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Hardly surprisingly, like many fellow Glaswegians, I grew up believing that the language of the majority of my fellow citizens was slang¹ and hence to be disparaged, if not altogether despised. The fact that we were all equally able to express ourselves in Glaswegian or varying degrees of “Standard” English was conveniently overlooked. The hegemonical dominance of the “Standard” was total. Our native tongue was to be extirpated as rapidly as possible if we wanted any social advancement at all and in working class Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970s social advancement was a major item on many a personal agenda. The multilingualism now so much à la mode was never an issue. Implicitly we were indoctrinated with notions of transient bilingualism whose goal, like that of the 19th and 20th century social missionaries in the Celtic areas of Scotland (and elsewhere), was to teach us the English in order that we forget the Glaswegian.

To reexamine the Weber Thesis pertaining to the relationship between ascetic Protestantism – especially Calvinism – and modern capitalism, as between an economic “spirit” and an economic “structure,” in which the first is assumed to be the explanatory factor and the second the dependent variable.

The chapter provides an attempt to combine theoretical-empirical and comparative-historical approaches to integrate theory with evidence supplied by societal comparisons and historically specific cases.

The chapter identifies the general sociological core of the Weber Thesis as a classic endeavor in economic sociology (and thus substantive sociological theory) and separates it from its particular historical dimension in the form of an empirical generalization from history. I argue that such a distinction helps to better understand the puzzling double “fate” of the Weber Thesis in social science, its status of a model in economic sociology and substantive sociological theory, on the one hand, and its frequent rejection in history and historical economics, on the other. The sociological core of the Thesis, postulating that religion, ideology, and culture generally deeply impact economy, has proved to be more valid, enduring, and even paradigmatic, as in economic sociology, than its historical component establishing a special causal linkage between Calvinism and other types of ascetic Protestantism and the “spirit” and “structure” of modern capitalism in Western society at a specific point in history.

In addition to the two cases deviating from the Weber Thesis considered here, it is necessary to investigate and identify the validity of the Thesis with regard to concrete historical and empirical instances.

The chapter provides the first effort to systematically analyze and distinguish between the sociological core and the historical components of the Weber Thesis as distinct yet intertwined components.

This chapter reviews the challenges facing educational research and knowledge production, in the independent post-Soviet Central Asia through examination of the case of Tajikistan. The chapter revisits issues discussed in Niyozov and Bahry (2006) on the need for research-based approaches to with these challenges, taking up Tlostanova’s (2015) challenge to see Central Asian educational history as repeated intellectual colonization, decolonization, and recolonization leading her to question whether Central Asians can think, or must simply accept policies and practices that travel from elsewhere. The authors respond by reviewing Tajikistan as representative in many aspects, if not all particulars, of the entire region. Part one of the review describes data sources, analyses, and our positionalities. Part two reviews decolonization in comparative, international, and development education and in post-Soviet education. Part three describes education research and knowledge production types and their key features. Thereafter, the authors discuss additional challenges facing Tajikistan’s and the region’s knowledge production and link them to the possibilities of decolonization discourse. The authors conclude by suggesting realistic steps the country’s scholars and their comparative international education colleagues may take to move toward developing both research capacity and decolonization of knowledge pursuits in Tajikistan and Central Asia.

Indonesia is one of the world’s “megadiverse” countries, providing ecosystem services that accrue at the global scale. However, control over access to and use of natural resources has historically been a source of tension between the central government and local communities, with the latter usually being marginalized by the former. Since the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998, however, a grassroots movement supports the revitalization of customary communities and their traditional systems of social organization (adat). A major part of this quest for legitimacy is the portrayal of indigenous people as environmentally benign. This chapter describes how indigenous systems have been influenced by political processes over time. We then describe how the changing political–administrative landscape has given rise to a national indigenous rights movement. We also analyze international factors that have contributed to the emergence of the indigenous movement before discussing potential challenges facing the movement in the future. This chapter seeks to get beyond the simplistic conflation of indigenous peoples and environmentalism by understanding the strategic articulation of indigeneity and environmentalism.

However, after Singapore's independence and separation from Malaysia on 9 August 1965, the PAP leaders were forced to change their vision of Singapore as part of Malaysia to Singapore as an independent nation, which they had earlier rejected. In other words, the PAP leaders had to “reinvent” Singapore to ensure its survival.