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As the bell rang, sounding the beginning of the school day, Ji-Sook (Elizabeth) entered the classroom, her pink tweed coat and mittens still frosty from the snow outside. This was Ji-Sook's second year of school in Canada and her first year at Streamside School. She really liked it here and loved her teacher, Ms. Song Lee. Ms. Lee was always sharing stories with the class about her experiences growing up in another country as well as her arrival to Canada and growing up in small towns where Ms. Lee was often the only Chinese person in her school. Listening to Ms. Lee's stories helped Ji-Sook think about Korea and her family there.Removing her coat, Ji-Sook moved quickly to hang it up, her dark curly bobbed hair bouncing as she skipped. Her newly permed hair felt different, but she liked the way it looked. Today Ji-Sook was wearing a favourite outfit, a knitted sweater with a matching plaid skirt. After hanging up her coat, Ji-Sook turned to face the class and noticed that along with her teacher, Ms. Lee, was Ms. Mitton and Ms. Simmee. Ji-Sook was surprised to see Ms. Mitton and Ms. Simmee at school on a Tuesday morning for they usually came in the afternoon. She greeted them happily and took another close look around the room for Ms. Jean. Ji-Sook asked Ms. Mitton where Ms. Jean was; Ms. Mitton smiled and reminded Ji-Sook that Ms. Jean would be coming Wednesday afternoon. Ji-Sook remembered to ask if Ms. Mitton would read with her during shared reading time.Ji-Sook knew it was going to be a very special day. Yesterday afternoon Ms. Lee had reminded the children that in the morning they were to begin a wonderful art project and create their own Starry Night paintings. Quickly Ji-Sook removed the book about Van Gogh, which discussed his Starry Night painting, from her backpack and, before everyone was seated, showed Ms. Lee and Ms. Simmee her book from home. The night before, she and her mother had spent time reading the book aloud. Ji-Sook felt it was much easier to read aloud in Korean than in English. Today's art lesson was out of the ordinary for she loved being able to bring things from home that fit with what they were learning in the classroom. And today was very special.Before going to her desk, Ji-Sook retrieved the poetry book that had a picture of a boy peering over the end of a sidewalk,¹ Ji-Sook hurried to her desk and sat down and waited for Ms. Mitton to join her for reading. Seated with three of her classmates at a table composed of 4 desks, she smiled at Nathan, Grace, and Dana. There was so much to be excited about as she knew that after school today there were parent teacher interviews. Ji-Sook knew her mother was not working at the deli shop and was going to come to the interviews with their neighbour who would translate for her. Ji-Sook so loved it when her mother came to school. Once Ms. Mitton arrived, she and Ji-Sook spent a few minutes reading aloud together before Ms. Mitton went to join Ji-Sook's friend, Hailey, who had also asked Ms. Mitton to read with her. Ji-Sook continued to read and look at the drawings in this wonderful book.Adjusting her headset and microphone, Ms. Lee asked Ella, the class's ‘star-of-the-week’, to tap on the desks of each group to indicate that they were to come to the sharing area. Ji-Sook waited excitedly for Ella to tap her group's desks and then she hurriedly joined Grace, Nathan, Dana, and the rest of her classmates on the foam mats by the picture window. Ms. Lee began the art lesson by showing examples of Starry Night paintings completed by the students she had taught last year. Ms. Lee then shared the rubric with which Ji-Sook and her friends could assess their paintings. Ji-Sook knew that Ms. Lee worked with Mrs. D, the other Grade 3 teacher, and that students in both classes would be making the paintings. Once Ms. Lee finished explaining the steps of their art lesson, she asked Ji-Sook if she would like to come and share the book she brought from home.Sitting at the front of the class in Ms. Lee's chair and wearing her microphone, Ji-Sook read aloud from the book. The book was in Korean and Ji-Sook scanned each page quickly before explaining to the class bits and pieces about Van Gogh's life. Ji-Sook, reading from her book, explained that Van Gogh cut off his ear because he couldn’t draw his own portrait properly. Ms. Lee later returned to this detail and asked about how this piece of information in Ji-Sook's book was different from what they had previously read about the artist. The children remembered that Van Gogh cut off his ear for a woman he loved and had offered his ear as a gift to her. Ms. Lee asked the class to think about these two different pieces of information. Following this question Ms. Lee asked what the children might do to ensure the information they found was accurate. Logan suggested that reading many sources would help.Ms. Lee then drew the children's attention to Ji-Sook and said that as Ji-Sook read she was doing two things at the same time. She asked the class what they thought she was doing. Mya suggested Ji-Sook was reading and then talking. Picking up on Mya's point, Ms. Lee emphasized that Ji-Sook was reading in Korean first and then translating what she read into English. Ms. Lee asked Ji-Sook if she would like to read aloud in Korean. Ji-Sook momentarily hesitated but responded with a smile when her classmates encouraged her. Ji-Sook read one page aloud. She read quickly and the rhythm of how she read aloud in Korean sounded very different from her reading skills in English.Paper and crayons were distributed. Ji-Sook, Grace, Nathan, and Dana were quiet as they began their Starry Night paintings. Looking over the rubric that Ms. Lee had explained, Ji-Sook understood the first step today was to plan the sky and landscape of her painting. She knew the sky was to be about 2/3 of the paper and that everything she drew was to be in small dashes. It was important for the sky of her painting to look like it was moving. Ji-Sook was aware of Ms. Lee moving about the classroom, helping her classmates check, whether or not, the sky in their paintings was approximately the right size. As everyone worked, Ji-Sook heard Ms. Lee remind the class to press hard with their crayons so that the paint would have something to cling to as it dried. Taking Ms. Lee's advice seriously, Ji-Sook pressed firmly each time her crayons touched the paper, and soon her right arm grew tired. Ji-Sook now had a better idea about what Ms. Lee meant by this art project taking a long time to complete. (Interim research text based on field notes,² November 21, 2006)

This chapter focuses on transforming cross-cultural conflict and misunderstanding into a learning opportunity, using a case study to illustrate an approach that has proven effective in tens of thousands of conflicts. This approach surfaces cultural values and approaches to work, toward improving intercultural management practices. It also supports employees to resolve their issues themselves, toward more sustainable solutions.

By using ethnographic data and family interviews from eight families in Taipei, Taiwan, this paper aims to delineate how multigenerational families implement parents’ child-rearing values, and how these strategies vary by social class. The primary focus is the child’s mother and her relationship with other family members. I ask the following question: How does a mother in a three-generation family implement her ideal parenting values for her child while being encumbered by the constraints of her parents-in-law? Additionally, how does this intergenerational dynamic vary with family socioeconomic status? To conceptualize this process in such a complex context, I argue that we must understand parenting behaviors as acts of “doing family” and “intensive mothering.”

From 2008 to 2009, I conducted a pilot survey in two public elementary schools to recruit the parents of sixth-grade students. All eight cases of multigenerational families in this paper were selected randomly after being clustered by the parent’s highest education level and family income levels. This paper utilized the mothers’ interviews as the major source to analyze, while the interviews of other family members served as supplementary data.

Two cases, Mrs Lee and Mrs Su’s stories, were selected here to illustrate two distinctive approaches toward childrearing in multi-generational families. Results indicate that white-collar mothers in Taiwan hold the value of concerted cultivation and usually picture the concept of intensive mothering as their ideal image of parenthood. Yet, such an ideal and more westernized child-rearing philosophy often leads to tensions at home, particularly between the mother and the mother-in-law. Meanwhile, blue-collar mothers tend to collaborate with grandparents in sharing childcare responsibilities, and oftentimes experience friction over child discipline in terms of doing homework and material consumption.

Via this analysis of three-generation families in Taiwan, we are able to witness the struggle of contemporary motherhood in East Asia. This paper foregrounds the negotiations that these mothers undertake in defining ideal parenting and the ideal family. On the one hand, these mothers must encounter the new parenting culture, given that the cultural ideal of concerted cultivation has become a popular ideology. On the other hand, by playing the role of daughter-in-law, they must negotiate within the conventional, patriarchal family norms.

This chapter examines the miners’ occupational culture of planisa at the level of supervisor–worker relations. The chapter presents a tale of two frontline production supervisors or shift-bosses as they were called on the mine – Jimmy and Lee. In this context, the ability of the production supervisor to make a plan in ways that enhance the social organisation of the production process and people management is crucial to the development of a reciprocal working relationship. The chapter argues that planisa also entails a valuable social organisational skill through which frontline supervisors could effectively use to manage work group dynamics and team performance associated with teamworking, intra-team conflict, effort-bargain and resistance.

The chapter reveals that by ‘getting on and getting by’ with his charges – going an extra mile to making plan for his mining teams wherever possible – Jimmy created a working environment that enabled his subordinates to achieve their production targets and increase their capacity to earn the much-desired productivity and safety bonuses. The case of Jimmy and his charges highlights the role of the frontline supervisor as a vital agent of workplace change that elicits worker cooperation and support for new work processes, not for the sake of pleasing management but in ways that benefit and make sense to them – going above and beyond organisational requirements to achieve the organisational performance goals at the point of production. On the contrary, the case of Lee, another frontline supervisor, demonstrates the opposite and highlights the harmfulness of poor supervisor–worker relations to the achievement of organisational, employee and team performance goals.

This chapter focuses on South Korea’s newly found regional leadership, as the emergent middle power of East Asia, in order to advance regional integration and institution-building. Policy leadership is observed and analyzed from an international lens, linked to the literature of middle powers. The chapter first conceptualizes middle powers in connection with the issue of international leadership, since such states often play important roles in promoting cooperation. The chapter looks especially into South Korea’s foreign policy behavior toward East Asian regional processes and how it has manifested innovative and capable leadership. More specifically, the last three presidencies of Kim Dae-jung (1998–2002), Roh Moo-hyun (2003–2008), and Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013) are scrutinized in the hope of underscoring how their particular administrations, political leadership, and strategic approaches to foreign policy toward the region influenced South Korea’s regional leadership attempts and middle power status.

Previous studies as well as anecdotes have indicated that parental involvement in adult children’s marital conflicts is fairly common in Korea. This study attempts to explain how in-law conflicts – arguably a structural outcome of the traditional Confucian family – lead to marital disruption in contemporary families.

This study adopts the hypotheses of the corporate group, mother identity, and gendered-role expectations, which are instrumental to understanding the social context in which the legacy of the Confucian culture interacts with the knowledge-based neoliberal economy to revive in-law conflicts. Divorced-couple data are from in-depth interviews and court rulings, and their analysis illustrates the trajectories of marital breakdown.

The findings provide support for the hypotheses. Parents, especially mothers, who heavily invested time and money in their children’s education and career building meddle in their marriages in hopes to ensure the best returns to their investment. Normative prescriptions of gendered roles provide references for the parents regarding the roles of their children and children-in-law, and the gaps between their expectations and perceived reality trigger parental meddling and in-law conflicts. Adult children who are indebted to the parents for their status formation may acquiesce to the parental intervention.

In the traditional patriarchal family, in-law conflicts were restricted to mother- and daughter-in-law relationships, but are now extended to mother- and son-in-law relationships, reflecting a paradoxical twist in gender-role expectations. This chapter suggests that heavy parental investment in their children can have an unexpected consequence increasing the probability of adult children’s marital disruption.

The children returned and Ms. Lee had them go to their desks. There was so much excitement in the air … . Ms. Lee has rearranged the desks again and I like how there are such frequent shifts in seating. Ms. Lee spoke of their photographs and their collages. She then said I would give the guiding question for their work on the citizenship education project today in their small sustained response groups. I fumbled badly and said something about who they are and how they belong. Ms. Lee wrote it on the board. As Ms. Lee continued to speak, I went and changed the words to “Who I am and how I belong.” Ms. Lee spoke to the children of how they were going to start putting their photos on their poster boards and to think about how their photographs were representations of who they were and where they belonged. No glue or scissors at this point. She also showed them the paper where she wanted them to write about their photographs.The children got their individual pieces of bristol board for their collages and Ms. Lee said they might want to choose a spot on the floor as they did this work. They were intent and focused on their own photographs but were also sharing with their neighbours. At one point, I commented to Ms. Lee, Simmee, and Jennifer about how impressed I was with their intentness. I spent some time with Logan who had some magnificent photographs … he has an eye for the aesthetic. I pointed out to him how much I liked the photographs. I also spent some time with Taylor who had three photographs of clothes: one Chinese outfit, one Korean outfit, and a long white dress that she said she did not know what it was. I asked if it was a christening dress and she said she thought so, that her mom had taken the photograph. She also had a close up of a Canadian flag. I spent some time with Sophie who had rejected some of her photographs as not interesting. When I pointed out what I saw as interesting things in her photographs, she started to see them more positively. I asked a few children what they planned to put in the centre of their collages. I realized, even as I asked that question, that I was privileging the centre photograph. Liam had his dad's photo clearly in the centre. He was busily writing words. He said he wasn't sure what to write about his dad but then wrote something about family being important. (Field notes, April 2, 2007)

In this chapter, we inquire into our ever-unfolding experiences as teachers and with teacher research participants in order to explore the complexities of curriculum making in teacher education. In doing so, we lay the foundation for understanding narrative inquiry as both theory and method as such, frame our work in this volume. Curriculum making, a term introduced by Joseph Schwab, reflects the dynamic process of learning in which the teacher, learner, subject matter, and milieu interact. Moreover, we think about the ways people make sense of themselves, identity-making, in the process of curriculum making. Through Derek’s experiences with Lee, a previous Grade five student, and Cindy’s work with Jesse, a research participant, we inquire into their curriculum making and identity-making. We argue that in schools, there are multiple curricula in the making, going beyond the formal notions of curriculum as grade-level standards or classroom objectives. In our inquiry process, we consider experiences in schools through Aoki’s understanding of curriculum-as-plan and lived curriculum. In his writing, Aoki noted that the lived experience of curriculum in schools is much more complex and varied than the planned curriculum that is meant for a generalized audience; students and teachers bring their lives with them into particular contexts that indelibly shape the ways that curriculum is lived out. As well, we think about the ways experiences and places shape teachers and researchers and the ways we see the world.

There is significant amount of literature tackling different issues related to the port industry. The present chapter focuses on a single business unit of seaports aiming at the documentation of works related to container terminals.

An effort to review, collect and present the majority of the works present in the last 30 years, between 1980 and 2010, has been made in order to picture the problems dealt and methods used by the authors in the specific research field. To facilitate the reader, studies have been grouped under five categories of addressed problems (productivity and competitiveness, yard and equipment utilization, equipment scheduling, berth planning, loading/unloading) and four modelling methodologies (mathematics and operations research, management and economics, simulation, stochastic modelling).

The analysis shows that most works focus on productivity and competitiveness issues followed by yard and equipment utilisation and equipment scheduling. In reference to the methodologies used managerial and economic approaches lead, followed by mathematics and operations research.

In reference to future research, two fields have been identified where there is scope of significant contribution by the academic community: container terminal security and container terminal supply chain integration.

The present chapter provides the framework for researchers in the field of port container terminals to picture the so far works in this research area and enables the identification of gaps at both research question and methodology level for further research.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.