"This book examines rural-urban migration policies in China, and considers how Chinese workers cope with migration events in the context of these policies. It explores the contribution of migrant workers to the Chinese economy, the impact of changes within the 'hukou' system (household registration) and the impact of recent migration policies promoting rural-urban migration and targeting key events during migrant workers' migration trajectories - job-seeking, wage exploitation, work injuries and illness - namely the corresponding 'Skills Training Program for Migrant Workers', the 'Circular on Managing Wage Payment to Migrant Workers', the 'Circular on Migrant Workers Participating in Work-Related Injury Insurance', and the 'New Rural Medical Cooperative Scheme' (Health Insurance). Through in-depth interviews, it examines how when facing such challenges, migrant workers choose to either make a claim under existing policies, or use other coping strategies. The book notably proposes a typology of "coping" which includes a variety of administrative coping, political coping and social coping, and considers how workers in China harness the power of civil groups and social networks."--
In recent times, there have been two schools of thought on how to integrate traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine: "Huitong" and "Scientific". This debate not only involves the names of traditional Chinese medicine diseases, but also responds to the major issue of how to recognize the scientization of traditional Chinese medicine.
The modern community is an organically assembled system of people, organizations, and infrastructures, as well as patterned interdependences and interactions. Functioning of modern communities relies on the continuous production and distribution of the essential goods and services, accomplished by large-scale, man-made, networked systems, called infrastructures. Such infrastructures are termed critical if their incapacity or malfunction could have a devastating impact on the health, security, and social well-being of community inhabitants. As exemplified by many recent occurrences, critical infrastructure systems in diverse communities across the spectrum of wealth have not been sufficiently robust and have not recovered quickly enough after severe natural disasters, with long-lasting physical damage and technical failures causing significant hardships and economic losses. Against this backdrop, it is imperative to comprehensively investigate, understand and model the disaster resilience of critical community infrastructure systems. Among such critical infrastructure systems, the Electric Power Supply System (EPSS) stands at the core of a modern community. Among many natural hazards, the earthquake hazard stands out as potentially the most devastating and the most difficult to predict. Therefore, this thesis is focused on modeling and assessment of seismic resilience of EPSS and the community it serves. The study begins with a review and an examination of the merits and drawbacks of the resilience modeling and assessment of current civil infrastructure system seismic resilience modeling frameworks. An important common shortcoming is the focus solely on the supply capacity of the infrastructure systems. To overcome this shortcoming, a measure of EPSS-Community system functionality and seismic resilience is formulated by comparing the service supply provided by the EPSS to the Community and the service demand generate by the Community. The supply/demand approach to quantify the seismic resilience of an EPSS-Community system is demonstrated using a virtual EPSS-Community system. A direct measure of the seismic resilience of the EPSS-Community system, the gap between the electric power supply and demand, is proposed in this thesis. This measure is tracked from the time an earthquake occurs until the EPSS-Community system has recovered to yield instantaneous and cumulative measures of resilience. One such instantaneous seismic resilience measure, the percentage of people without power (PPwoP) at any time after an earthquake, can serve as a societal measure of EPSS-Community system systemic resilience. While the robustness of the EPSS-Community system is crucial for reducing the impact of an earthquake, the post-earthquake recovery process is critical to the seismic resilience of EPSS-Community system. This post-earthquake recovery process is case-specific, given their unique characteristics of EPSS and Community physical vulnerability, and dynamic, given the interactions among different infrastructure systems, community sectors, and the political and economic governance structures put in place after the disaster. An Agent-Based model is developed in this thesis to capture the unique dynamic characteristics of the EPSS-Community system seismic recovery process. Two individual agents, the EPSS Operator and the Administrator, are specified using a set of parameters to define their individual behavior and interactions. The effect of agent parameters and their interactions is identified in simulations of the seismic recovery process of a virtual EPSS-Community using the supply/demand approach. The post-earthquake restoration of a modern EPSS is contingent upon the post-earthquake serviceability of other critical infrastructure systems, in particular upon the serviceability of the transportation systems (TS) of the community. To investigate this interdependency among the community infrastructure systems, the virtual EPSS-Community system is expanded to include a transportation system, and a third agent, the TS Operator, is added to the model. The conducted case studies demonstrate that the interplay among different agents, as well as the interdependency between the civil infrastructure systems, determine the recovery path for the integrated EPSS-TS-Community system. The community resources available for post-earthquake recovery are finite. A network-theoretical model is used to gauge the impact of the quantity of the disposable repair resources and work crews on the seismic recovery for EPSS-TS system. The case study simulation results clearly indicate the rate of EPSS-TS system recovery is affected by the amount of available resources, but, importantly, that an optimal distribution of the available resources between the EPSS and the TS can significantly reduce the system recovery time and, thus, increase its seismic resilience. The presented scientific findings lay the foundation for a comprehensive and integrated resilience assessment on the EPSS-Community system based on the proposed agent-based network-theoretical supply/demand framework. Further work on generalizing the model by including all community infrastructure systems and refining their interactions in the model can be done using the proposed framework to investigate the interdependencies among the infrastructure systems and optimize community governance actions. Inclusion of dynamic models of community and infrastructure system post-disaster behavior, such as movement of the population, restructuring of the infrastructure and the effects on the production and consumption of goods and services, would make it possible to examine how disaster resilience of the integrated critical infrastructure systems shapes the long-term socio-economic development of the communities.
This book serves as a guide to strategic management accounting. It introduces new and useful concepts on how to collect, analyse, and evaluate options to enable managers to steer corporate directions and write strategic plans for the long-term success of the corporation. Starting with basic techniques and the latest strategic management approaches, the book then presents cases that show the techniques employed step by step. By demonstrating how easily the ideas can be translated into action, it is a valuable resource for business practitioners, as well as for students taking advanced management accounting courses.
Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.
Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.
AbstractDue to the rapid industrialization and urbanization ofChina, an estimated 252 million farmers have migrated from impoverished rural areas to prosperous urban regions, seeking off‐farm employment. InChina, these are referred to as migrant workers. Workers' compensation insurance law represents one of the most vital formal institutions forChinese migrant workers. Through in‐depth interviews with migrant workers and employers, the authors find that instead of making a formal claim based on workers' compensation insurance law, most injured migrant workers adopt informal channels (e.g. bargaining, negotiation, threats, violence) to receive compensation from employers. Even when migrant workers are insured in accordance with the law, they may be denied legal insurance compensation and thus turn to informal private settlement. Generally, the amount of compensation acquired by means of informal private settlement is significantly smaller than that awarded in the case of legal insurance compensation. This practice reveals that, like some other formal institutions inChina, workers' compensation insurance law is merely a symbolic ornament, window‐dressing for the public, which are referred to as 'ornamental institutions'. In the way they are designed, set up and funded, these ornamental institutions can easily prove illusory since they conceal an anarchic world wherein diverse informal channels of social actors emerge, which reflect the reality ofChinese society. Therefore, only through deep empirical research, like this study, can one see beyond the facade of modernity in contemporaryChina, observe the reality of social actors, and reflect upon the functioning of ornamental institutions.
Human resource development and competency studies in China are at an early stage, which researchers in both China and the United States acknowledge. The human resource competency training and the scientific research on validating the competency standards that are or will be established by companies in China will advance basic skills of Chinese professionals in these areas and allow them to keep up with the rapid development of HR professionals in the global environment.
In 1999 the State Council of the People's Republic of China (PRC) introduced the Regulation on the Minimum Living Standard Scheme(MLSS, 低保 or dibao) for urban residents in China. Policy learning from different parts of the world significantly shaped the formation and expansion of the MLSS, and Chinese social policy researchers have drawn conclusions about the experiences of these multiple regions. Through expert interviews, we discovered that the Chinese social assistance scheme has been influenced by the US ideas of "social investment" and "workfare." Furthermore, the European values of "universal entitlement" and "social citizenship" have also been internalised by the Chinese actors behind the scheme. In addition, Hong Kong's social assistance scheme has inspired Chinese policymakers to explore a model consisting of various categories that target the country's enormous special welfare needs. Thus, scholars and policymakers from China have used values and ideas outside China to create a hybrid model of social assistance that is characterised by broad coverage, a low benefit level, and a highly provincial administrative structure. (JCCA/GIGA)
