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Sociology Department> Research > Ethnic and race relations

Ethnic and race relations

Introduction

Hawaii is a unique laboratory of ethnic and racial diversity, and the study of ethnic relations has historically been a strength of the department. Continuing interest and work with graduate and undergraduate students is focused on the sociology of Hawai`i, the study of race and ethnic groups in Hawai`i and race and ethnic groups and class relations in and around the Pacific Basin and in the United States. Recent research also emphasizes the globalization of economic processes as they impact on the labor force and ethnic relations.

Faculty and students continue to conduct research and publish research reports on Asian Americans from the U. S. Census, the role of ethnicity and gender in the arrested and confined youth and adult populations in Hawai`i, the influence of ethnicity and gender in matters of equity in pay and related personnel actions, and race, ethnic, and gender patterns in the admission profiles, and in persistence, and completion of studies in the university system and at Manoa. Our faculty and students have received cross-national, national, and local-institutional recognition for their work in these areas.

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Recent Projects

Sun-Ki Chai is working on a project called "Cultural Modeling of Decision-Making in Multinational Settings". The overall objective of the project is to design and to develop cultural difference models that can be used on a real-time basis in a multinational coalition environment. The multinational cultural difference model based application will aid the decision support process by providing recommendations and support that are appropriate for the culture of the decision makers and for other members of the coalition. The initial impetus for this research relates to the difficulty of coordinating multinational peacekeeping forces in places such as Kosovo and Bosnia, but extends to a large class of problems in business and government that arise as a result of globalization and increasing intercultural cooperation. Therefore, the present research will not be oriented towards particular types of coalition environments, but rather towards understanding general processes of cooperation within large multinational groups in a variety of settings. This research is being done jointly between the principal investigator, and 21st Century Systems, Inc. of Fairfax, VA, under a Small Business Innovation Grant funded through the Office of Naval Research. Another project he is working on attempts to look at ethnic identity in a dynamic fashion by predicting how ethnic identity will form and how the criteria for being admitted to a particular ethnic group will be affected by the surrounding social environment. One of the major endevours of sociological research on ethnicity in recent years has been to reveal the extent to which ethnic identity is not fixed by biology or ancient history, but rather actively constructed by groups of people via their collective experiences. Because of this, the boundaries of ethnic identity are always changing. Chai's project attempts to take this insight and turn it into theory that can predict ahead of time, based on social circumstances, what kind of ethnic groups will form and how the criteria for membership in existing groups will change in the future.