Students‘ perceptions of professional social work ethics and the need for the development of competence-based ethics standards in undergraduate training program in Vietnam

As a newly recognized profession in Vietnam over the last two decades social work has undergone significant development, both in training and practice. However, there are many challenges in its professionalization, in which ethics plays a key role. This article presents the key findings of a study about students‘ perceptions of ethics and developing competence-based ethical standards in social work programs. It first analyses the students‘ attitudes and understanding of professional ethics. Second, it clarifies the situation of ethics education in training institutions. Finally, it provides suggestions for the implementation of social work competence-based ethical standards for Vietnam and beyond.     

The right to fashion in the age of terrorism

As part of a feminist commitment to collaboration, this article appears as a companion essay to Mimi Thi Nguyen's "The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms" and offers a point of departure for thinking about fashion and beauty as processes that produce subjects recruited to, and aligned with, the national interests of the United States in the war on terror. The Muslim woman in the veil and her imagined opposite in the fashionably modern - and implicitly Western - woman become convenient metaphors for articulating geopolitical contests of power as a human rights concern, as a rescue mission, as a beautifying mandate. This article examines newer iterations of this opposition, in the wake of September 11, 2001, in order to demonstrate the critical resonance of a biopolitics on fashion and beauty. In "The Right to Fashion in the Age of Terrorism," the author examines the relationship between the U.S. war on terror, targeting persons whose sartorial choices are described as terrorist-looking and oppressive, and the right-to-fashion discourse, which promotes fashion's mass-market diffusion as a civil liberty. Looking at these multiple invocations of the democratization of fashion, this article argues that the right-to-fashion discourse colludes with the war on terror by fabricating a neoliberal consumer-citizen who is also a couture-citizen and whose right to fashion reasserts U.S.exceptionalism, which is secured by private property, social mobility, and individualism.     

“Susie Bubble is a Sign of The Times”

This essay takes as its point of critical departure the digital stardom of Susanna Lau, aka Susie Bubble, the most recognizable and respected fashion blogger in the world, in order to consider the historical formation of success in the postmillennial digital economy. By examining Lau as an embodied sign rather than an exceptional figure of success, I am concerned with the technical, cultural, and economic forces that give shape to hegemonic notions of success and the ideal subject it produces. More specifically, I hope to demonstrate the cultural frames that structure our ways of seeing and recognizing successful individuals in the post millennium by highlighting the gendered and racial construction of the ideal Web 2.0 subject. The aim of my discussion is to show that the discursive construction of Lau's success is reflective of emerging global patterns born out of the rising significance of Asians and young women (especially young Asian women) as consumers and producers in the digital economy.     

The globalization of production,national labour regulations and income inequality in the global North and South, 1980–2013

A central concern over global value chains (GVCs) is whether the integration of national firms into GVCs exacerbates income inequality within countries. However, despite decades of research, the distributional consequences of GVCs remain unclear in the empirical literature. Drawing on panel data from 96 countries between 1980 and 2013, we examine the effects of GVC integration on market income inequality and whether national labour regulations moderate these effects. We find integration increases inequality in the global North and South. More importantly, we find labour regulations amplify the inequality effects of integration in Southern countries by expanding the size of the informal sector while suppressing these effects in Northern countries by promoting unionization. This suggests institutional power from national labour regulations may enhance the bargaining power of labour in the North through increasing collective resources while disempowering labour in the South through reinforcing labour market segmentation between formal and informal sectors.