This study is an attempt to examine the major problems of economic development in Thailand. It attempts to analyze the important role of both non-economic and economic factors in the development of the country.

This thesis explores the everyday lives and dreams of young people living in urban poverty in Thailand, focusing on their practices and aspirations within three key spheres of action. In recent years, a number of emerging bodies of literature have taken youth in the developing world as the objects of their analysis; the literature on youth in Thailand, studies of youth and development within the Thai and international spheres, and the new anthropology of youth each focus on the lives of young people – social, cultural and economic – and see youth as active agents in the creation of society, culture and the economy. This thesis, drawing on the analysis of ethnographic data, contends that each of these bodies of literature constructs young people in partial or misleading ways, and in particular that insufficient emphasis is placed on the unintended consequences that can ensue from everyday practice and the pursuit of dreams. It argues that if these emerging literatures on youth in the developing world are to adequately conceptualise and represent young people, then they must attend to these unintended consequences. As the thesis will demonstrate, doing so facilitates analysis of the ways in which different spheres of action affect each other, of the structures that constrain and enable young people, and of the way in which attempting to participate in dominant cultures can have profoundly counter-productive outcomes. The thesis also explores some of the methodological processes involved in immersion in, and withdrawal from, „the field‟. It argues that one of the tasks of social research is to bring out the multiple and shifting nature of interpretation, and to be explicit about the contexts in which such interpretations are produced.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston University

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

Official Thai history gives the iconic role of King Chulalongkorn as the civiliser of which is the theme underpinning my study. This thesis aims to complicate this narrative by investigating the historical specificity of Chulalongkorn's visual representation operating with the mechanisms of westernisation. The study discusses how the King presented and represented his royal person and his regal power and how the King consequently changed and shaped Siam's visual and material culture at the turn of the century. Chulalongkorn's royal family portraits and grand architectural programme, as well as his European art collection recreated a new concept of Siamese kingship and the monarchy: this wide-ranging analysis traces the shift from a semidivine to a secular and modernised monarchy. This thesis argues that the westernisation programme was a process and product of transcultural exchange within the colonial encounters between Siam, the West and their colonies. Chulalongkorn's appropriation, adaptation and reinterpretation of Western art doubly transformed the monarchy and its kingdom into a modernising nation under the pressure of Western colonialism. This compelled Siam to become a crypto-colonial state of nation. Chulalongkorn's aspiration for westernised visual representation turned political loyalty into religious devotion in later years. Collective memory of Chulalongkorn was strongly embedded in the public's perception through the practice of remembrance, nostalgia and commemoration fed by the royalist narrative in official Thai history. This thesis also contributes to an ongoing dialogue on the relations between the monarchy, memory and national identity through an investigation of celebratory exhibitions of the Chakri Dynasty. The issues of visual representation and its impact addressed in this thesis are arguably as bound up with issues of national identity and national politics.

The Faculty Job Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction Scale developed by Olin R. Wood (1973) was employed in this study to determine what significant differences and level of faculty job satisfaction existed on each facet of job satisfaction and in overall job satisfaction among faculty members at non-metropolitan teachers colleges in central Thailand. The results of this study were compared with the findings of Vatthaisong (1982) in a similar study of faculty members at teachers colleges in northeast Thailand. The instrument consists of two parts: the first part includes seven demographic items, and the second part has 68 items and uses a six-point rating scale for ten facets of job satisfaction, including one-single item of overall satisfaction. A sample of 288 faculty members at non-metropolitan teachers colleges in central Thailand was randomly selected. A total of 253 faculty members or 87.85 percent of the sample participated in this study. Frequencies, percentages, means, one-way ANOVA, and two-way ANOVA were used for analyses. The level of significance was set at .05. The Scheffe method for post hoc comparison was adopted following one-way ANOVA.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This study was designed to investigate the current practice of continuing professional education in the library science departments of teachers colleges and universities in Thailand and the role of the library science department in continuing professional education for librarians. In order to accomplish this task, two questionnaires were developed and administered to 236 chairpersons and library school faculty of 31 tecahers colleges and 9 government universities. Of the returned questionnaires, 72.88% were usable. Data were analyzed using percentage and a contingency chi-square test. The major conclusion of the study was that while the library science departments of teachers college and universities in Thailand provide to some extent, all 20 continuing education items of the Association for Library and Information Science Education model, only two were identified as being provided by more than a majority of institutions.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Education. / The majority of the world’s learners and teachers of English are located in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts such as Thailand, but related academia, teacher training and textbooks remain for the most part located in English-speaking countries of the Centre. Key assumptions of the latter have been that students wish to enter into the target culture and to work towards native speaker competence; classrooms have consequently reified the native speaking teacher and excluded students’ first language. But in fact, for most EFL contexts such as Thailand, neither those goals nor their associated methods are relevant. This study takes as fundamental to the Thai EFL context the presence of a first language shared by teacher and students, and explores how Thai teachers’ use of both L1 and L2 creates a distinctive bilingual pedagogy. The research takes an ethnographic approach which comprises the observation of ten English classes at a provincial Thai university and interviews with nine teachers on site. The framework for analysis is grounded in systemic-functional linguistics, and integrates this theory of ‘language in use’ with a socio-cultural theory of mind, elements of SLA, and trans-disciplinary perspectives. The study thus seeks to engage with Thai teachers’ voices both as they are heard in the classroom and in dialogue with the researcher. To date, there exist in English no published studies of Thai EFL which have conducted this kind of enquiry. The study produces new ways of describing Thai EFL classrooms. It discusses how L1 contributes to students’ capacity to ‘make meaning’ in L2; how L2 constructs different possibilities of speaker ‘performance’ as well as of speaker ‘reticence’; and how bilingual teachers deal with textbooks which appear exclusively in L1. The study demonstrates that Thai EFL is quite distinct from the ESL domain in which it is usually subsumed, and that on the contrary, it is strongly affiliated with Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) in almost every feature of curriculum, methodology, student participation and teacher bilinguality.

It is observed through out the world that the financial crisis took Asian countries by storm. Living conditions in my homeland, Thailand, dropped dramatically. Income decreased, the prices of essential goods increased, the stock market collapsed, loans turned to bad debts, businesses closed down while the prices of imported goods skyrocketed. The situation made the Thai people aware of the economic problems. This Thesis explores the cause of the crisis such as the central bank and the currency speculation, the poor use of foreign loans and the bubble in both the economy and the stock market. We will look deeply into the currency exchange system for its strong and weak points, over spending in every sector of the economy especially the real estate sector. We will investigate why the interest rate was so high in Thai financial markets. Econometrics is used to analyse the data in this thesis. From the analysis we will see that the Thai economy is moving towards a recession by itself, lacking any key institution to repair it. It can be seen in hindsight that these problems could have easily been corrected and Thailand could have well avoided the recession. Now the crisis is over, Thailand is in a period of economic reconstruction and, hopefully, the monetary crisis will not recur in Thailand. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)