The information and risk society poses a new challenge for the law in all its fragments. Modern media communication and technologies increase people’s prosperity while stating new risks with not uncommonly devastating crisis-potential: The banking crisis, the safety net for the euro zone and the nuclear incident in Fukushima are only the latest forms of those specific modern common dangers wh…
The objective of this report is to examine the extent to which countries in Latin America and the Caribbean participate in global value chains and what are the drivers of such participation. Production processes have been increasingly fragmented worldwide. For example, the production of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner involves 43 suppliers located in 135 locations around the globe. There are many ex…
This book is open access under a CC BY license. This edited collection focuses on theories, language and migration in relation to multiculturalism in Japan and the Asia-Pacific. Each chapter aims to provide alternative understandings to current conflicts that have arisen due to immigration and policies related to education, politics, language, work, citizenship and identity.
This book presents theories and case studies for corporations in developed nations, including Japan, for designing strategies to maximize opportunities and minimize threats in business expansion into developing nations. The case studies featured here focus on Asia, including China and India, and use examples of Japanese manufacturers. Five case studies are provided, including Hitachi Construct…
This book discusses the common principles of morality and ethics derived from divinely endowed intuitive reason through the creation of al-fitr' a (nature) and human intellect (al-‘aql). Biomedical topics are presented and ethical issues related to topics such as genetic testing, assisted reproduction and organ transplantation are discussed. Whereas these natural sources are God’s specia…
This Open Access book offers a novel view on the benefits of a lasting variation between the member states in the EU. In order to bring together thirty very different European states and their citizens, the EU will have to offer more scope for variation. Unlike the existing differentiation by means of opt-outs and deviations, variation is not a concession intended to resolve impasses in negotia…
This open access book utilizes new data to thoroughly analyze the main factors currently shaping the African housing market. Some of these factors include the supply and demand for housing finance, land tenure security issues, construction cost conundrum, infrastructure provision, and low-cost housing alternatives. Through detailed analysis, the authors investigate the political economy surroun…
This open access book explores common critiques in the literature of hybrid peacebuilding, especially the lack of connection between hybridity in theory and practice. Through using a complexity-informed framework, the foundation for introducing the mid-space actor typology is established. Mid-space actors as insider-partial mediators are perceived to be vital agents for peace processes in confl…
In Cultures in Collision and Conversation, David Berger addresses three broad themes in Jewish intellectual history: Jewish approaches to cultures external to Judaism and the controversies triggered by this issue in medieval and modern times; the impact of Christian challenges and differing philosophical orientations on Jewish interpretation of the Bible; and Messianic visions, movements, and d…
In Hindu Pluralism, Elaine M. Fisher complicates the traditional scholarly narrative of the unification of Hinduism. By calling into question the colonial categories implicit in the term “sectarianism,” Fisher’s work excavates the pluralistic textures of precolonial Hinduism in the centuries prior to British intervention. Drawing on previously unpublished sources in Sanskrit, Tamil, and T…
This is an Open Access book. How can we make work better? It is an important question, one that the Dutch government, employers’ organizations and trade unions have been grappling with. People work to make money. But work also inspires self-respect, shapes our identity and gives us a sense of belonging – especially when the work we do is good. Good work is essential to prosperity in the bro…
Relationship management (RM) is an essential part of business, but its success as a business model can be hard to measure, with some firms embracing a model that is truly relationship-orientated, while others claim to be relationship-orientated but in fact prefer transactional short-term gain. This open access book aims to develop a mid-range theory of relationship management, examining truly…
This open access book presents religious literacy as the main explanatory factor when dealing with certain ethnic groups that attract stereotypes which gloss over other personal factors such as age, class, gender and cultural differences. It discusses freedom of religion, and the Christian revival movement. It examines religious literacy and religious diversity in multi-faith schools. It looks …
This open access book follows the idea that security policy must be based on strategic analysis. Defence policy and the role of the armed forces can subsequently be determined on the grounds of said analysis. More than ever, internal and external security, and developments both in the Netherlands and abroad are interconnected. The world order is shifting, the cooperation within NATO and the EU …
What can we learn from a teacher's journal about working with challenging youth? Why does the Training Room Program in German schools impede the development of an empowering learning culture? What experiences transpire during a train trip to the sea with an unruly crew of school boys? Or: what happens when children plan a trip on their own? Anyone who has accumulated experiences in teaching fac…
This is a philosophical work that develops a general theory of ontological objects and object-relations. It does this by examining concepts as acquired dispositions, and then focuses on perhaps the most important of these: the concept of learning. This concept is important because everything that we know and do in the world is predicated on a prior act of learning. A concept can have many meani…
The region of the Middle East has been called the cradle of mankind. This volume studies historical, cultural, religious, social and political legacies, which play a central role in obstructing intercultural dialogue in the Middle East. The region became home to numerous cultures, religions and ethnicities with long experience of living together in a multicultural environment and has an immense…
This book is aimed at improving contemporary educational practice by rooting it in clear analytical thinking. The book utilizes the analytic approach to philosophy of education to elucidate the meaning of the terms “education,” “moral education,” “indoctrination,” “contemporary American Jewish education,’’“informal Jewish education,” “the Israel experience,” and “Isr…
In a time when conservative politicians challenge the irrefutability of scientific findings such as climate change, it is more important than ever to understand the conflict at the heart of the “religion vs. science” debates unfolding in the public sphere. In this groundbreaking work, John H. Evans reveals that, with a few limited exceptions, even the most conservative religious Americans a…
This book offers a new perspective on the connected histories of Spain, China, and Japan as they emerged and developed following Manila’s foundation as the capital of the Spanish Philippines in 1571. Examining a wealth of multilingual primary sources, Birgit Tremml-Werner shows that crosscultural encounters not only shaped Manila’s development as a “Eurasian” port city, but also had pro…
How does language work? How does language produce truth and beauty? Eleventh-century Arabic scholarship has detailed answers to these universal questions. Language Between God and the Poets reads the theory of four major scholars and asks how the conceptual vocabulary they shared enabled them to create theory in lexicography, theology, logic, and poetics. Their ideas engaged God and poetry at t…
The multidisciplinary anthology Religious Fundamentalism in the Age of Pandemic provides deep insights concerning the current impact of Covid-19 on various religious groups and believers around the world. Based on contributions of well-known scholars in the field of Religious Fundamentalism, the contributors offer about a window into the origins of religious fundamentalism and the development o…
We thank Ekman & Co AB and Gadelius Holding Ltd for their kind and generous support, making this research available online for free. Lottaz and Ottosson explore the intricate relationship between neutral Sweden and Imperial Japan during the latter’s 15 years of warfare in Asia and in the Pacific. While Sweden’s relationship with European Axis powers took place under the premise of existenti…
A Table for One explores the links between female singlehood and social time, juxtaposing two theoretical fields that are rarely linked: the social study of time and the study of singlehood. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this book paves the way for a new theorisation of singlehood which will put it at the fore of deconstructive critical thinking and on the feminist agenda. Although…
This open access book sets out to explain the reasons for the gap between “knowing” and “doing” in view of self-reliance, which is more and more often expected of citizens. In today’s society, people are expected to take responsibility for their own lives and be self-reliant. This is no easy feat. They must be on constant high alert in areas of life such as health, work and personal f…
This open access book seeks to foster a multidisciplinary understanding of the ties between faith, financial intermediation, and economic progress by drawing on research across economics, finance, history, philosophy, ethics, theology, public policy, law, and other disciplines. Chapters in this edited volume examine themes as consequential as economic opportunities, real world outcomes and fait…
Borders have been drawn since the beginning of time, but in recent years artificial barriers have become increasingly significant to the political conversation across the world. Donald Trump was elected President of the United States while promising to build a wall on the Mexico border, and in Europe, the international movements of migrants and refugees have sparked fierce discussion about whet…
In these powerful and stylishly written essays, Maria Manuel Lisboa dissects the work of Paula Rego, the Portuguese-born artist considered one of the greatest artists of modern times. Focusing primarily on Rego’s work since the 1980s, Lisboa explores the complex relationships between violence and nurturing, power and impotence, politics and the family that run through Rego’s art. Taking …
This book includes studies of main conflict areas in modern Western societies where religion has been a central element, ranging from popular movements and narratives of opposition to challenges of religious satire and anti-clerical critique. Special attention is given to matters of politics and gender. With this theme, it provides a useful guide to conflict areas in modern European religious h…
Every day in Mumbai 5,000 dabbawalas (literally translated as "those who carry boxes") distribute a staggering 200,000 home-cooked lunchboxes to the city’s workers and students. Giving employment and status to thousands of largely illiterate villagers from Mumbai's hinterland, this co-operative has been in operation since the late nineteenth century. It provides one of the most efficient deli…
Palestinians frequently present a harmonizing and homogenizing we-image of their own national we-group, as a way of counteracting Israeli attempts to sow divisions among them, whether through Israeli politics or through the dominant public discourse in Israel. However, a closer look reveals the fragility of this homogenizing we-image which masks a variety of internal tensions and conflicts. By …
This book offers multidisciplinary perspectives on the changing relationships between states, indigenous peoples and industries in the Arctic and beyond. It offers insights from Nordic countries, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Russia to present different systems of resource governance and practices of managing industry-indigenous peoples’ relations in the mining industry, renewable resour…
This volume offers new approaches to some of the biggest persistent challenges in the study of esotericism and beyond. Commonly understood as a particularly “Western” undertaking consisting of religious, philosophical, and ritual traditions that go back to Mediterranean antiquity, this book argues for a global approach that significantly expands the scope of esotericism and highlights its r…
Newly arrived in New York in 1882 from Tsarist Russia, the sixteen-year-old Bernard Weinstein discovered an America in which unionism, socialism, and anarchism were very much in the air. He found a home in the tenements of New York and for the next fifty years he devoted his life to the struggles of fellow Jewish workers. The Jewish Unions in America blends memoir and history to chronicle th…
This book is an open access book. Many scholars have wondered if a non-Western theory of international politics founded on different premises, be it from Asia or from the “Global South,” could release international relations from the grip of a Western, “Westphalian” model. This book argues that a Buddhist approach to international relations could provide a genuine alternative. Because o…
Since the relational turn, scholars have combated methodological universalism, nationalism, and individualism in researching social-spatial transformations. Yet, when leaving the gaps between the traveling and local epistemic assumptions unattended, engaging relational spatial theories in empirical research may still reproduce established theoretical claims. Following the sociology of knowledge…
In the thirteenth century, the Armenians of Greater Armenia and of the Armenian Kingdom in Cilicia were invaded by Mongol nomads of the Inner Asian steppe. The ensuing Mongol-Armenian relations were varied. The Greater Armenians became subjects of the Mongol Empire, whereas the Cilician Armenians, by entering into vassalage, became allies and furthered the Mongol conquests. In order to enhance …
In refocusing attention on the Paris Commune as a key event in American political and cultural memory, Sensational Internationalism radically changes our understanding of the relationship between France and the United States in the long nineteenth century.
This Open Access book presents unique evidence from the first comprehensive study of the outcomes of open adoption from care in Australia. It contributes to the international debate concerning the advantages and disadvantages of face-to-face post adoption contact with birth families. The chapters assess whether adoption provides a better chance of permanence and more positive outcomes than long…
All in the mix: class, race and school choice considers how parents choose secondary schools for their children and makes an important intervention into debates on school choice and education. The book examines how parents talk about race, religion and class – in the process of choosing. It also explores how parents’ own racialised and classed positions, as well as their experience of educa…
This book places literature on the post-colonial African state in conversation with literature on modern authoritarianism, using this to frame over ten months of qualitative field research on Uganda's informal security actors - including vigilante groups, local militias, and community police. Based on this research, the book presents an original framework - called 'institutionalized arbitrarine…
Music, as the form of art whose name derives from ancient myths, is often thought of as pure symbolic expression and associated with transcendence. Music is also a universal phenomenon and thus a profound marker of humanity. These features make music a sphere of activity where sacred and popular qualities intersect and amalgamate. In an era characterised by postsecular and postcolonial processe…
The world is currently undergoing an historic energy transition, driven by increasingly stringent decarbonisation policies and rapid advances in low-carbon technologies. The large-scale shift to low-carbon energy is disrupting the global energy system, impacting whole economies, and changing the political dynamics within and between countries. This open access book, written by leading energy…
Islamic Ethics and the Trusteeship Paradigm explores the emerging ethical theory examines the development of this modern Islamic theory of the trusteeship paradigm as developed by the Moroccan philosopher Taha Abderrahmane (b. 1944). The volume, with contributions in English and Arabic, examines the development of this modern Islamic theory of ethics and how it permeates various disciplines: ph…
This volume is dedicated to the cultural and religious diversity in Jewish communities from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Age and the growing influence of the rabbis within these communities during the same period. Drawing on available textual and material evidence, the fourteen essays presented here, written by leading experts in their fields, span a significant chronological and geograph…
This open access volume is the first academic book on the controversial issue of including spiritual care in integrated electronic medical records (EMR). Based on an international study group comprising researchers from Europe (The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland), the United States, Canada, and Australia, this edited collection provides an overview of different charting practices and expe…
In 1951, the secluded Neo-Aramaic-speaking Jewish community of Zakho migrated collectively to Israel. It carried with it its unique language, culture and customs, many of which bore resemblance to those found in classical rabbinic literature. Like others in Kurdistan, for example, the Jews of Zakho retained a vibrant tradition of creating and performing songs based on embellishing biblical stor…
"This book inquires into the use of prediction at the intersection of politics and academia, and reflects upon the implications of future-oriented policymaking across different fields. The volume focuses on the key intricacies and fallacies of prevision in a time of complexity, uncertainty and unpredictability. The first part of the book discusses different academic perspectives and contributio…
Standards often remain unseen, yet they play a fundamental part in the organisation of contemporary capitalism and society at large. What form of power do they epitomise? Why have they become so prominent? Are they set to be as important for the globalisation of services as for manufactured goods? Graz draws on international political economy and cognate fields to present strong theoretical arg…
Populism and authoritarian-populist parties have surged in the 21st century. In the United States, Donald Trump appears to have become the poster president for the surge. David M. Ricci, in this call to arms, thinks Trump is symptomatic of the changes that have caused a crisis among Americans - namely, mass economic and creative destruction: automation, outsourcing, deindustrialization, globali…