ES/J016772/1
An Experimental Study of East-West Differences
in Social Learning
Hong Kong Principal Investigator: Prof
Lei Chang (The Chinese University of Hong
Kong)
UK Principal Investigator: Dr Alex Mesoudi
Durham University
Social learning is defined as the acquisition
of knowledge and behaviour from other people,
in contrast to individual learning in which
problems are solved independently with no
social influence. Social learning is one
of the defining characteristics of our species,
whether we think of a prehistoric hunter
100,000 years ago on the plains of East
Africa copying how to make a simple stone
tool from an expert tool-maker, Isaac Newton
attributing his success to having "stood
on the shoulders of giants" (i.e. copied
and built on what went before), or the recent
"Arab Spring" uprisings where
civil unrest spread rapidly from region
to region via the internet. Whereas social
learning is common, it is contingent on
the environmental conditions with stable
environment promoting social learning and
changing environment promoting individual
learning. Historical and contemporary evidence
from multiple sources is reviewed that indicates
smaller extents of environmental variability
in East Asia including China than in Europe
and North America, favoring social learning
in the East and individual learning in the
West. Chang theorized that cultures result
from social learning and individual learning
as primary means to adapt to the local environment
and that East-West cultural differences
(e.g., independent vs. interdependent self-construal;
autonomy vs. harmony in values; hierarchical
vs. egalitarian relationship) result from
Asians being more social then individual
learners and Westerners adopting more individual
than social learning. The purpose of this
project is to empirically test this hypothesis
about East-West differences in using social
vs. individual learning. Specifically,
Objective 1: to conduct learning experiments
on both Western (British) and East Asian
(Hong Kong) participants, to test whether
the latter engage more frequently in social
learning than the former.
Objective 2: to test whether participants
respond to environmental change in the lab
task in the way predicted to have occurred
historically, i.e. social learning in constant
environments and individual learning in
changing environments.
Objective 3: to compare rural and urban
Chinese participants to see whether a history
of Western influence in Hong Kong, and/or
Western mass media exposure, have eroded
cross-cultural differences in learning style
in Hong Kong.
Objective 4: to test the learning style
of Chinese immigrants in the UK, to see
whether they retain the learning style of
their country of origin or whether they
shift to the UK learning style.
ES/J016799/1
How partner firms coordinate their environmental
management practices? Green supply chain
integration and its performance implication
Hong Kong Principal Investigator: Dr.
Christina Wing Yan Wong ((The Hong Kong
Polytechnic University)
UK Principal Investigator: Prof Chee Wong
(University of Nottingham)
In recent years many firms from developed
and developing countries have seriously
started to initiate green supply chain management
to achieve greater efficiency and reduce
environmental impacts of their supply chains.
To become greener, many firms have now realized
the need to collaborate or integrate with
their supply chain partners to implement
environmental management. Such efforts are
noted from the participation of more than
120 companies, including British Telecom
Group, Vospre Thornycroft Group Plc, Kraft
Foods, IKEA, Levi Strauss and Co., and others,
in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative,
where firms measure carbon emissions of
their product life cycle and supply chains.
In the management literature, there is a
paucity of knowledge about how firms may
effectively coordinate environmental management
across their supply chains, and most importantly,
how firms can achieve desirable environmental
performance throughout a supply chain without
compromising their operational performance.
Even though some recent studies indicate
that environmental collaboration (collaboration
with suppliers and customers in environmental
management) could lead to both better operational
and environmental performance, the effectiveness
of such a concept is yet to be thoroughly
proven and understood. This research elevates
the concept of environmental collaboration
to a novel concept called Green Supply Chain
Integration (GSCI), which is a more strategic
and integrative approach to achieving green
supply chain performance. The research plans
to identify the effective practices of Green
Supply Chain Integration that can simultaneously
improve operational and environmental performance
of firms from developing and developed countries
(Hong Kong, China, Thailand and UK). It
will reveal the complementary effects of
various Green Supply Chain Integration practices
and factors such as regulation, competitive
priority, supply chain structure which may
support or inhibit such efforts. This research
is importance because most supply chains
are globally fragmented and yet every firm
needs to simultaneously achieve superior
operational and environmental performance.
It is a timely research because the needs
to effectively coordinate environmental
practices in a global supply chain have
now been recognised but there is a lack
of insights into how breakthrough in operational
and environmental performance can be achieved.
ES/J017035/1
Reshaping Educational Practice for Improvement
in Hong Kong and England: How Schools Mediate
Government Reforms
Hong Kong Principal Investigator: Prof
Allan David Walker (The Hong Kong Institute
of Education)
UK Principal Investigator: Dr. Qing Gu (University
of Nottingham)
Raising standards of teaching and learning in schools is at the forefront of policy makers' minds internationally. The importance attached to learning outcomes is obvious in the substance of key educational reforms across societies and contexts. However, there is continuing uncertainty about how and to what extent schools implement these reforms and, most importantly, whether they really have a positive impact on student learning outcomes.
This project investigates whether government education reform policies make a real difference in schools, particularly to student outcomes, in Hong Kong and England. In order to build understanding we focus on three main areas - system policy, school leadership and the school community. The first area will detail and then compare systemic government reform models which seek to raise standards of pupil outcomes by changing teaching and learning, in school and classroom structures and cultures. This will involve an analysis of recent government reform documentation and interviews.
The second area focuses on the roles and qualities school leaders need to lead and manage change successfully. This will involve an examination of how school leaders at all levels mediate reforms to make them work in their school contexts. Information will be sought about the skills, knowledge and capacities they need to build and sustain a strategic and operational focus, on the leadership of learning and teaching. The third area looks at outcomes at the grassroots level. This will involve identifying the challenges school leaders, teachers and pupils face as they respond to systemic government reforms.
Drawing on existing and newly-collected data the project will compare and contrast the similarities and differences between schools both within and between Hong Kong and England. This comparative analysis will provide new insights into the nature of the leadership and management of change in educational practice. This will involve identifying similarities and differences in the social, cultural and societal values of the two countries as they reverse similar policy trajectories.
ES/J017264/1
The effects of social pedagogic contexts
in the teaching of primary mathematics:
facilitating learning in two cultures
Hong Kong Principal Investigator: Prof
Peter Kutnick (University of Hong Kong)
UK Principal Investigator: Dr. Linda Hargreaves
(University of Cambridge)
This bilateral UK-Hong Kong project responds to government concerns about the teaching of mathematics in English primary schools and the desire to increase the use of groupwork in primary classes in Hong Kong. It capitalises on Hong Kong's consistent top ranking in international mathematics competitions, and English teachers' greater familiarity and expertise in using groupwork strategies. In both countries, however, children's attitudes to mathematics have declined. Groupwork, applied according to social pedagogic principles, has been shown not only to foster effective learning, but also to sustain children's attitudes to school subjects. The proposal, thus, seeks to examine the effects of social pedagogy on mathematics teaching in two different cultural contexts taking account of teachers' different mathematical knowledge. The specific objectives are:
In this project, teachers will be trained in social pedagogy, which emphasises good communication and trusting relationships between children, and the adaptation of teaching strategies and classroom arrangements conducive to effective groupwork, as shown by the researchers' previous research (http://www.tlrp.org/proj/phase11/phase2a.html). The teachers will communicate across the two cultures using video conferencing. The project will run from July 2012 to December 2013.
ES/J017272/1
What Calculations and Strategies Drive
Young Migrants? An Investigation of the
Traffic between London, Hong Kong and
Beijing
Hong Kong Principal Investigator:
Dr. Wing-chung Ho (City University of
Hong Kong)
UK Principal Investigator: Prof Caroline
Knowles (Goldsmiths College)
This research will investigate an emerging migration circuit with important implications for the UK, China and its Special Administrative Region (SAR) Hong Kong. Central to the examination are the calculations, strategies and reasoning of young migrants. Born between 1982 and 1992 the migrants in this study will be between 20 and 30 years old in 2012. The young migrants covered in this study will be university graduates who have migrated independently and no longer in education: young people at the launch-point of their careers. We want to know who these young migrants are and why they migrate along these routes. We want to know what resources or attributes they anticipate migration provides, and how they intend deploying them. And we want to know the thinking behind their journeys - do they compare departure and arrival cities and if so how? In short, we want to know how mobility plays-out in how young migrants think about themselves and their lives. In each city we will investigate young migrants from the other two cities. Though the use of mixed-methods - including street surveys and in-depth interviews, we expect to uncover new links between biography, geography and mobility and thus make an important theoretical contribution to migration studies. We expect to uncover new empirical data as no one has investigated this group of migrants or the routes they travel.
ES/J017299/1
The Professionalization of Human Resource
Management in Hong Kong and the United
Kingdom
Hong Kong Principal Investigator:
Dr. Paul Higgins (City University of Hong
Kong)
UK Principal Investigator: Dr. Ian Roper
(Middlesex University)
The aim of this research project is to
contribute to theory and practice by investigating
the professional standing of Human Resource
Management (HRM) practitioners in Hong
Kong and the United Kingdom. Designed
to facilitate greater understanding of
the nature of 'managerial professionalism'
within the field of sociology the value
of this bilateral collaboration is tied
to the cross-national nature of the project
and in particular its exploration of the
homogeneity of 'next generation' HRM practices.
Built around an innovative four-stage
combined quantitative and qualitative
research framework the research aims to:
- Theoretically ground the basis of study
in the context of the debate on HRM as
being a form of 'managerial professionalism'
- Evaluate the normative content and organizational
influence of HR practitioners in each
economy
- Critically review the extent to which
homogeneity of practice of HR associations
might be observed across different national
contexts
- Evaluate the extent to which the aspirations
of the professional institutes match the
workplace experiences of HR practitioners
- Compare and contrast the criteria for
professional practice in each economy,
including reference to codes of ethics,
standards documentation and certification
systems
ES/J021113/1
Cultural and Individual Influences on
Parenting During Infancy
Hong Kong Principal Investigator:
Prof Terry Kit-fong Au (The University
of Hong Kong)
UK Principal Investigator: Dr. Merideth
Gattis (Cardiff University)
To evaluate how parenting affects early child development, valid measures of parenting principles and practices are crucial research tools. Two potentially important dimensions are: structure and attunement. Structure refers to reliance on routines and schedules, and attunement refers to reliance on the infant's cues. Structure and attunement are often presented as opposites, contrasting parents who follow strict routines (schedulers) with parents who are infant-led (huggers). Recent research indicates, however, that although structure and attunement are weakly related, they each make a distinct contribution to parenting. Earlier research conducted by Winstanley and Gattis (2011) discovered that some parents were high in structure and low in attunement, while others were high in attunement and low in structure, but importantly, some parents were high in both structure and attunement, and other parents were low in both structure and attunement. To see how well these two dimensions characterize parenting for infants, it is important to develop valid measures cross-culturally. The proposed research will evaluate a new measure - the Baby Care Questionnaire (BCQ) originally developed by Winstanley and Gattis (2011) - in the UK, Hong Kong, and Mainland China.
We propose a series of three studies to address the need for an economical and culturally valid measure of parenting during infancy. In these studies we will develop and evaluate a Chinese version of the BCQ, and use it to investigate cultural and individual influences on parenting during infancy. A cross-culturally valid parent-report measure of parenting principles and practices, when validated with labor-intensive observations, will be extremely cost-effective as a research tool for future studies. Once developed, this instrument could be used for a wide range of studies investigating other theoretical and practical questions concerning the influences of parenting during infancy on child health and development.
ES/J021180/1
Theory of mind development and use in
children from Hong Kong and the UK - A
latent variable study
Hong Kong Principal Investigator:
Dr. Zhenlin Wang (The Hong Kong Institute
of Education)
UK Principal Investigator: Dr. Claire
Hughes (University of Cambridge)
Acquiring a theory of mind (i.e., recognizing that human behaviour is governed by mental states such as beliefs and desires) enables young children to understand and engage in a wide range of sophisticated social interactions, including lies, jokes and shared pretend play. The litmus test for having a theory of mind has, for many years, been success on tasks involving predicting or explaining mistaken beliefs. In the West, children typically begin to pass such tasks between their 3rd and 5th birthdays. Yet findings from a recent meta-analysis suggest that Chinese preschoolers pass false belief tasks up to 2 years later, with children in Hong Kong performing even more poorly than their peers in mainland China. These findings have led to concerns that the intensely academic focus adopted by Hong Kong preschools may be constraining children's sociocognitive development. However, before seeking explanations for this striking cross-cultural contrast, at least two sets of methodological issues need to be addressed.
First, very few studies have used carefully matched samples or applied statistical tests to establish whether contrasts simply reflect inappropriate translations or differing response styles/social norms. In addition, such studies rarely include direct measures of the environment (e.g., parental practices and expectations), even though these are needed to explain WHY there are group contrasts. Second, new task paradigms have shown that from as early as 15- to 18-months of age, children show looking and helping behaviours that appear to indicate false-belief awareness, such that failure on traditional false-belief tasks does not necessarily mean poor understanding of mind. To date, these novel paradigms have yet to be used in direct cross-cultural comparisons. Moreover, research with adults suggests that Chinese adults actually show superior use of 'theory of mind' skills, suggesting that any cultural contrasts observed in pre-schoolers are likely to be developmentally specific.
There is, therefore, a pressing need both to increase the methodological rigour of existing research and to integrate cultural and developmental perspectives. This proposal uses two psychometric studies to address these twin challenges. Study 1 extends the developmental scope of this research field by comparing theory of mind use in 10-year-old children from the UK and Hong Kong, using a task battery that includes a newly developed silent film task. Study 1 also includes a battery of other cognitive tests (e.g., tests of language ability and executive function) and multi-informant, multi-measure ratings of social competence. In this way, Study 1 will also shed light on the cultural universality/specificity of the correlates of variation in older children's understanding of mind. Study 2 also has twin aims. The first of these is to test competing theoretical accounts of why children's spontaneous behaviours (e.g., looking, helping) appear to indicate a rudimentary understanding of mind long before they respond correctly to traditional false-belief tasks. Next, the most robust paradigms will be administered to pre-schoolers in Hong Kong (matched with their UK peers for age and verbal ability) to investigate the nature, magnitude and origins of cultural contrasts in children's understanding of mind.