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As the global economy becomes more integrated, incorporating international experiences into college curricula becomes increasingly desirable for American students and their counterparts abroad. This paper describes one model for creating an international, Web-based, distance-learning classroom that can be used as a guide for those who might wish to pursue similar endeavors. Our replicated experiences teaching a sociology course on social control, twice under slightly different conditions, provide the basis for identifying the conditions and practices that optimize the goals of providing a forum for international education and enhancing reading and writing skills. A content analysis of the online Student-Led Discussions provides evidence that cross-national knowledge and understanding can be enhanced in this learning environment. Enrolling students from the United States, Belarus, Russia, and Australia, our course demonstrates how instructors can create a successful virtual classroom that truly encircles the globe.

Should deep seabed mining (DSM) stop or proceed? The international community is now facing a difficult choice. No matter what decision is made, environmental consideration is the core of the issue. This book tackles the compelling question of how to secure the marine environmental protection in DSM from an international law perspective. It deals with two major research questions: What are the international environmental requirements of participants - the contractor, the sponsoring State and the International Seabed Authority (ISA)? What are the legal consequences for them when environmental damage occurs? In doing so, it analyses the international DSM legal regime and general international environmental principles, observes the functioning of the ISA, and draws on law and practice of various environmental treaty mechanisms. The examination reveals the potential practical difficulties as well as fundamental obstacles in the application of international environmental rules and principles in the specific context of DSM.

The management of safety culture in international and culturally diverse organizations is a concern for many high‐risk industries. Yet, research has primarily developed models of safety culture within Western countries, and there is a need to extend investigations of safety culture to global environments. We examined (i) whether safety culture can be reliably measured within a single industry operating across different cultural environments, and (ii) if there is an association between safety culture and national culture. The psychometric properties of a safety culture model developed for the air traffic management (ATM) industry were examined in 17 European countries from four culturally distinct regions of Europe (North, East, South, West). Participants were ATM operational staff (n = 5,176) and management staff (n = 1,230). Through employing multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, good psychometric properties of the model were established. This demonstrates, for the first time, that when safety culture models are tailored to a specific industry, they can operate consistently across national boundaries and occupational groups. Additionally, safety culture scores at both regional and national levels were associated with country‐level data on Hofstede's five national culture dimensions (collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long‐term orientation). MANOVAs indicated safety culture to be most positive in Northern Europe, less so in Western and Eastern Europe, and least positive in Southern Europe. This indicates that national cultural traits may influence the development of organizational safety culture, with significant implications for safety culture theory and practice.

As the capital of Vietnam, Hanoi boasts itself of a rich culture, historical and traditional values that draw attention of many foreigners. There are enormous potentials for the tourism development, but the city still cannot attract as many tourists as expected due to the monotonous tourism services and products. Thus, the study was conducted to explore the relationship between the international tourists" initial expectations and their perceptions to examine their (dis-)satisfaction level with the current tourism destination attributes in Hanoi. By using the utility of mixed-method design as a data collection, the study contemporaneously analyzed both quantitative and qualitative data. In the quantitative research, the survey questionnaire was investigated the opinions and feedback from 246 foreign tourists who visited Hanoi in summer, 2012. The HOLSAT model was applied as a valuable tool to elaborate the (dis-)satisfaction of tourists at the destination. Additionally, it has been inspired by the face-to-face interview with seven tour operators to gain insights into the problems and contribution of their current business toward Hanoi tourism and international tourists to the city. Further, the research proposes some suggestions to improve the positive image of the city as an attracting tourist destination. These suggestions aim to improve the visitors" satisfaction and their willingness to revisit. Finally, the thesis would provide useful insights to local government and tour operators in better planning and managing tourism activities to maximize both visitors" satisfaction and profitability of tourism enterprises, and at the same time sustain natural resources in the long term.

Regions—geopolitical spaces based on various definitions—have been judged as important for explanations about international politics. Area specialists devote their professional lives to the study of one or, perhaps, two regions. Quantitative international relations scholars use regional controls in empirical models of conflictual or cooperative relations, and they typically find that regions matter, at least statistically. Most states conduct much of their political relationships1 within regions rather than globally (Acharya 2007; Hurrell 2007). At a very minimum, geopolitical context constitutes a strong conditioning effect on how they conduct their external (and often internal) affairs. Yet rarely are explanations of interstate relations embedded in a comparative regional perspective,2 using region as either the primary level or unit of analysis. This is due to a variety of definitional, conceptual, theoretical, and empirical issues that have retarded development of systematic, comparative, and rigorous inquiry at the regional level. Our intention here is not to address those problems fully, nor to resolve them. Instead, we wish to offer a view of the more recent quantitative literature, suggest some trends, and offer a theoretical framework that may be useful to the development of more comparative regional analysis. We take on these tasks in the context of three puzzles of interest concerning international relations. First, what accounts for variation in intraregional cooperative relationships between states? Some regions contain cooperative relationships and institutionalized cooperative relations that are far more extensive than others; additionally, regions also go through cycles of greater or lesser cooperation. Do state level and dyadic findings explain these differences, or, do regional dynamics exist that may provide additional insights? Second, regions vary in terms of the extent of conflict between their members. Can regional dynamics help explain variation in conflicts across regions and across time within regions? Third, we are interested in the literature on diffusion processes, including both conditions that may accelerate diffusion processes and emerging work on firewalls that may retard the diffusion of phenomena, including conflicts and cooperation (Solingen 2012). In particular, we wish to probe the extent to which regions vary in creating such firewalls and their relative effectiveness.