Books published by Palgrave MacMillan

This open-access book analyses how stakeholder relationships impact the sustainability of health aid. It does this by providing an overarching analytical framework, which allows for a systematic analysis of sustainability, relationships, and a possible causal link between these phenomena. The book goes beyond universal paradigms and detailed single-case studies by offering a thorough analysis of development projects to identify the factors that are also applicable to similar initiatives in comparable contexts.Empirically, it focuses on two health initiatives, both implemented in the Kyrgyz Republic, a country pursuing a sector-wide approach to health aid. Unique primary material provides insights into a geographic region that is mostly neglected, and will be of interest to students and researchers of social policy, development studies, international health and those focusing on the post-Soviet region and Central Asia.

This open access book presents a nuanced and accessible synthesis of the relationship between land tenure security and sustainable development. Contributing authors have collectively worked for decades on land tenure as connected with conservation and development across all major regions of the globe. The first section of this volume is intended as a standalone primer on land tenure security and its connections with sustainable development. The book then explores key thematic challenges that interact directly with land tenure security, followed by a section on strategies for addressing tenure insecurity. The book concludes with a section on new frontiers in research, policy, and action. An invaluable reference for researchers in the field and for practitioners looking for a comprehensive overview of this important topic.This is an open access book.

As humans expand the frequency and scale of interactions off-planet, Space Criminology ponders the nature of crime, harm and transgression in outer space and possible responses to these. The first book of its kind, it discusses the dynamics of space crime, from those involving powerful elites through to those associated with the mundane interactions of people living and working in space. It is essential reading for anyone interested in extra-terrestrial crime, space law, and criminal justice.

This book examines the development of British post-Second World War short-term residential adult education, through the lens of the Shropshire Adult Education College (1948-1976) and the tenure of Sir George Trevelyan as its first warden. Trevelyan is acknowledged as the godfather of new-age spiritualism in the UK and is credited with the development of eclectic and esoteric learning opportunities in arts, traditional crafts, culture and ecology. Embodying the spirit of a new national drive for optimism and enterprise in the post-war period, Trevelyan, and his contemporaries at other colleges, took risks and innovated in new pedagogical approaches to adult education, capturing the imagination of hundreds of students, before being stifled by an increasingly restrictive policy framework and financial strictures. The book considers the ideological drivers and tensions behind this unique form of education - its inception, evolution and virtual demise - and seeks to learn from its complex history to inform education in the future.

This book provides a balanced and accessible introduction to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. It carefully and comprehensively follows the thread of Aristotle's argument and sheds light on topics that all too often receive little attention or are entirely ignored in the existing textbooks (such as self-control, legislative science and the legislator, the life of the money-maker, craft-knowledge, comprehension, and beastliness).Its objective is not only to offer an academically reliable presentation of Aristotle's Ethics but to also defend Aristotle's main tenets--or, at least, to present them in their most defensible form.It places the Nicomachean Ethics within the study of ethics generally; students are invited to understand Aristotle's claims in the light of, or in contrast to, other ethical theories or their own intuitions about ethical matters.It follows the reader of the Nicomachean Ethicsin action, registering questions, expectations and progress within an insightful exegesis of Aristotle's philosophical argument. It is replete with pedagogical tools including examples from our concrete everyday experience, paintings, films, and literature, end of chapter summaries, internet resources, suggestions for further reading, study questions, and essay questions.

This open access book breaks new ground by examining the significant role played by radio in empowering women in three Francophone West African countries: Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.It examines the representation and perception of key themes broadcast by radio and associated with women's empowerment in the three countries. Each chapter contextualises a specific topic in the country and then explores discrete aspects of radio's provision. The topics covered in the chapters are women's political engagement; women and finances; women and life within marriage; inheritance; women's involvement in radio structures; and radio, internally displaced women, and trauma.Given the social, economic and political vulnerability and deteriorating security situation of the three countries, this book provides a timely and meaningful contribution to acknowledging and understanding the vital role of radio in women's empowerment.

This open access book revises Kant's ethical thought in one of its most notorious respects: its exclusion of animals from moral consideration. The book gives readers in animal ethics an accessible introduction to Kant's views on our duties to others, and his view that we have only 'indirect' duties regarding animals. It then investigates how one would have to depart from Kant in order to recognise that animals matter morally for their own sake. Particular attention is paid to Kant's 'Formula of Humanity, ' the role of autonomy and the moral law, as well as Kant's notions of practical reason and animal instinct. The result is a deliberately amended version of Kantianism which nevertheless remains faithful to central aspects of Kant's thought. The book's final part illustrates the framework's use in applied contexts, addressing the issues of using animals as mere means, the ethics of veganism and vegetarianism, and environmental protection. Nico Dario Müller shows how, when furnished with duties to animals, Kant's moral philosophy can be a powerful resource for animal ethicists.

This book is a comparative study of the endeavors to create a socialist system of higher education in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in China under Mao. It is organized around three themes: the convergence of Maoism with Stalinism in the early 1950s, which induced the transnational transplantation of the Soviet model of higher education to China; historical convergence between Stalinism of the First Five-Year Plan period (1928-1932) and Maoism of the Great Leap period (1958-1960), which was prominently manifested in Soviet and Chinese higher education policies in these respective periods; the eventual divergence of Maoism from Stalinism on the definition of socialist society, which was evinced in the different final outcomes of the Maoist and Stalinist endeavors to create a socialist system of higher learning.

This book explores how and if the mandate for children to worship in schools can be justified within the context of declining church attendance and increasing nonreligious identification in British society. Shillitoe asks what place compulsory worship has in an increasingly diverse and plural society, and what the answer means for the relationship between religion, the secular, and education more broadly. Through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork from across three schools in southwest England, the book reveals how examining the significance of children's experiences expands our understanding of both collective worship in schooling and religion in social life more broadly and demonstrates that adult-centric anxieties and assumptions in this area do not always reflect the experiences of children.

This book examines the concept of empathy in sociological and neuroscientific discourses using innovative perspectives from sociology and social neuroscience. Through a transdisciplinary approach, the author delves into the history of empathy and its social, cultural and semantic changes, and then reviews the conception of empathy in neuroscientific discourse.Distancing itself from the traditional neuroscientific literature of biological universalism, this volume offers an innovative perspective on empathy. It also opens a new avenue for neurosociology, which is presented as the discipline that can emphasize all the cultural and emotional aspects that govern empathy. Key themes addressed in the text are: empathy in all its meanings, from Hume to TenHouten; neurosociology as one possible avenue for embracing the cultural and neuroscientific aspects of empathy; and empirical research. A valuable resource for sociology students and academics in the field of empathy and neurosociology, this book is also of interest to those studying sociological thought, and social neuroscience.

This book is a comprehensive guide that explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and forecasting, providing the latest insights and trends in this rapidly evolving field. The book contains fourteen chapters covering a wide range of topics, including the concept of AI, its impact on economic decision-making, traditional and machine learning-based forecasting methods, challenges in demand forecasting, global forecasting models, meta-learning and feature-based forecasting, ensembling, deep learning, scalability in industrial and optimization applications, and forecasting performance evaluation. With key illustrations, state-of-the-art implementations, best practices, and notable advances, this book offers practical insights into the theory and practice of AI-based forecasting. This book is a valuable resource for anyone involved in forecasting, including forecasters, statisticians, data scientists, business analysts, or decision-makers.

​This book examines connections between racism, violence, and social harms, along with the parts played by media actors and institutions in sustaining these phenomena. The chapters present instances of racism from numerous countries in connection with state violence, media coverage of harms and violence against racialised others, including Roma, Palestinians, Indigenous Australians, Maori, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Muslim peoples, Black people in Portugal, Middle-Eastern people in Australia, and asylum seekers. The chapters analyse ideology while paying attention to history and global context, tracing intersectional dynamics including nexuses of racism, class, and gender. They focus on various aspects of violence, including state, colonial and imperialist violence and ideological violence. The book is necessarily interdisciplinary, but explicitly anti-racist and attentive to resistances. It traverses criminology, sociology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, mediastudies, history, and cognate fields.

Creativity -- A New Vocabulary proposes a novel approach to the way in which we talk and think about creativity. It covers a variety of topics not commonly associated with creativity that offer us valuable insights and open up new and exciting possibilities for creative action. This second edition includes six new essays which continue to challenge the traditional vocabulary of creativity and its preference for individuals, brains, cognition, personality, divergent thinking, insight, and problem solving. The book proposes a more dynamic and relational perspective that considers creativity as an embodied, social, material, and cultural process. This book will be useful for a wide range of specialists within the humanities and social sciences, as well as practitioners from applied fields who are looking for novel ways, of thinking about and doing creative work.

This book addresses the impact of Covid-19 on employment relations and provides a reconstruction and a critical assessment of the measures enacted worldwide to tackle the economic and social crisis triggered by the global health emergency. The pandemic has been a booster of critical issues that for years have been silently shaping society and the labor market and so it can represent an opportunity to relaunch a critical analysis on the future of work.Beginning from this assumption, this book collects contributions from different disciplines, including law, economics and organization theory. It covers topics such as the measures enacted to protect workers' health and cushion the labour, the new inequalities that emerged during the pandemic and the strategies to construct a sustainable and human-centred development in the post pandemic scenario. It is highly relevant to scholars and students of organisation studies, resilience, the labour market and labour law.

This collection presents policy and research that addresses digital inequalities, access, and skills, from multiple international perspectives. With a special focus on the impact of the COVID-19, the collection is based on the 2021 Digital Inclusion, Policy and Research Conference, with chapters from both academia and civic organizations.The COVID-19 pandemic has changed citizens' relationship with digital technologies for the foreseeable future. Many people's main channels of communication were transferred to digital services, platforms, and apps. Everything 'went online' our families, friends, partners, health, work, news, politics, culture, arts and protesting. Yet access to digital technologies remained highly unequal. This brought digital inclusion policy and research to the fore, highlighting to policymakers and the public the 'hidden' challenges and impacts of digital exclusion and inequalities. The cutting-edge volume offers research findings and policycase studies that explore digital inclusion from the provision of basic access to digital, via education and digital literacy, and on to issues of gender and technology. Case studies are drawn from varied sources including the UK, Australia, South America, and Eastern Europe, providing a valuable resource in the pursuit of social equity and justice.​This is an open access book.

The German Federal Election of 2021 was one of the most open and competitive in the post-war era. This book provides a systematic analysis of its domestic and international context, the shifting balance of the political parties, the election strategies and campaign themes, along with the challenges of government formation. An international array of scholars from Europe, North America and Australasia have contributed specially commissioned chapters on their principal areas of research. The discussion of individual topics is combined with sufficient background information so as to be accessible to readers who may not have detailed knowledge of German politics. In addition, by including links to multimedia election-related content we enhance the value of this volume and make it an indispensable reference tool.

In an ever-changing working environment, customer and workplace demands have brought new challenges to how we organize and manage work. Increasingly, this is addressed by the idea of 'agility.' From its beginning, agile work has claimed to be a radically different approach which allows organisations to react flexibly to changing environmental demands whilst also offering a 'people' centered approach to management.While the literature often examines agile instruments from a business perspective, this edited collection advances the discussion of the efficacy of agile working, by applying a more critical social science perspective.The chapters scrutinize whether agility is just a discursive imperative, or whether it is in fact a genuine organizational and institutional strategy that is meant to better deal with complexity and volatility. The answers to these questions can vary at different levels, and the editors therefore examine agility at the level of teams, organizations and societies. By assembling different perspectives on the sustainability and virtue of agile instruments, and by bringing together international scholars from a variety of disciplines, the project stimulates a comparative discussion.

This open access book explores the intersection of property law, relocation, and resettlement processes in the United States and among communities that grapple with migration as an adaptation strategy. As communities face the prospect of relocating because of rising seas, policy makers, disaster specialists, and community leaders are scrambling to understand what adaptation pathways are legally possible. While in its ideal application, law functions blindly and without variation, the authors find that legal contradictions come to bear on resettlement processes and place certain communities further in harm's way. This book will unearth these contradictions in order to understand why successful community-based resettlement has presented such a challenge to communities that are experiencing land deterioration as a result of climate change.

This textbook provides an accessible, practical guide to the strategic planning process required for the preparation of city plans from entire metropolitan areas to town centres. It fills a gap in the academic literature on the topic of strategic planning. Its conceptual and practical content together with a student friendly style and high use of practical examples make it accessible to both the student and recent graduate. Its presentation in three parts allows the reader or course leader to access those sections relevant to either their learning requirements or day-to-day work activities. The book is clearly structured into three-parts and provides flexibility in approach and learning for students taking relevant planning courses. The extensive reading list at the conclusion of each chapter provides the student with an opportunity to explore in more detail the individual topics. The practical approach equips the recent graduate with a deeper understanding of the purpose of each element of strategic planning from how to prepare a research brief to how to approach community engagement activities.

This book offers unique insight into the public and private governance of international shipping from the 1970s through to the 2010s. Focusing on the part played by maritime classification societies, it highlights the role played by the European Union during this time and its influence in creating transnational maritime regulations. The emergence of the Treaty of Rome and the European Parliament in enabling market liberalisation within the shipping industry on the one hand and more stringent maritime safety regulation on the other is examined, alongside the common transport policy and enforcement of international maritime rules. Particularly attention is given to the growth of the European Union's maritime presence, the establishment of the European Maritime Safety Agency, developments in flag state implementation, and relations between the International Maritime Organization and the European Union. This book presents a detailed guide to the European Union's role as a maritime safety regulator and the impact this has had on the shipping industry and its governance structure. It will be relevant to researchers and policymakers interested in maritime and transport economics as well as to students of European affairs and of international relations.

Why are we willing to believe that technology can bring about war... but not peace? PeaceTech: Digital Transformation to End Wars is the world's first book dealing with the use of technological innovation to support peace and transition processes. Through an interwoven narrative of personal stories that capture the complexity of real-time peace negotiation, Bell maps the fast-paced developments of PeaceTech, and the ethical and practical challenges involved.Bell locates PeaceTech within the wider digital revolution that is also transforming the conduct of war. She lays bare the 'double disruption' of peace processes, through digital transformation, and through changing conflict patterns that make processes more difficult to mount. Against this backdrop - can digital peacebuilding be a force for good? Or do the risks outweigh the benefits?PeaceTech provides a 12-Step Manifesto laying out the types of practice and commitment needed for successful use of digital tools to support peace processes. This open access book will be invaluable primer for business tech entrepreneurs, peacebuilders, the tech community, and students of international relations, informatics, comparative politics, ethics and law; and indeed for those simply curious about peace process innovation in the contemporary world.

This book provides a transnational African perspective on business management concerns and business ethics by examining the concepts of responsible business practices and sustainability across sub-Saharan Africa. Covering topics ranging from ethical advertisement to responsible pricing to waste management for sustainable business, it highlights the importance of consciously and deliberately inculcating responsible practices in the creation and operation of business activities within a corporate context to achieve sustainability in African markets. The book employs a case-by-case method for treating issues in responsible business practice and sustainability, with contributions illustrating responsible and irresponsible business practices across various areas of business management. Relevant to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, it will be of great importance to academics and students of responsible business, sustainability, business ethics and African business more broadly. It will also be a helpful guide for professionals and business owners to understand some salient issues in navigating sustainable business practices in Africa.

Rationality has been philosophers' concern stretching back to ancient times. But just what is rationality? In trying to answer this question, rationality is found to be more complex than supposed. This book investigates this supposition and thereby aspires to bring together the facets of the peculiar phenomenon that is rationality. Rationality is shown to be both more complex than presumed and yet more accessible than many may have feared. One argument concedes the common assumption that those interested in rationality need only rely on intuitions about this phenomenon. Yet, even moderate research reveals the concept's profound fuzziness. This book aims to set forth a theory, explanation, and unification of the kindred and disparate understandings of this elusive concept, rationality.

The distinctive point of the book is its innovative interdisciplinary approach to business communication, with interconnections between linguistics, sociology, and critical organisational studies as applied to the corporate world. It offers a first-hand insight into primary business discourse with a deeper understanding and analysis of business processes and mechanisms underlying and reflected in enterprise software-mediated communication. It answers the question what 'doing business' in the digital age is about and illustrates 'business discourse' from practitioners' point of view.Grounded in the analysis of empirical data, pertaining both to internal and external business communication, the author reflects on the reality of accelerated and pressurised communication in global IT corporations. Following a communication-centred approach, this monograph puts the topic of enterprise software-mediated business discourse into a multi-layered perspective of how global corporations operate, what their primary goals are, and what kind of (political) power they execute. Moreover, it demonstrates how profit-driven corporations can be viewed and interpreted as strategically acting systems within a specific sociological framework.

Camouflaged by "Covid-19," an undeclared global class war was initiated in 2020, aimed at replacing liberal democracy with technocracy, a novel, biodigital form of totalitarianism. The opening campaign involved the largest psychological operation in history, intended to demoralise, disorientate, and debilitate the public. This volume deals with the application of shock and stress, trauma-based mind control, the use of fear and threat, cognitive attack, weaponised deception, and techniques for turning society against itself. This is an open access book.

This book explores the impact of recent planning reforms on emergent, alternative models of local governance. It uses the pioneering approach of Frome in Somerset, UK to showcase development and governance alternatives in a post-Brexit landscape. It investigates the role of planning in contributing to sustainable development under localism, and examines how key actors have used the Neighbourhood Planning process to put forward niche, community-based development futures. In doing so, the book offers valuable methodological, empirical and theoretical contributions to wider debates concerning transition, placemaking, local politics and planning. It will appeal to all those interested in public policy and governance.

This is the first book to frame U.S. public diplomacy in the broad sweep of American diplomatic practice from the early colonial period to the present. It tells the story of how change agents in practitioner communities - foreign service officers, cultural diplomats, broadcasters, citizens, soldiers, covert operatives, democratizers, and presidential aides - revolutionized traditional government-to-government diplomacy and moved diplomacy with the public into the mainstream. This deeply researched study bridges practice and multi-disciplinary scholarship. It challenges the common narrative that U.S. public diplomacy is a Cold War creation that was folded into the State Department in 1999 and briefly found new life after 9/11. It documents historical turning points, analyzes evolving patterns of practice, and examines societal drivers of an American way of diplomacy: a preference for hard power over soft power, episodic commitment to public diplomacy correlated with war and ambition, an information-dominant communication style, and American exceptionalism. It is an account of American diplomacy's public dimension, the people who shaped it, and the socialization and digitalization that today extends diplomacy well beyond the confines of embassies and foreign ministries.

This book examines the role of the Arctic in Iceland's foreign and security policies from the end of the Cold War to the present. Based on extensive research and drawing on approaches from the fields of history and international relations, it shows that Iceland's Arctic policies have gone through multiple phases during this period, all of which have been heavily influenced by external geopolitical factors including its relationship with the United States, the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of China, and the Ukrainian crisis. It also demonstrates how Iceland's strategic position in the North Atlantic has important repercussions for the United States, Russia and China. With an emphasis on geopolitics, nation branding, and governance, this book will appeal to scholars and students of Arctic policies, geopolitics and international relations.

This book is about the crises of the world economy that have occurred from the 1970s to the present day. It makes the specific case that the global economy has experienced six crises during this 50-year period. Crises of the global economy are periods of substantial slowdown in world economic activity--as measured by investment, industrial production, trade, or unemployment--in which many national economies are technically in recession. To pose the existence of crises of the global economy implies that the world economy is a real entity with its own dynamics; it implies also that the usual approach that views national economies as the appropriate units of economic analysis has major limitations. The author provides data illustrating the global and regional manifestations of these crises of the world economy, elaborates on the concepts of world economy and economic crisis, and discusses the theories that have been used to explain them. The book shows how these recurrent global crises are discrete, countable phenomena, distinct states of an entity that can be appropriately referred to as the world or global economy, or world capitalism.

This innovative book argues that establishing an ontological framework makes a substantial difference to Pierre Bourdieu's core concepts of habitus and field. In doing so it addresses the charges of determinism, tautology, and circularity that have long been directed at habitus and field. Teasing out Bourdieu's ontology, the book offers a novel critical realist reading of Bourdieu, arguing that while Bourdieu explored the epistemological basis of his key concepts, he neglects their ontological underpinnings, and that elaborating on this adds a layer of depth and complexity which enriches Bourdieu's project. In addition to articulating the synergies between Roy Bhaskar's critical realism and Bourdieu's oeuvre, this book extends Bourdieu's insights in new and exciting directions by developing an ontologically informed Bourdieusian account of institutions as explored through the lens of institutional racism and by outlining a unique methodological approach to habitus.