Suchergebnisse

The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly changed our world. And through the preparation, rapid response, and early vigilance of the universities and the government in Singapore was admirable Richard Smith looks at the challenges still ahead.

In the beginning of the 1990s, Singapore's government identified the local production of global knowledge as field of action that shall assure sustainable future economic and social development. This focus appears plausible when looking at the factors of production that - besides knowledge - Singapore can offer. As a small country with less than 4m inhabitants, little land and labour is available. Consequently, the Singaporean government decided to focus on knowledge and money as the factors of production that are increasingly regarded as responsible for the creation of wealth by members of the international scientific community. Besides others, the management guru Peter F. Drucker expressed this belief in the economic strength of knowledge by stating: 'the central wealth-creating activities will be neither the allocation of capital to productive uses, not 'labour'. Value is now created by 'productivity' and 'innovation' both applications of knowledge to work' (Drucker, 1994: 8). This paper attempts to outline this push towards knowledge production and the positioning of Singapore as a knowledge hub in the Straits of Malacca initiated by the Singaporean government. The paper is divided into, first, grasping the dominant definitions of knowledge in Singapore and second, redrawing the government activities towards increased knowledge production, which is hoped to ensure long-term economic stability and growth.

Research on new media such as blogs examines users' motivations and gratifications, and how individuals and organizations use them for political participation. In Singapore, political blogs have attracted much public scrutiny due to the bloggers' online and offline challenges of official discourse. While previous research has established the political significance of these blogs, extant scholarship is limited to blogs written in the English language. Little is known about blogs maintained by the Chinese community, the largest ethnic group in multi-racial Singapore. This study is a first to examine this community and the space they inhabit online. Through web crawling, we identified 201 Chinese-language blogs and through content analysis, we analyzed if Chinese bloggers contributed to public debates and used their blogs for civic engagement. Their content, motivations for blogging in the language, hyperlinking practices and use of badges indicated that Chinese bloggers in Singapore do not use blogs for political participation and mobilization, but are individualized and a-politicized. We discuss possible reasons and implications in this paper.

Singapore has emerged as one of the major importers of temporary workers in East Asia, particularly from Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand, and has developed policies to maximize the benefits of foreign labor while minimizing its social and economic costs. Government policies restrict unskilled foreign workers to approved sectors and prohibit settlement in Singapore. Illegal workers are subject to imprisonment and the controversial punishment of mandatory caning. On the other hand, policies toward highly qualified and professional workers are exceptionally liberal, with new rules designed to attract skilled people from Hong Kong. As regional labor flows grow, Singapore's dependence on skilled and unskilled foreign labor will go beyond the primacy of a domestic focus and lead to an increased emphasis on managing labor problems through skillful diplomacy and migrant protection.

Abstract This article explores the limits of central industrial planning through a case study of Singapore. While previous Austrian scholars have argued that successful industrial planning is impossible, and that its successes (if any) are limited to the resolution of technical problems, the positive economic record of Singapore under the auspices of its developmental state capitalism poses a strong challenge to these market-oriented perspectives. In response, I present a modest position. I concede that Singapore's industrial policy has to some extent contributed to genuine economic development but insist that its state-heavy approach has nonetheless hampered the market's entrepreneurial discovery by stifling local entrepreneurial talent and crowding out local small-medium enterprises. The top-down model has also limited the economy's adaptive potential. I draw from productivity, entrepreneurship, and innovation data to make my case and conclude that Singapore's experience with its developmental state model comes with a significant cost, notwithstanding its impressive achievements.

Early childhood research and policy are focusing increasingly on issues of 'quality' in early childhood education. Much of the focus, however, has been on adult-generated notions of quality, with little attention being devoted to children's own views of their experience in early childhood settings. Conducted in the context of early childhood education in Singapore, this research seeks to contribute children's own insights into their experience in two early childhood classrooms in Singapore. Informed by the sociology of childhood conceptualisation of child competence, the research methodology draws upon contemporary approaches to researching with children. The findings of this study were generated by beginning with the understanding that young children have the competence to articulate their ideas using a range of symbolic literacies. They formed views and constructed theories about their preschool experiences, in particular about teachers, and give a clear indication of what constitutes good quality in this domain. This study calls for those engaged with children, particularly teachers, to act upon the contributions offered by this group of children to the understanding of quality.

AbstractThe envisioning of Singapore as an inclusive society has witnessed the most progressive systemic and policy developments concerning people with disabilities in recent years. The building of "heartware" in society (as in the will, values, and attitudes of its citizens) in order to realize the vision of an inclusive society, however, requires both change from within and change from without. For the vision of an inclusive society to be realized, an inclusive system needs to be upheld and supported by people who are inclusive within. The seeds for the possibilities of change in society toward inclusivity of diverse others (e.g., persons with intellectual disabilities) lie within the individual and imply that at the core of such change is personal interior growth and transformation. The sustainable and successful transformation of Singapore in becoming an inclusive society, in addition to the external social and educational changes, depends on individuals who are willing to embrace interior change and personal transformation to become more inclusive of themselves and others.

Even as the government declares Asia - with China and India at the forefront - as a region of change and opportunities, the fear of becoming irrelevant ensures that Singapore will not relent in its drive to stay ahead of the regional economic competition. For instance, the search for new industrial winners, after the successful industrial programmes in electronics and the biomedical sciences, has begun resolutely with the formation of a high-powered ministerial committee to mould Singapore's research and development destiny. Restructuring in Singapore is a governing norm that is very much invoked as a policy necessity and a way of life in an uncertain world.

The full story of the Indians in Malaya has yet to be told. Here an attempt is made to assemble the information relating to some aspects of their settlement in Singapore over the last one hundred and fifty years.