Setting The Stage For The Next Century

As humans, we make choices. With change as a constant, we are continually presented with a number of choices, and we must choose. The change represented by the divergence of humanity from the rest of the world is rapidly growing, and in need of transformation. Setting the Stage for Sustainable Community Development is a guide for that transformation, which can help to create a sense of "place" where it did not previously exist. This invaluable text looks at resolving environmental conflicts through a "transformative" rather than a "problem-solving" approach. The transformative approach emphasizes the capacity of facilitation for personal growth. The text analyzes good and bad institutionalized social patterns in an ecological sense. The authors believe that through positive thinking and the willingness to take risks, we can become creative forces in our communities and in the world.

This volume considers the submissions to the 6th International IFIP-TC 9/WG 9.1 Conference on Women, Work and Computerization WWC 97. The conference provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, practitioners and users in the field of information technology. In this book the authors discuss how different areas of society are being transformed by computer technology, but with particular emphasis on changes in women's work and life and how these have come about. Such transformations include the transitions from women's traditional work to work based on modern technology; from communicating within personal communities to communicating within virtual communities; from traditional job gendering to new perspectives on "who does what".

Since the 1990s, Canadian policy prescriptions for immigration, multiculturalism, and employment equity have equated globalization with global markets. This interpretation has transformed men and women of various ethnic backgrounds into trade-enhancing commodities who must justify their skills and talents in the language of business. This particular neo-liberal reading of globalization and public policy has resulted in a trend the authors call selling diversity. Using gender, race/ethnicity, and class lenses to frame their analysis, the authors review Canadian immigration, multiculturalism, and employment equity policies, including their different historical origins, to illustrate how a preference for selling diversity has emerged in the last decade. In the process they suggest that a commitment to enhance justice in a diverse society and world has been muted. Yet, neo-liberalism is not the only or inevitable option in this era of globalization, and Canadians are engaging in transnational struggles for rights and equality and thereby increasing the interconnectedness between peoples across the globe. Consequently, the emphasis on selling diversity might be challenged.

Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young believe that this reveals a shift in the United States and Canada to a worldview based on ideological feminism, which presents all issues from the point of view of women and, in the process, explicitly or implicitly attacks men as a class. They argue that ideological feminism is silently reshaping law, public policy, education, and journalism.

Traditional definitions of public policy in Canada have been challenged in recent years by globalization, the transition to a knowledge-based economy, and the rise of new technologies. Critical Policy Studies describes how new policy problems such as border screening and global warming have been catapulted onto the agenda in the neo-liberal era. The book also surveys the recent evolution of critical approaches to policy studies, which have transformed decades-old issues. Contributors conceptualize the ways in which public policy questions cut across the traditional fields of policy. They cover both topical approaches such as Foucauldian and post-empiricist analysis and new applications of established perspectives, such as political economy. Conventional methodologies reveal new connotations when used to explore such topics as security issues, Canadian sovereignty, welfare reform, environmental protocol, Aboriginal policy, and reproductive technologies. Critical Policy Studies provides an alternative to existing approaches to policy studies, and will be welcomed by scholars, students, and practitioners of political science and public policy.

Canada, along with all United Nations member countries, was called upon to formulate a national plan to advance the situation of women, both within its own borders and globally. This document is Canada's response to that request and its contribution toward the goals of the global Platform for Action to be adopted at the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, in September 1995.