Collects 15 essays which provide detailed analyses of multicultural approaches to a multiethnic reality and how the Aloha State addresses economic, political and social problems. Topics include a brief history, language, the media, music, literature, public opinion and cultural values, politics, organized labor, social stratification, education, crime and justice, and political economy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
Social science research is fragmented by the widely differing and seemingly contradictory approaches used by the different disciplines of the social sciences to explain human action. Attempts at integrating different social science approaches to explain action have often been frustrated by the difficulty of incorporating cultural assumptions into rational choice theories without robbing them of their generality or making them too vague for predictions. Another problem has been the major disagreements among cultural theorists regarding the ways in which culture affects preferences and beliefs. This book provides a general model of preference and belief formation, addressing the largest unresolved issue in rational choice theories of action. It attempts to play a bridging role between these approaches by augmenting and modifying the main ideas of the "rational choice" model to make it more compatible with empirical findings in other fields. The resulting model is used to analyze three major unresolved issues in the developing world: the sources of a government's economic ideology, the origins of ethnic group boundaries, and the relationship between modernization and violence. Addressing theoretical problems that cut across numerous disciplines, this work will be of interest to a diversity of theoretically-minded scholars. Sun-Ki Chai is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Arizona.
The author describes with unusual candor the behind the scenes activity, the give and take, and the decisions of high-ranking university officials responsible for exercising authority at the University of Hawaii, including regents, administrators, deans and directors, and faculty. The actions of non-university officials who influence Hawaii's higher education policy and funding are also described; federal officials, state officials, and powerful legislators.
With a foreword written by former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, this book portrays President Barack Obama as a true child of Hawai'i and explains why he believes that America can achieve even more greatness by learning from the multicultural customs of the 50th state. Obama's aspiration to transform the United States using Hawai'i as his model has been a conspicuous theme in his books and speeches over the years. In them, he extols Hawai'i's multicultural ethos, describing how a normative, problem-solving mindset predicated on mutual respect and harmonious interchange is inculcated in the culture, politics, and society of the Islands. Indeed, this "Aloha Spirit" is imbued in Barack Obama, is part of what made him irresistibly charismatic as a candidate, and explains why voters in 2010 were baffled at his demeanor after he became the 44th President of the United States. This unique book examines Obama's decisions as an adult and as president and exposes how they are directly linked to the culture of Hawai'i and Obama's multicultural life as a child. The author and contributors also describe the ways in which native Hawaiians were dispossessed of their sovereignty and their land, how they steadfastly sought justice, and how their quest served as a model for Obama's mobilization of support for his candidacy.
This book describes racist rule in Hawai’i during the first half of the twentieth century and how statehood made possible a fundamental transformation. Based on a multicultural ethos, top political power shifted from Whites to Japanese and later to other racial groups. Racism was eliminated in the economy, environmental policies were modified, government operations became more multicultural, and the desires of Native Hawaiians to recover what had been lost from the days of the Kingdom of Hawai‛i were placed on legal and political agendas. Even before statehood, Hawai‛i’s example of school integration gave birth to the movement resulting in Brown v Board of Education. Afterward, the Aloha State was the first to adopt many reforms: unrestricted abortion, universal health care insurance, an Equal Rights Amendment, a State Ombudsman, neighborhood boards, classifying Whites as a “minority” in affirmative action, banning strip searches of females, and dozens of other innovative reforms that have been adopted elsewhere. Hawai‛i remains the only state that is officially bilingual, has required mediation before foreclosures, celebrates an Islam Day, prohibits discrimination based on credit history and breastfeeding, bans smoking until the age of 21, disallows plastic bags, has declared an end to the use of fossil fuels by 2045, and has adopted many other measures that lead the world. This book explains how developments in the Aloha State, which have provided leadership to the United States, may be copied elsewhere, primarily based on the technique of reverse cultural engineering, which is the unrecognized basis for legal systems around the world.
