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This chapter examines the impact of social diversity on state development across the Asia-Pacific region. It argues that variation in ethnic structure both between and within states helps to explain some of the distinctive features of political and economic development across the region. However, these vary across different dimensions of governance. With regards to public policy, highly diverse societies almost inevitably face difficulties of government coordination and policy implementation due to competing ethnoregional demands. On the other hand, in certain situations such diversity may also assist democratic continuity by necessitating cross-ethnic power-sharing and making challenges to the existing order difficult to organize and sustain.

Despite their acknowledged importance, parties have traditionally been viewed as social phenomena beyond the scope of deliberate institutional engineering. In recent years, however, political reformers in a diverse array of Asian and Pacific states including Thailand, Indonesia, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea have tried to shape the development of their party systems by strengthening party organizations, promoting cross-regional party structures, countering the rise of ethnic parties, and generally encouraging the growth of cohesive party organizations. While not yet the subject of much attention, these political experiments are likely to have important consequences for governance in the region. This chapter examines these various attempts across the Asia-Pacific to engineer the development of political parties and party systems.

This chapter examines differences that make a difference among people when they negotiate institutions and practices for palliative and end of life care. This has particular resonance given that there is now increasing recognition of how multiple and simultaneous disadvantages can influence palliative care needs and end of life experiences. It offers an understanding of the current controversies with the language of understanding diversity in society. The chapter then explores the experiences of advanced disease among Black and Asian minority ethnic communities and related contributory factors. Finally, it offers a case study of a hospice based in an area characterized by social and cultural diversity, which has attempted to address issues of accessibility and acceptability of its services for the many communities it serves.

This chapter demonstrates the organizers' efforts to persuade their socially diverse youth volunteers to bond quickly, easily, and comfortably. Such efforts are based on the hope that the act of sharing their personal tastes, habits, and desires would help build stronger bonds, but the only desires that these youths have claimed to share were for pizza and blue jeans. Paradoxically, these exercises show the participants just how uncomfortable people of diverse, unequal backgrounds feel when they are thrown together. This chapter thus reveals an important sociological lesson in just how deep social divisions go. Though it is an important lesson in and of itself, it is not what the programs had aimed to teach.

There are features that distinguish most early Christian manuscripts of literary texts from pagan high-quality literary manuscripts of the time, e.g. the Christian preference for the codex (especially for texts functioning as scripture), greater use of punctuation and spacing to mark off sense-units, wider spacing between lines, these and other features apparently intended to facilitate the reading of these Christian texts. Taking a cue from an article by William Johnson in which he proposed that the more severe appearance of pagan literary manuscripts reflects the elite social circles in which they were read, this chapter proposes that the features of early Christian manuscripts also reflect the social characteristics of the Christian circles in which they were read. In sum, the earliest Christian manuscripts are artifacts reflecting the more diverse social make-up of early Christian circles and the aim of enfranchising a wider spectrum of readers.

This chapter examines recent empirical work and policy, and considers some aspects of current social and urban change that seem likely to lead to increasingly inequitable future outcomes. One major theme present in the chapter is that a growing identification of community sustainability with social diversity through public policy actions will be consistently undermined by social forces. These forces are related to social affinity and fear/security that is operating in a context of increasing social inequalities.

This chapter focuses on how normative beliefs—understood as socially shared values, perceptions, and expectations about social order—shape welfare attitudes. It distinguishes among four basic categories of beliefs about social order that are associated with welfare legitimacy: moral order measured by authoritarianism and social distrust, free market measured by perceived welfare dependency, social diversity measured by ethnocentrism, and structural inequality measured by egalitarianism. The discussion proposes an account of social psychological processes at work in the construction of welfare attitudes. The results demonstrate that such processes are not universal but rather are moderated by the institutional and normative contexts in which they are enacted.

This chapter deals with the issues surrounding abortion. It attempts to answer four questions that are key to contemporary debates surrounding abortion and reproduction. Should there be abortion on demand? Should there be abortion on demand? In this chapter, the ethics of abortion has not been reviewed in full but enough has been said, with sentience as a vital determinant of personhood, to propose that abortion on demand is a means of preserving the ‘pragmatic consensus’, especially if we decide that the upper time limit should be reduced. The author also puts emphasis on the right to choose, and that this should be contextualised carefully and systematically by an ethic that, except in the case of extreme harm and suffering, respects the right to be chosen and values the social diversity that differential abilities bring.

This chapter analyzes the epigraphy for evidence of social diversity within Palmyra and examines the extent to which Greek and Roman customs (juxtaposed with Parthian) influenced Palmyrene social development. It outlines the various categories of social organization and involvement in the life of the community, beginning with the Palmyrene family, and moving on to the roles of women, slaves, freedmen, and freedwomen, occupational groups, and, finally, ending with an analysis of voluntary associations and the prevalence of ritual dining. It also considers the nature of the power relations, specifically patronage and friendship, that governed personal and group interactions within the Palmyrene community.

The conclusion offers a proposal to move past argumentation to better define and operationalize the everyday neighborhood. The proposal includes the need for strong centers, internal and external connectivity that helps build a strong sense of neighborhood, support for both a plan and a process, self-determination strengthened by neighborhood identity, the promotion of social connection via the neighborhood’s functionality, support and enabling of social diversity in multiple ways, and mechanisms for governance. The proposal is motivated by the idea that the everyday neighborhood still has relevance for many urban dwellers. Unraveling the debates and offering a proposal for how entrenched issues might finally be resolved, it leverages what is known about neighborhoods after a century of argument in hopes of making them ultimately more real, relevant, and realistic.

This chapter reviews the final, and most significant, debate about the neighborhood: its association with social segregation. Many have argued that the delineation of neighborhood is by definition a form of exclusion, and that if neighborhoods weren’t identified in the first place, there would be less emphasis on social sorting and who is “in” and “out” of the neighborhood. There is no denying that the neighborhood, especially the planned neighborhood unit, was and is associated with segregation, sometimes explicitly. Proposed resolutions of this debate are (a) to make neighborhood-scale social diversity an explicit policy goal and (b) to look for ways to successfully integrate smaller, more homogeneous neighborhoods set within larger, heterogeneous districts. In both cases, it is again the physically defined neighborhood rather than the socially differentiated neighborhood that provides an identity through which diversity can be embraced.

This chapter examines the performance of the state with regard to the supply of some important public goods, such as internal security, education, and health. It finds the state to be seriously lagging behind the performance of the economy. One consequence of this performance of the state has been the resort by the public to the market for such goods. In the changed context of politics after the passing of the first generation of post-independence leadership, the factors of social diversity and political democracy as presently practised are also, regrettably, responsible for the lag in the state's performance. While the economic arena has seen considerable reform as part of economic liberalization, there has been little reform in the area of governance.

Orange County is a place that is widely known but largely misunderstood. Many see it as vastly different from other U.S. communities. In fact, Orange County has a lot in common with many other regions, though admittedly this was more true in the years leading up to the bankruptcy. By focusing on the facts surrounding Orange County, we can better understand why the fiscal crisis happened in this place and the reasons it can happen in other locales throughout the nation. Orange County, California, has a variety of images in the national media. It is best known as the home of Disneyland, the self-proclaimed “Happiest Place on Earth.” Conservative politics has a large role in the public's image of Orange County. This chapter looks at Orange County's rapid economic growth and social diversity, economic recession in the 1990s, middle class, fiscal conservatism and voter distrust, the weak structure of local government, similarities with other county governments, local governments, and local focus and regional apathy.

The present chapter provides an understanding of the process of identity construction in a pluralistic society, its contestation, and its implications for intergroup harmony. Identity construction does not occur in a vacuum; there are personal and social factors that play a major role. The process of identity construction may involve negotiations and at times contestations, which provide a context wherein personal and social identities can be understood. The chapter discusses the nature, antecedents, and challenges in identity construction and attempts to delineate how multiple identities can coexist and augur for a harmonious society. The understanding of pluralities of human identity is important for harmony. With multiple identities, the scope for sharing common ground increases and the boundaries between groups become more porous. It is the sharing of spaces between groups that offer an opportunity for intergroup harmony today.

This chapter provides a reflexive discussion about the ethnographic experience with Northshire police officers. It is explained that while all individual officers would have strict anonymity, to omit a disclosure from any final conclusions would be to overlook a central part of the research framework; namely to examine officers' feelings towards greater social diversity in the internal and external policing environment. The gender of the author may have presented initial problems with accessing the covert aspects of police life, but being a young female researcher in a male-dominated environment had its advantages. It also describes the recording and interpretation of the field.

In 1995, Geert Lovink started <nettime> with Pit Schultz. It expanded into many lists and languages and in the process demonstrated that English language and American-centric platforms do not have to be the lingua franca of the Internet. Lovink's contemporary work with the Institute of Network Cultures and its research networks, such as Unlike Us, has shaped a coalition that explores network architectures, the role of collective production, aesthetic tactics, and diverse, open information exchange. This introduction to the Epilogues focuses on his 2012 essay in e-flux -- “What Is the Social in Social Media?” -- asking three questions: Can you expand on what roles you envision for artists and writers in contemporary social media? How can we teach students to create in a difficult medium that so beautifully (and relentlessly) combines text, image, design, interactivity and collaboration? And how do you envision a social media of the future?

This chapter focuses on another historical source of gender change: a powerful wave of immigration into the United States. It begins by discussing the competing patterns of gender differentiation that immigrants brought and the ways in which immigration infused American gender culture with individual transformation and social diversity. The chapter also explores the challenges to gender orthodoxy, and how new immigrants met postmodernity and magnified the force of gender change.

This chapter reviews the debate over predetermination, that is, whether neighborhoods should and can be planned into existence. The planned neighborhood is the result of deliberative action, either through a physical plan or as a set of orchestrated actions, in contrast to spontaneous neighborhood formation. The emphasis here is on the contrast between planning for a specified end state and “neighborhood planning” as a process with no predetermined outcome, especially in physical terms. A common narrative is that top-down neighborhood planning has been harmful, for example when it was used to motivate wholesale destruction of existing neighborhoods in the urban renewal period. The resolution of this debate proposes merging the best of both worlds: neighborhoods that do not ignore the importance of bottom-up generation but are still open to the possibility of a planned physical ideal.