Books published by Palgrave MacMillan

This book provides a comprehensive overview of Norway's foreign policy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on the latter. Covering themes such as security and defence, foreign aid and European integration, the author argues that despite often presenting itself as an idealist country and a "peace nation", Norwegian governments have demonstrated an understanding of power politics and a desire to, above all, promote national self-interests. The author explores the country's global relations with the US and NATO, with the countries of the European Union, and with great powers such as Russia and China. By adopting a historical perspective, the book demonstrates how continuity and stability have been fundamental features of contemporary Norwegian foreign policy. The book draws on a wide range of current and archival government sources, parliamentary debates and opinion pieces in news outlets, as well as an extensive selection of academic sources.

This book focuses on the aural and musical sphere of fictional audio-visual reconstructions of the Holocaust, a defining event in the history of the 20th century. Musicology has seen an increasing number of works on the function of film music and the construction of identity in media contexts in recent years. This project analyses the use of music in feature films about the Shoah. The analysis of 'the sound of Nazi violence', as well as the escape from and resistance against it, not only reveals a lot about the construction of the filmic characters' emotive states, but also tells us more about our own relationship to the past. The author understands the soundtrack of these films as an affective mediator of time, which connects filmic representations of the past with the present. Analysis focuses on the soundtracks of four films: Schindler's List, The Pianist, Taking Sides and Inglourious Basterds.

This book presents a history of Swedish sport, highlighting in particular the relationship between sport politics and people's changing attitudes towards sport from the eighteenth century until today. It scrutinizes the interaction between sport politics and people's different approaches to sport in everyday life. By investigating how different ways of pursuing and conceptualizing sport have progressed and interacted, and how they have influenced as well been influenced by sport politics, this book discerns the role of both governmental and municipal politics in the development of sport in Sweden.

This book investigates the ways in which new developments in areas of language teaching practice, such as policy-making, planning, methodology and the use of educational technology are locally adopted, adapted, initiated, and implemented in Vietnam and Cambodia. The region is responding to a large number of significant challenges, including large-scale education reforms, the effects of globalisation and the need for lifelong learning, as well as concerns about the quality of its language education system. By looking at the drivers, stakeholders, obstacles and affordances in one particular regional context, the authors examine how processes of change occur. This will help anyone involved in language development, from curriculum reform to materials development, and from programme evaluation to the setting of assessment standards. The book will be of particular interest to those involved in managing change in language education that attempts to mediate between global trends and local needs, as well as students and scholars working in language education, applied linguistics and related fields.

This book offers a pragmatic approach to the benefits of spirituality and sustainability for both individual and organizational success. It introduces sustainability and workplace spirituality as contemporary solutions to the challenging organizational environment. The first few chapters introduce the fundamentals of spirituality, workplace spirituality, and sustainability. The author then demonstrates how the three qualities are beneficial in achieving personal and business success. Through the combination of synthesized research summaries and case studies of individuals and organizations, this book offers readers a fresh perspective on the importance of spirituality and sustainability to organizational performance.

This open access book responds to the need for a specifically African focus on public policy. It outlines the fundamental principles of public policy research, and engages with major issues in the study of public policy from an African perspective, covering essential topics such as the location and centrality of social sciences in relation to public policy, leadership, methodology, institutions, governance, and gender. This book is essential for understanding the various aspects and dimensions of policy making in Africa that underscore quality research and are at the core of excellence in teaching and learning.

This book is a pioneering multi-disciplinary analytical study of Caribbean political corruption grounded in Caribbean epistemology, challenging universalist perceptions generated outside the region which take no account of historical and cultural elativity. In tracing the history and development of Caribbean political systems and corruption, it collates and synthesizes existing data, indispensable to current and future research. Rigorous analysis of international corruption measurement tools demonstrates deficiencies and limited validity for small island states in the Caribbean and worldwide. Highly detailed case studies and fieldwork research investigating perceptions of corruption and democratic capacity present invaluable new empirical data and offer insights into remodelling corruption analysis. With its wide cross-disciplinary appeal, this book makes significant and timely contributions to decolonial studies and an emerging decolonization discourse in the Caribbean.

This monograph offers new insights into the fundamentals of literary theory. It synthesizes and evaluates research from recent decades, critically examining this work from a transnational perspective and with a particular focus on publications in English, French and German. The book is divided into six sub-theories that tackle problems of interpretation, fictionality, performativity and performance, intertextuality, genre and periodization. Drawing on texts from Classical Antiquity to English, German, French, Spanish and Italian literature, the book brings together a range of different scholarly traditions in different languages.

Bosnian Literature on Stage and Screen aims to reconcile theoretical approaches with theatrical and cinematic practices by examining two adaptations based on works by the Bosnian author Mesa Selimovic. The book is informed by scholarship in film and theatre adaptation theories, and is grounded in a comparative approach that focuses on the interplay of sign systems and codes unique to screen and stage. The book looks closely at two adaptations: a screen adaptation of the novel The Fortress and a stage adaptation of the novel The Island.

This open access book explores the transnational and transoceanic dimensions of the debate on gender and women's cultural agency and mediation in the long eighteenth century. It aims to decenter perspectives on traditional Enlightenment geographies, by emphasizing cultural transfers between Southern Europe and the rest of Europe, as well as with the Americas; by focusing on a variety of cultural mediators--women authors, female (and male) translators, readers, travelers, and disseminators; and by examining diverse written and visual sources--from correspondence, travel narratives, and philosophical essays, to novels, opera, portraits.

This book presents the result of an innovative challenge, to create a systematic literature overview driven by machine-generated content. Questions and related keywords were prepared for the machine to query, discover, collate and structure by Artificial Intelligence (AI) clustering. The AI-based approach seemed especially suitable to provide an innovative perspective as the topics are indeed both complex, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, for example, climate, planetary and evolution sciences. Springer Nature has published much on these topics in its journals over the years, so the challenge was for the machine to identify the most relevant content and present it in a structured way that the reader would find useful. The automatically generated literature summaries in this book are intended as a springboard to further discoverability. They are particularly useful to readers with limited time, looking to learn more about the subject quickly and especially if they are new to the topics. Springer Nature seeks to support anyone who needs a fast and effective start in their content discovery journey, from the undergraduate student exploring interdisciplinary content, to Master- or PhD-thesis developing research questions, to the practitioner seeking support materials, this book can serve as an inspiration, to name a few examples. It is important to us as a publisher to make the advances in technology easily accessible to our authors and find new ways of AI-based author services that allow human-machine interaction to generate readable, usable, collated, research content.

This open access book provides a multifold exploration of how people in early modern Europe understood, conducted, and actively used private conversations. From sharing personal matters to discussing delicate secrets, all layers of early modern society had their motives for wanting to keep certain exchanges out of public eyes and ears, and ways of trying to achieve this. Detecting such instances in historical sources typically becomes a complex pursuit, full of subtle references that require creative approaches, especially when it comes to more informal practices. Yet, in a reading against the grain, different sources can offer us hints of how conversations took place in private. The book consists of a historiographical and methodological introduction to the study of private conversations, followed by ten case studies from a variety of cities, villages, and countryside across early modern Europe. The concluding epilogue suggests some pathways to further explore the terrain of how people have talked in private in past societies.

This book explores the intellectual grounds of Scandinavianist ideology and its political development into a national unification movement. Denmark, Norway and Sweden were nearly annihilated during the Napoleonic Wars. The lesson learned was that survival was a matter of size. Whereas their union of 1814 offered Sweden-Norway geostrategic security tempered by fear of Russia, Denmark was the biggest territorial loser of the Napoleonic Wars and faced separatism connected to German nationalism in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. This evolved into a national conflict that threatened Denmark's survival as a nation. Meanwhile, a new generation of Danes, Swedes and Norwegians had come to regard kindred language, culture and religion as a case for Scandinavian union that could offer protection against Russia and Germany. When the European revolutions of 1848 unleashed the First Schleswig War, the influence of Scandinavianism was such that it nearly turned into a Scandinavian war of unification.

This book accounts for Scandinavian unification efforts in a time of great upheaval. The ideological repercussions of the European revolutions of 1848-1849 and the Crimean War (1853-1856) transformed both the international political system and nationalism into more 'realist' types. The First Schleswig War (1848-1851) having nearly turned into one of Scandinavian unification, the influence of Scandinavianism extended into the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian courts, cabinets and parliaments, attracting interest from the great powers. The Crimean War offered another window of opportunity for Scandinavian unification, before the Danish-German conflict over the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein nearly united Scandinavia upon the outbreak of the Second Schleswig War in 1864. The ultimate failure of Scandinavianism in its unification efforts was not predetermined, although historiography has made it appear as such. Napoleon III, Cavour and Bismarck all actively contributed to plans for Scandinavian unification, the latter even declaring himself as "very strongly Scandinavian".

This book delves into the role of higher education as a means of sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Contributions from across the region examine the strategies and technological advances available to enable students to deal with an uncertain future and are organised under two key themes: Curriculum and Teaching and Higher Education and Innovations. The volume brings together theoretical and practical perspectives, relating them to international benchmarks while maintaining the specificities of the African context. It will be of interest to students and scholars as well as practitioners whose work interrogates higher education, quality assurance, and sustainable development goals.

Agriculture is the oldest and most traditional of economic sectors, and its business has seen major leaps in innovation over the past century. Contemporary agribusiness is being influenced and reshaped by technological developments, geopolitical developments, and globalisation, as well as transport and logistics innovations, changes in consumer behaviour.Reflecting on these changes and providing a deep dive into this sector, this two-volume work defines, refines, analyses, and prescribes the evolution of agribusiness in the present and future. Taken together, the books offer a comprehensive conceptualisation of the multifactorial macro, micro and organisational elements of agribusiness, including strategic, managerial, marketing, technological and geo-socio-political forces.Volume II focuses on the wider, macro-environmental forces acting upon agribusinesses, exploring the contextual evolutions that impact the sector, and the means, practices and avenues for its development.It includes topics such as digital technologies adoption, supply chain sustainability, big data analytics, women's agricultural entrepreneurship, and simulation model decision making.

Agriculture is the oldest and most traditional of economic sectors, and its business has seen major evolutionary leaps over the past century. Contemporary agribusiness is being influenced and reshaped by technological advancements, geopolitical developments, globalisation, transport and logistics innovations, as well as changes in industry structure and consumer behaviour. Reflecting on these changes and providing a deep dive into this sector, this two-volume scientific works' collection defines, refines, analyses, and prescribes the evolution of agribusiness in the present and future. Taken together, the books offer a comprehensive conceptualisation of the multifactorial macro, micro and organisational elements of agribusiness, including strategic, managerial, marketing, technological and geo-socio-political forces. Volume I explores the strategic, managerial and marketing aspects of contemporary agribusiness, and descriptively and prescriptively investigates the organisational and immediate industry practices and sectoral forces. Topics covered include circular business models, CSR communication practices, digital marketing, organisational sustainability and contemporary farming systems, to name a few..

Although many studies are available on visitors to cultural institutions, the infrequent or non-visitors are largely unexplored. However, they make up the majority of the population. Their motivation for not visiting is therefore the focus of this volume. This volume provides an in-depth overview of the international state of nonvisitor research. Building on this, extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses are conducted on reasons for non-visitation. This is followed by an empirically based, practice-oriented theory of visitor attraction. The authors thus present the first comprehensive work on non-visitor research in Germany.This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Nicht-Besucherforschung by Martin Tröndle, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2019. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

Drawing on theories in politics, sociology, gender and feminist studies, and social movement studies, this book compares and contrasts NGOized feminist organizations and informal street feminist groups in Belgium and Romania in order to understand the transformation of modern and contemporary feminist movements. Chapters trace the development of this NGOization process and its entanglements with neoliberal modes of governance and techniques and proposes an historically and empirically grounded analytical model to studying the NGOization of feminist movements as a multidimensional process. By analyzing the NGOization process through a cross-national comparison based on very different cases, the book disentangles the links between institutionalization, professionalization, bureaucratization and precarization and brings clarifications concerning the outcomes associated with them, such as demobilization, depoliticization, co-optation and burn-out. This book places the NGOization offeminist movement organizations within the specific context of relations between the state and the market in neoliberalism. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers across Gender & Feminist Studies, Social Movements, Sociology, and Politics.

The Council of the EU is a powerful institution whose centrality has been challenged by the Treaty of Lisbon. More than ten years after this major institutional revision, this book examines its role within the EU political regime and its interactions with other institutions. It explores how the Council Presidency has navigated major crises over the past decade and addressed internal challenges. The various chapters discuss key timely questions: How has the relationship between the Council and the European Council evolved over time? To what extent have the recent crises reshaped the relationship between the Council and the European Parliament, as well as its interactions with the Commission? Is the Council Presidency still a powerful mediator? What are its internal challenges? What are the prospects for the rotating presidency system?

This open access book provides the first ever authoritative collection of scholarly insights, based upon original research, into the political groups of the EP tackling the fundamental changes since the Lisbon Treaty and the upsurge of radical right parties. It analyses political groups and their importance from multiple perspectives critically assessing their role and significance in EU politics. Each chapter is authored by leading scholars in the field, working on key topics in relation to political groups: political group formation and function, their role in parliamentary and EU policy-making, the way that Eurosceptic MEPs influence (or not) the Parliament, and the nature and form of interactions with external actors. In doing so, each chapter opens hitherto unexplored 'black boxes' in the political work of the EP, such as the internal practices of, and power relations within the political groups, and informal arenas of intra-group decision-making.

Countries across Africa are rapidly transitioning from rural to urban societies. The UN projects that 60% of people living in Africa will be in urban areas by 2050, with the urban population on the continent tripling over the next 50 years. The challenge of building inclusive and sustainable cities in the context of rapid urbanization is arguably the critical development issue of the 21st Century and creating food secure cities is key to promoting health, prosperity, equity, and ecological sustainability. The expansion of Africa's urban population is taking place largely in secondary cities: these are broadly defined as cities with fewer than half a million people that are not national political or economic centres. The implications of secondary urbanization have recently been described by the Cities Alliance as "a real knowledge gap", requiring much additional research not least because it poses new intellectual challenges for academic researchers and governance challenges for policy-makers. International researchers coming from multiple points of view including food studies, urban studies, and sustainability studies, are starting to heed the call for further research into the implications for food security of rapidly growing secondary cities in Africa. This book will combine this research and feature comparable case studies, intersecting trends, and shed light on broad concepts including governance, sustainability, health, economic development, and inclusivity. This is an open access book.

This book addresses the emergence of 'protest memory' as a powerful contemporary shaper of ideas and practices in culture, media and heritage domains. Directly focused on the role of museum and archive practitioners in protest memory curation, it makes a compelling contribution to our understanding of how social movements and activist experiences are publicly remembered and activated for social and environmental justice.

This open access book critically examines discussions on digitalisation and individual opportunities for socio-economic advancement. Contrary to the prevailing narratives of "digital empowerment" and opportunities for every individual, this book argues that digitalisation massively curtails social advancement opportunities, consolidating existing social relations. From a spatial perspective, Scheffer demonstrates how socially disadvantaged groups are faced with reproducing mechanisms as part of a new data economy. Surprisingly, the more intensively digital services are used, the more this happens.Building on Löw´s sociology of space and Bourdieu´s concept of habitus, this book shows how practices of social exclusion are transferred to the digital present in an innovative way. The image of "mirrored" spaces describes a new mechanism that explains social exclusion in the age of digitalisation. This book is an essential resource for researchers and students interestedin socio-economic inequalities, processes of digitalisation, and digital geographies.

This edited volume aims to ignite an academic discussion regarding necessary, and urgent, adaption and mitigation strategies for the tourism industry. Now more than ever, there is a need for designing and implementing concrete strategies for a world in which tourism practices are sustainability-minded, not only to rescue this key industry from the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to limit the effects that it has on pollution, climate change, and at-risk populations. Achieving this goal will require innovations that can help us synchronously adapt to committed change as well as shift our planning processes and alter our behaviours. Including contributions from international experts in the fields of tourism management, economics, political science, finance, business, and sustainability, this book provides much-needed research on sustainable tourism by evaluating current and future trends, global contributions, case studies and new research evaluating issuessuch as over-tourism and under-tourism, as well as the general effects that tourism have on a region's economy, environment, culture, and society. In addition, it will explore how sustainable tourism can help alleviate, mitigate, or control these problems. This book aims to provide insight into how we can still enjoy and benefit from touristic travel while implementing appropriate strategies and adaptation plans in the areas of health, culture, the economy, and the environment and showcase investigations of alternative tourism frameworks and tourist perspectives. It will be of great interest to academic and practitioner communities in business and policy, as well as economics, tourism management, development studies, finance, cultural heritage management, policymaking and entrepreneurship.

This book provides a critical and biographical account of the fascinating hand-made book of rector William Greswell (1848-1923), in which he assembled British and American reviews and accounts of the Romantic poet, critic, philosopher, and religious thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). J.C.C. Mays re-evaluates Coleridge's nineteenth-century reputation through the lens provided by Greswell's workbook. Mays demonstrates how Coleridge is one of the most complicated and influential religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, whose "religious musings" (most prominently as published in Aids to Reflection and On the Constitution of the Church and State, but also in posthumous collections such as Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit) cast a long shadow over religious thinking in nineteenth-century England and America. Although Greswell was but one of Coleridge's many readers in the nineteenth century, his engagement with Coleridge's writings was noteworthy for the sheer mass of the materials he assembled, and the breadth of the Coleridge he depicts. Greswell's Coleridge is a Coleridge in whom all Coleridgeans will be interested.

The contributions to this volume are devoted to Christian Kracht's aesthetics under two main aspects: On the one hand, with regard to sometimes irritatingly twisted actualizations of that self-reference and reservation which, since Kant, is to be evaluated as a central mode of the aesthetic; on the other hand, with regard to interferences with areas that are usually perceived as extra-aesthetic, but which can be evaluated as ferments of contemporary aesthetics: Stagings in the field of the literary establishment, the aesthetic under media and market conditions, and in the focus of canonization and criticism. Kracht's Frankfurt Poetics Lectures, which were intensively commented on by the media, form the background to this discussion.

This study of Joseph Conrad's influential work "Heart of Darkness" presents for the first time the German-language reception of this reference text in the debate on postcolonialism. The spectrum ranges from Conrad's contemporaries (like Kafka) to many canonical authors of the 20th century (including Thomas Mann, Ernst Jünger, Christa Wolf) to the most recent names in literature (i.e. Christian Kracht und Lukas Bärfuss). Beyond the readings of their works, the study contributes to the study of cultural transfers as well as to Conrad philology, and it expands the theory of intertextuality with parameters that capture the complex factor of power in postcolonial relations.

This book makes the case for a unique coastal-urban experience of war on the home front during the First World War, focusing on case studies from the north-east of England. The use of case studies from this region problematises an often assumed national or generalised experience of civilian life during the war, by shifting the frame of analysis away from the metropolis. This book begins with chapters related to wartime resilience, including analysis of pre-war fear of invasion and bombardment, and government policy on public safety. It then moves on to a discussion of power relations and the local implementation of policy related to bombardment, including policing. Finally, the book explores the 'coastal-urban' environment, focusing on depictions of war damage in popular culture, and the wartime and post-war commemoration of civilian bombardment. This work provides a multi-faceted perspective on civilian resilience, while responding to a recent call for new histories of the 'coastal zone'.

This volume explores the notion of "affective media" within and across different arts in Japan, with a primary focus on music, whether as standalone product or connected to other genres such as theatre and photography. The volume explores the Japanese reception of this "affective media", its transformation and subsequent cultural flow. Moving from a discussion of early encounters with the West through Jesuits and others, the contributors primarily consider the role of music in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. With ten original chapters, the volume covers a wealth of themes, from education, koto music, guitar making, avant-garde recorder works, musicals and rock photography, to interviews with contemporary performers in jazz, modern rock and J-pop. Innovative and fascinating, the book provides rich new insights and material to all those interested in Japanese musical culture.