Westernization

About: Westernization is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1154 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15791 citations. The topic is also known as: occidentalization.

Teaching How to Discriminate: Globalization, Prejudice, and Textbooks.

Abstract: Language education is a complex social practice that reaches beyond teaching and learning phonology, morphology, and syntax. Language is not neutral; it conveys ideas, cultures, and ideologies embedded in and related to the language, so that language education needs to be examined not only on the purely linguistic level, but also on the broader social and political level. One of the social and political factors that influence language education is governmental policy. Language education is often subject to explicit policy decisions made by governmental bodies. This study seeks to unveil the influence of South Korea's globalization policy on the content of government-approved South Korean high school EFL (English as a Foreign Language) textbooks. I will examine the ways in which globalization is reflected and promoted in the textbooks. In doing so, I will investigate popular social perceptions about globalization in South Korea and interpret textbook contents within unique South Korean social and historical contexts. Then the implications of this study will be discussed with respect to the role that all teacher educators need to play in encouraging pre-service teachers to examine instructional materials through a critical lens. Many researchers have examined the social and political aspects of language education and the crucial roles that governments play in shaping the implementation and practice of English as a Second Language (ESL)/English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education (Recento, 2000; Recento & Burnaby, 1998; Tollefson, 1991, 1995, 2002; Tsui & Tollefson, 2007). For example, learning and using English tend to exacerbate the negative residual effects of colonialism in many Asian and African countries, including India, Hong Kong (Pennycook, 1994, 1998), Sri Lanka (Canagarajah, 1999), and Tanzania (Vavrus, 2002). The English language is also invariably related to the historical imperialism of two powerful countries--the United States and Britain (Pennycook, 1994, 1995, 1998; Phillipson, 1992). These two countries have used both implicit and explicit policies with regard to the promotion of English that were designed to promote national interests (Phillipson, 1992, 1994). Globalization Discourse on globalization tends to center on new and internationalized consumption patterns, global markets, workers, and cross-national investments (Burbules & Torres, 2000; Short & Kim, 1999). Telecommunications such as the Internet and the World Wide Web, the rise and proliferation of supranational organizations such as the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Funds (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), and blurred distinctions between international and domestic affairs (Short & Kim) also figure prominently. However, this broad-spectrum sketch often fails to capture the complexity of globalization, and offers little information on the means by which globalization takes place within the boundaries of a given society. What is needed is an in-depth interpretation of cultural globalization that highlights the particular way that each society experiences globalization (Capella, 2000; Luke & Luke, 2000; Pike, 2000). Cultural globalization cannot be fully understood without thorough discussions of the unique social, political, economic, and historical factors that interact within a given society. This approach is sometimes called glocal (Burbules & Torres, 2000), hybridization, creolization, or reterritorialization (Short & Kim, 1999). From this perspective, it is too simple to explain the complex mechanisms of globalization merely as, for example, Americanization/Westernization. For a thorough analysis of globalization, it is necessary to include situated and local uniqueness (Capella, 2000; Luke & Luke, 2000; Pike, 2000), since globalization is not itself a unified global phenomenon in any case (Burbules &Torres, 2000). This point of view serves as guidance for the present study, as I attempt to analyze situated meanings of the contents of South Korean high school EFL textbooks. …

Poland's first post-communist generation

Abstract: The post-communist condition education the economy routes into the workforce unemployment lifestyles, youth cultures and consumerism young people and their families politics westernization?

The International Diffusion of Planning Ideas: The Case of Istanbul, Turkey

Abstract: Diffusion is the process by which economical, political, and cultural experiences are shared amongst countries. The international diffusion of planning ideas is defined as borrowing and imposition at national and local levels. In the case of Turkey, these experiences are viewed within the context of modernization and westernization. The most significant arena of this process took place in Istanbul. The process of adaptation began in the second half of the nineteenth century with the Tanzimat reforms and developed parallel to the degree of influence the United States and Europe had on the changes in the political regime and identity of the country in the wake of the two world wars. The financial support of the United States and World Bank investments sped up this process. A European Union harmonization process is now under way. The objective of this study is to relate the Turkish experience of international diffusion of planning ideas and evaluate the contribution of Istanbul's spatial formation.

"The West" in the Eyes of the Iranian Intellectuals of the Interwar Years (1919-1939)

Abstract: Persia has not been modernized and has not in reality been Westernized. Look at the map: there is Persia right up against Russia. For the past hundred years, living cheek by jowl with Russia, Persia has maintained her complete independence of Russian thought. Although sixty to seventy percent of her trade for the past hundred years has been with Russia, Persia remains aloof in spirit and in practice. For the past ten years, Persia has been living alongside the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, and has remained free from any impregnation by their basic ideas. Her freedom is due to her cultural independence. For the safety of Persia it is essential, if she is to continue to develop on her own lines, that she should not attempt modernization, and I do not think that the attempt is being made. It is true that the Persians have adopted motor-cars and in small way railways. But let us remember that the Persians have always been in the forefront in anything of that sort. The fi rst Eastern nation to enter the Postal Union and to adopt a system of telegraphs was Persia, which country was also among the fi rst of the Eastern nations to join the League of Nations and to become an active member. The Persians have always been ready to adapt to their own peculiar needs any Western invention that seemed to suit them. But that does not mean that they are being Westernized, with one exception. Westernization is taking place in the sphere of law.1

From Post-Communism to Civil Society: The Reemergence of History and the Decline of the Western Model

Abstract: For virtually all the major schools of Western opinion, the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, between 1989 and 1991, represents a triumph of Western values, ideas, and institutions. If, for triumphal conservatives, the events of late 1989 encompassed an endorsement of “democratic capitalism” that augured “the end of history,” for liberal and social democrats they could be understood as the repudiation by the peoples of the former Soviet bloc of Marxism-Leninism in all its varieties, and the reemergence of a humanist socialism that was free of Bolshevik deformation. The structure of political and economic institutions appropriate to the transition from post-Communism in the Soviet bloc to genuine civil society was, accordingly, modeled on Western exemplars—the example of Anglo-American democratic capitalism, of Swedish social democracy, or of the German social market economy— or on various modish Western academic conceptions, long abandoned in the Soviet and post-Soviet worlds, such as market socialism. No prominent school of thought in the West doubted that the dissolution of Communist power was part of a process of Westernization in which contemporary Western ideas and institutions could and would successfully be exported to the former Communist societies. None questioned the idea that, somewhere in the repertoire of Western theory and practice, there was a model for conducting the transition from the bankrupt institutions of socialist central planning, incorporated into the structure of a totalitarian state, to market institutions and a liberal democratic state. Least of all did anyone question the desirability, or the possibility, of reconstituting economic and political institutions on Western models, in most parts of the former Soviet bloc.