless members of society.

Despite the importance of the first Chinese language movement in the early 1970s that elevated the status of Chinese as an official language in British Hong Kong, the movement and the colonial state’s response remained under-explored. Drawing insights primarily from Bourdieu and Phillipson, this study aims to revisit the rationale and process of the colonial state’s incorporation of the Chinese language amid the 1970s.

This is a historical case study based on published news and declassified governmental documents.

The central tenet is that the colonial state’s cultural incorporation was the tactics that aimed to undermine the nationalistic appeal in Hong Kong society meanwhile contain the Chinese language movement from turning into political unrest. Incorporating the Chinese language into the official language regime, however, did not alter the pro-English linguistic hierarchy. Symbolic domination still prevailed as English was still considered as the more economically rewarding language comparing with Chinese, yet official recognition of Chinese language created a common linguistic ground amongst the Hong Kong Chinese and fostered a sense of local identity that based upon the use of the mother tongue, Cantonese. From the case of Hong Kong, it suggests that Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of state formation paid insufficient attention to the international context and the non-symbolic process of state-making itself could also shape the degree of the state’s symbolic power.

Extant studies on the Chinese language movement are overwhelmingly movement centred, this paper instead brings the colonial state back in so to re-examine the role of the state in the incorporative process of the Chinese language in Hong Kong.

This historical study explores accounting’s association with processes of cultural hybridisation involving themes such as image-(un)making, alliance-formation and norm-setting as part of Britain’s civilising mission during the era of modern globalisation. In doing so, the purpose of this paper is to examine the manner in which accounting may be implicated in micro-practices through which multi-layered socio-political relations of inequality are produced.

Archival materials enable an accounting understanding of the historical processes of image-(un)making, norm-setting and formation of a hybrid form of rule through elite indigenous alliances.

The study finds that the British Empire’s colonial project on civilising the indigenous peoples in British Fiji involved: the (un)making of indigenous identities and their moralities; and the elaboration of difference through ambiguous, partial and contradictory application of accounting in attempts to support the globalised civilising course. The globalising challenges indigenous peoples faced included accounting training to change habits in order to gain integration into the global imperial order. The study also finds that the colonised indigenous Fijians had emancipatory capacities in their negotiation of and resistance to accounting.

The paper identifies avenues for further accounting examination of such processes in the context of post-colonialism and current forms of neo-liberal globalisation.

By investigating accounting’s association with processes of cultural hybridisation, this paper makes a significant contribution by providing the detail on the role of accounting records kept by the British Empire to facilitate Britain’s domination and control over the colony of Fiji and its residents.

The purpose of this monograph is to present the first English translation of a unique French colonial report on women living under colonial rule in West Africa.

The issue begins with a discussion of the contribution this report makes to the history of social development policy in Africa, and how it serves the on‐going critique of colonisation. This is followed by the English translation of the original report held in the National Archives of Senegal. The translation is accompanied by explanatory notes, translator’s comments, a glossary of African and technical terms, and a bibliography.

The discussion highlights contemporary social development policies and practices which featured in identical or similar forms in French colonial social policy.

As the report demonstrates, access to basic education and improving maternal/infant health care have dominated the social development agenda for women in sub‐Saharan Africa for over a century, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future in the Millennium Development Goals which define the international community’s agenda for social development to 2015. The parallels between colonial and post‐colonial social policies in Africa raise questions about the philosophical and cultural foundations of contemporary social development policy in Africa and the direction policy is following in the 21st century.

Though the discussion adopts a consciously postcolonial perspective, the report that follows presents a consciously colonial view of the “Other”. Given the parallels identified here between contemporary and colonial policy‐making, this can only add to the value of the document in exploring the values that underpin contemporary social development practice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role colonial ties play in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) to Ghana, several years after the official end of colonisation in the African continent. Colonisation left behind legacies of institutional framework, social ties and remnants of companies of colonial masters, which could potentially offer contemporary businesses from home countries the benefits of country of origin agglomeration.

This paper uses sequential explanatory mixed research design through 101 questionnaires and 8 interviews from the UK companies with FDI in Ghana. This approached enabled the initial quantitative results to be explored further through the qualitative data.

Colonial ties have limited influence on contemporary flow of FDI to Ghana, in spite of the institutional legacies between former colonisers and colonies. Majority of UK companies are influenced by agglomeration opportunities in general rather than country of origin agglomeration. However, country of origin agglomeration remains important to over a third of the companies surveyed.

The sample was taken from the non-extractive industry in Ghana, and caution must be applied in generalising the findings. However, some universal issues concerning agglomeration and institutions are discussed.

Although there has been some research on colonial history and its impact on FDI in Africa, existing knowledge on bilateral relations is rather limited. Unlike previous studies, this research provides depth by examining colonial influence on FDI between two countries, using two key concepts: country of origin agglomeration and institutions. It provides UK companies with contemporary views to consider when exploring FDI opportunities in Ghana, particularly in relation to the effects of the colonial history. It also provides investment promotion agencies with empirical results on the importance of various forms of agglomeration and institutions for FDI attraction.

This paper aims to trace the development of Hong Kong's Happy Valley from a space associated with dangerous miasmas to the site of a racecourse, recreation ground and a series of cemeteries for the colony's foreign communities while examining the relationship between the exclusion of Chinese from Happy Valley and the notion of colonial order.

This paper makes use of empirical evidence from historical documents, such as newspapers and government records, and applies Michel Foucault's notion of the heterotopia as a theoretical model.

This paper provides insights into the relationship between space and power in the colonial setting. It demonstrates that the imposition of colonial order in Happy Valley was a process that involved the exclusion of Chinese and that the various ways in which this order was reinforced, contested and negotiated revealed it to be shallow and incomplete.

This paper sheds light on an underexamined but important colonial space in 19th and early 20th century Hong Kong and complicates the notion of colonial control.

This paper aims to accomplish two purposes: firstly, it revisits the “positional identity” – the ambivalent-hybrid disposition – of human resource management (HRM) in the (postcolonial) Global South. Secondly, it seeks to reframe the role of Southern agents of the epistemic community of HRM, particularly human resource (HR) managers, in managing people in the South.

This paper takes inspiration from the postcolonial theory of Homi Bhabha, his notions of hybridity, the Third Space and colonial positionality, to revisit the positional identity of HRM and to reframe the role of HR managers in the South.

In postcolonial Southern organisations, HR managers play a dual role – as “mimics” and “bastards” of Western discourses of HRM. The dual role tends to put the managers in Southern organisations in a “double–bind”.

This paper helps in the understanding of the role of HRM as well as HR managers in Southern organisations regarding the (post-)colonial legacy of the South.

This paper provides new insights into the identity of HRM in the Global South beyond the dualistic understanding of HR practices, such as convergence–divergence and the mere form of crossvergence. It argues that hybridisation of HRM in Southern organisations takes place in the form of (post-)colonial hybridity.

The focus of this paper is the changes in domestic social patterns from independence (1956) in Khartoum and their effects on domestic architecture, analysed using space syntax analysis. The built representation of the political change in Khartoum, which had led economic, cultural and social transformation, has not been well investigated. The domestic architecture is envisaged here to reflect the change from a liberal and secular British colonial lifestyle to a post-colonial native conservative and religious one.

The study explored twenty representative samples from the two eras in order to reveal the hidden nature of these patterns by employing space syntax analysis, particularly convex mapping. This analysis attempted to both decipher space transition and to identify patterns. Interviews were conducted to interpret the social meaning of these configurations and to factor in the historical context of the transition.

The analytical comparisons revealed that these socio-cultural changes had subtle effects on the transformations experienced in the use and spatial organization. The change shows the emerging dominance of privacy: the relationship with exterior had started to diminish, and some interior spaces were redefined. This privacy centred patterns also, in many post-colonial cases, have pushed the core of integration deeper in the access graph.

The study sheds lights on the transition in the Sudanese society, reflected on the spatial arrangement of houses and traditions. It is directed to the Sudanese as well as regional societies who passed the transition before and after colonial eras.

The enclosed j-graph study on houses' plans is original and haven't been investigated using this space syntax approach.