Books published by Palgrave MacMillan

This cutting-edge volume is the first to address the burgeoning interest in drugs and Africa among scholars, policymakers, and the general public. It brings together an interdisciplinary group of leading academics and practitioners to explore the use, trade, production, and control of mind-altering substances on the continent

Through rap and hip hop, entertainers have provided a voice questioning and challenging the sanctioned view of society. Examining the moral and social implications of Kanye West's art in the context of Western civilization's preconceived ideas, the contributors consider how West both challenges religious and moral norms and propagates them.

What is posthumanism and why does it matter? This reader offers an introduction to the ways in which humanism's belief in the natural supremacy of the Family of Man has been called into question at different moments and from different theoretical positions. Can posthumanism have a politics - post-colonial or feminist?

Through sharing the research methodologies, and describing intervention and change techniques used in leadership development, this book, written by IGLC-INSEAD professors and leadership coaches, contributes to a better understanding of how organizations may go beyond coaching in order to create best places to work.

This book investigates the policy implications, discursive ethos and practical realities of plea-based case dispositions in the criminal justice system of four Chinese-speaking jurisdictions, including Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. It aims to provide fresh and cutting-edge insights into important legal, social and cultural issues found throughout plea-based case dispositions in Greater China, but in a geographically specific manner - providing an in-depth view of issues that can help forge connections and inspire creative solutions for scholars gaining understanding of common problems across the societies in question. The book includes an introduction and conclusion with 9 chapters. Based on a diverse range of first-hand data and secondary sources of information, topics covered in the chapters represent multiangle perspectives and analysis that help to construct a sophisticated, intricate and evidence-based portrait of locally informed approaches to case disposition through pleas in Chinese-speaking societies.

The Crusades and Nature: Natural and Supernatural Environments in the Middle Ages explores the intersection of crusader studies and studies of nature. The volume addresses encounters with, responses to and representations of a broad variety of phenomena: celestial objects and events; familiar and unfamiliar fauna and flora; seascapes and landscapes; the elements and the seasons; etc. It introduces readers to crusaders' actual, but also largely or entirely imaginary encounters with natural phenomena, as well as literary references to nature in crusader sources more generally (such as, for example, animal metaphors). Finally, this project investigates the relationships between the natural and the supernatural and between nature and human-made environments. The volume will define "crusades" broadly, to include not only crusades to the East, but also crusades to frontier regions such as the Baltic and Iberian peninsula and extends to representations of crusades and nature in later medieval and early modern sources.

This book argues that listening to constituents who reside outside organizational boundaries, but who are essential members of an organization's ecosystem, is a vital constitutive element of organizational communication. It also attempts to demonstrate that, by and large, the field of organizational communication has neglected such listening. The book goes on to introduce a conceptual and methodological framework organizations can use to assess listening practices and effectiveness. Through a combination of theory, research, and case illustrations, the book will be valuable to both scholars and practitioners in the fields of organizational communication, marketing, and public relations. It will provide insight and direction for theory-building, knowledge development, and implementation of best practices.

This book explores the nature, scope, merits and limits of international responses to Myanmar's February 2021 coup. The novelty of this book lies in its analysis of the coup in the digital age. While the literature on Myanmar addresses issues such as earlier periods of reform, Myanmar's political transition, the Saffron revolution, and human rights, there is still limited research that looks into the influence of digitalised Myanmar on the post-coup Civil Disobedience Movement and protestors. Myanmar opened and changed enormously in the past ten years. The use of technology and the Internet increased phenomenally, exposing Myanmar's citizenry to new ideas, experiences and ways of viewing the world. The impact of these developments on responses to the 2021 coup is the focus of this book.Myanmar's opening to the world and its digitalisation has made this coup different from the three previous coups. The book's starting point is that diplomacy is no longer (if it everwas) the preserve of governments and diplomats. International organisations, not-for-profit organisations, large corporations, academia, civil society, social media, and even individuals have all been engaged and sought to influence developments.Drawing extensively on primary sources (official statements by UN agencies, foreign governments, international corporations, NGOs and Burma campaign activists) and experiences as a senior diplomat and an academic working with Myanmar's government to build cyber capacity and cyber security awareness, this book takes a fresh look at all forms of international behaviour that seek to bring about change in a rogue or pariah state. The book will be the first to study the part played by Gen Z and their facility with smart phone technology to mobilise, inform and build opposition to the coup. To what extent did the youth of Myanmar learn from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand and the so-called "milk tea alliance"? How has dependenceon the internet affected the operations of the security forces and the Civil Disobedience Movement? How did both sides deploy misinformation and disinformation to achieve their respective goals?The book thus provides an informative guide for those seeking an understanding of what has happened and what, short of a military intervention, can be done about it. It examines international responses in the first year following the coup, candidly assessing their feasibility, efficacy and utility. Recent developments are situated within the context of Myanmar's modern history and the discourse on the effectiveness of sanctions compared with engagement.The book also critically examines ASEAN's role - how does ASEAN see its role, how does the National Unity Government regard ASEAN endeavours, and how does the rest of the world view ASEAN's capacity to address Myanmar's problems? We evaluate ASEAN's principle of non-interference in the internalaffairs of member states. Does this principle matter more to it than judgments about its weakness and inability to deal with breaches of the ASEAN Charter?

This textbook explores the histories of royal women in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It argues that by dint of an unprecedented conjunction of historical shifts and powerful personalities, it was these women, and not men, who sat at the helm of global politics; moreover, it was they who in truth steered our world's transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. Organized into chapters devoted to each of the era's great states, the book sets out to challenge several historical premises. First, it shows that women were the actual, if not always formally crowned, sovereigns of these states, or at least played a decisive role in shaping their policies. Second, the book dissolves the conventional dichotomy between East and West, showing that in both Christian Europe and Islamdom, women achieved their high status by means of similar strategies and at similar periods in history. Third, by demonstrating that there was a precedent for female authority long before the first harbingers of the women's movement in the eighteenth century, the book calls into question received ideas about historical progress and the evolution of women's liberation.

Polarization in the United States has been on the rise for several decades. In this context, few observers expect politics today to stop "at the water's edge," as the old cliché goes. But key questions about the relationship between polarization and US foreign policy remain to be fully answered. To what extent are American ideas about foreign policy now polarized along partisan lines? How is polarization changing the foreign policy behavior of the US Congress and President? And how is polarization altering the effectiveness of US foreign policy and influencing America's role in the world? This edited volume explores these questions and more, bringing together existing knowledge as well as considering how the political dynamics and execution of US foreign policy may evolve in the years ahead.

This book provides an authoritative overview of public administration, public management and public governance in Japan. Japan is one of the leading countries on the international stage, with a reputation for effective government and administration. The book covers a wide range of themes, including social welfare, public employment, the education system, public finance, and crisis management. Written by a team of expert scholars, it will appeal to international researchers and practitioners interested in Japan, as well as public administration and public management more broadly. It will be the definitive guide to public administration and governance in Japan for years to come.This is an open access book.

This Open Access edited volume presents twelve African case studies that systematically reconstruct, document and analyse how national governments and other stakeholders took equity into account in their initial policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the onset of the pandemic, many African governments acted quickly to suppress the virus through various public health measures, including lockdowns, mobilizing healthcare resources and designing responses to support the economy and the population. There were, however, significant variations in the severity and type of measures taken, as well as their accessibility and impacts. Equity was not a given and, therefore, important questions have been raised about who benefitted and who were left unprotected from the interventions, particularly those designed to protect income and basic services? The book, based on a variety of empirical data and disciplinary perspectives of research teams from across the continent, examines the inclusivity of mitigation and policy responses. It situates these findings on short-term interventions and impact in debates about the longer-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on the development of the African continent and proposes new directions for policy, research and practice in responses and interventions during crises.

Postcolonial African migration to the West is not only a spatial movement in search of material and physical security but also an expression of the mimetic desire for being by imitating the West or "whitening" oneself against the background of the dehumanizing historical legacies of slavery, colonialism, and Western dominance. It is a flight from oneself, from perceived inadequacies. To migrate to the West is an expression of the desire for being, not through detachment from the "fascinating" West but rather through adoration and imitation of its lifestyle, beauty ideals, and soft and hard power, and by living in the West. The model (the West) builds ubiquitous anti-migrant physical and virtual fences, which the imitator tries to overcome. The more the model re-strengthens these fences, the more the imitator tries to scale them. The anti-migrant fences are the meeting point of the model's perceived superiority, admirability, and desirability on the one hand, and on the other hand the imitator's inferiority complex and inner tension between the paradoxical desire for detachment from the model and its passionate imitation at the same time. This book argues that African migration to the West will continue even in the absence of poverty, conflicts, and climate change because it is also about the mimetic desire for being.

This book explores the formation of Catherine of Lancaster (1373-1418) and her arrival in Castile, linking that to the new interest in collecting and writing court poetry and the new production of religious lyric at her court. This book introduces a Castilian Queen of English extraction to contribute to the growing field of queenship and the influence of powerful women. Relatively little is known about Catherine from an English perspective. How she might have influenced court poetry and its production is only beginning to be explored, and this book marks an important contribution to that project in the way it enhances understanding of possible areas of influence from one country's religious production to another. It also addresses whether and in which ways Catherine might have influenced the development of a new court culture of poet-administrators, similar to the one she had left behind in England.

There has been a steady stream of articles written on the relations between ethics and the interpretation of literature, but there remains a need for a book that both introduces and significantly contributes to the field - particularly one that shows how we can think more openly and creatively about the multiform powers of ethical narrative by considering ethically significant literature. This volume offers an analytically acute and culturally rich way of understanding how it is that we can productively think philosophically about the narrative structures that describe our ethical lives and what kind of distinctive conceptual, and in some cases personal, progress we can make by doing so. Given the extremely widespread interest in ethical issues, this volume will strike resonant chords far and wide on arrival, while offering something new in bringing together the study of long-form narrative, the language of moral psychology, and detailed literary case studies. Given the vast expansion of narrative studies in recent years, the time for just such a volume is right.

This edited collection examines different facets of organizational communication in the context of current technological developments and disruptions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. AI is making inroads in organizational communication practice, influencing how organizations communicate and interact with their environments. It drives, augments and supplements organizational communication. Chatbots, for example, are becoming increasingly relied upon by organizations, using them to manage basic communication tasks that used to belong solidly to the realm of human. Similarly, developments such as ChatGPT have attracted scholarly attention due to their perceived implications on various aspects of communication. All of this has a profound effect on human interactions and relationships in organizational settings. Filling a gap in scholarship around organizational communication in light of ongoing digital transformation processes and COVID-19 induced transformations, chapters provide an up-to-date account of how new communication technologies, especially AI, are transforming organizational communication. The contributions reflect upon the most current theory and practice in the field in the post-COVID era. Combining theory, applied scholarship and fresh case studies, this is a valuable resource that reflects on the new realities of today's organizational environment.

This book, structured in two parts, gives a 360-degree view on integrated thinking, the foundation of integrated reporting, a rising trend in corporate reporting practice. This topic is particularly interesting in the context of new regulatory landscape, such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) in the EU (shaped by EFRAG's developments), alongside the IFRS Foundation's efforts towards global sustainability standards, both of which are shaping contemporary debates on sustainable value creation. The first part builds a framework for integrated thinking in a multidisciplinary perspective while the second part revises the framework in the light of practices, by bridging the gap with research findings in this field to date. The book concludes with the current shift of paradigm, and the need to address managerial questions in their complexity, building on knowledge across different specialized disciplines. The book will be of specific interest to accounting and finance teams and professional accounting bodies alongside those teaching or doing research within the fields of finance and accounting.

This edited book examines and analyses Heydar Aliyev, the architect and founder of modern, post-Soviet Azerbaijan. The editors of the volume discuss developments between 1993 and 2003 - a decade that saw the establishment of the institutional foundations of the current republic, the adoption of a new form of national identity, the redefinition of the concept of the Azerbaijani state, and the creation of a security establishment designed to gain control of territories Armenia had held since the 1988-1994 war over Karabakh. The book explains why this fateful period had far-reaching consequences for Azerbaijan as a fully formed state and society, as well as major implications for its political future and its geopolitical strategy.

This edited volume presents a multi-perspectival inquiry into the models that have shaped the study of ancient economies in past decades. The contributions collected here respond to the prevailing tendency to measure ancient Mediterranean economies using methods and techniques designed for assessing the performance of modern economies, considering a range of approaches that might generate a more socially and morally attuned history of the ancient Mediterranean. The volume explores the challenges of quantification and critically examines the ideological assumptions implicit within the models usually applied to the study of ancient economic performance. The chapters advocate for more inclusive alternatives to traditional ideas of 'growth' that take factors such as social inequality, fairness, wellbeing and the relationship between humans and the natural environment into consideration. The book examines through a series of different questions the importance of querying the appropriateness of economic methods from an ethical or socially aware position. Rather than condemning older models, methods, and points of view for their inadequacies, this book focuses on leveraging the benefits from existing methods in economics and suggesting new frameworks to reach toward historical approaches that are both methodologically sophisticated and attuned to the moral, ethical, and political concerns of the twenty-first century. This book will be a valuable resource for interdisciplinary researchers in economics, economic history, ancient history and archaeology.

In the fields of management and organization, there is an ongoing debate about different ontological assumptions about people in and around organizations, and the dangers of self-fulling prophecies, i.e., the phenomena in which unsubstantiated, unethical, or dysfunctional assumptions about people can lead to adverse practical consequences. This open access book advances this debate, but in a self-reflexive direction, asking: Who do we, as scholars in the fields of management and organization, think we are? What ontological assumptions about ourselves do we live by? Do we think we are something "special", a 'Homo Academicus', distinctively separated from the life-world of managers and employees but linked with other academics such as, say, philosophers and sociologists? If so, what are the consequences and implications of such assumptions? Part of the popular Palgrave Debates in Business and Management series, each of the chapters disclose, problematize, and criticize different ontological assumptions about 'Homo Academicus' that underpins research in the fields of management and organization. It will be of great interest to management and organization scholars and students, as well as those with a broader interest in methodology and critical studies.

In thematic terms, this book seeks to promote vital debate on the interactions between economic, political, and social processes. Latin American Political Economy publishes new, relevant, and empirically grounded scholarship that deepens our understanding of contemporary Latin American political economy and contributes to the formulation and evaluation of new theories that are both context-sensitive and subject to broader comparisons. Inspired by the need to provide new analytical perspectives for understanding the massive social, political, and economic transformations underway in Latin America, the series is directed at researchers and practitioners interested in resurrecting political economy as a primary research area in the developing world. It is especially concerned with how findings may further our understanding of development models, the socio-political institutions that sustain them, and the practical problems they confront.

This book contends that the development of modern Chinese international thought has been profoundly shaped by the distinctive nature of the Chinese state as a contender state and its global positioning since 1912. The argument posited demonstrates that, notwithstanding the varied perspectives on the 'international' held by Chinese intellectuals throughout the 20th century, there exist commonalities across the periods analyzed in this book. In essence, the book emphasizes that the shared elements influencing the production of modern Chinese international thought do not derive from a unified cultural Chinese identity but rather stem from China's evolving geopolitical position in the modern world.

This book examines the contributory role of inclusive housing management services in safeguarding the living environment, empowering neighborhoods, sustaining lovable home, building social capital, fostering community wellbeing and social sustainability from the perspectives of the sociology of housing. By repositioning professional housing management as an important driving force in community building, this book argues that the community-initiated inclusive housing management model has been acting as a driving force in enhancing a sense of belonging, cultural renewal, environmental sustainability, social integration and community cohesion particularly in cities with high density and compact development. This case study in Hong Kong will make an important contribution to interdisciplinary research in urban sociology, business management, community development, leadership building and environmental health. This study also contributes to the international literature on the dynamics of neighborhood and community governance by addressing the concrete local community initiatives and collaborative management practices in meeting the ever-changing environmental, social and health risks in Hong Kong and beyond. It will be of value to scholars researching on housing management and inclusive community building in world cities globally

This book is the second installment of a trilogy that explores the spatial dimensions of music. Music has generated substantial interest among geographers, but other academic disciplines have also developed related spatial perspectives on music. This trilogy brings together multiple approaches, each book investigating a bundle of interrelated themes. New Geographies of Music 2: Music in Urban Tourism, Heritage Policies and Place-making starts by exploring contemporary approaches to the study of popular music, as well as the relations existing between music, tourism, heritage and urban geography. The chapters address a range of issues, including how music shapes the "feel" of touristic towns and urban public spaces, how music scenes have an increasing role in heritage and tourism policies, and how this recognition of music has consequences on artistic practices and urban imaginaries. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the relationship between space and music.

This book sheds light on the overall description and explanation of the current socio-political, economic and cultural environment concerning the development of China's audio streaming programs industry. It interprets the emergence of the "ear economy" through the subjects of media ecology, media psychology, communication studies and cultural criticism, media industrial studies, sociology and anthropology. The book skillfully weaves together historical, cultural, and industry studies, along with textual and critical discourse analysis. This interdisciplinary work contributes to multiple academic fields including literary and cultural studies, media and communication studies, China/Asia studies, and political theory.

This book explores the past and current traces that cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals used by humans have left in Anglophone literary fiction. In times of accelerated global warming, an acute pandemic, and breakthroughs in bioengineering practices, discussions on how to rethink the relationships to these animals have become as heated as perhaps never before. Livestock and Literature examines what literature has to contribute to these debates. In particular, it draws on counter-narratives to so-called livestock animals' commodification in selected science- and speculative fiction (SF) works from the twenty-first century. These texts imagine 'what if' scenarios where "livestock" practice resistance, transform into biotechnologically modified, postanimal beings, or live in close companionship to humans. Via these three points of access, the study delineates the formal and thematic strategies SF authors apply to challenge anthropocentric and speciesist thought patterns. The aim is to shed light on how these alternative storyworlds expand readers' understanding of the lives of farmed animals; seeking insight into how literature shapes human-animal relationships beyond the page.

This book reexamines the socioeconomic and political transformation that occurred in Brazil during the 1940s as a result of the Second World War. Integrating social and political history, the author explores the adoption of new policies around state-sponsored industrialisation, the consolidation of Brazilian labour law institutions, and the expanded influence of ¿racial democracy¿ in the country's domestic and foreign policy. The book argues that the nature of the Brazilian state and its definitions of citizenship were redefined both from ¿the top¿ ¿ as a result of Brazil¿s integration in the new international order following the War ¿ and ¿from below¿ - as antifascism and mass nationalism opened new spaces for subaltern agency. Challenging traditional narratives on Brazil¿s transition from the Estado Novo dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas to a postwar democratic experience, this book highlights the extent to which political developments were shaped by key global processes and foreign relations with the USA. The book also focuses on the ¿bottom-up¿ forces and actors that brought about change in Brazil, emphasising the role of workers, protestors, and popular actors in shaping history. Breaking new ground in Brazilian historiography, this book makes a significant contribution to studies of populism and democratisation in Latin America.

​In the postwar years, Dutch survivors Eddy de Wind, Louis Micheels, and Elie A. Cohen, who went on to become practicing psychoanalysts, penned accounts of their survival of the Nazi camps. Their sober assessments contrast sharply with those by Bruno Bettelheim and Viktor Frankl, which emphasized decisiveness, 'positive thinking', and resistance, missing the fact that many Holocaust victims with those characteristics or other qualities did not survive. De Wind's, Micheels' and Cohen's accounts are more sober, (self-)critical, and shaped by analytical practice. By analyzing them anew and comparing them with accounts by female doctors who survived Block 10 in Auschwitz, this book argues that their theories of survival accord with contemporary sensibilities in psychoanalysis and Holocaust historiography. Psychoanalytic concepts have changed over time in response to greater understanding of the Holocaust and recent Holocaust historiography makes us more receptive to insights that were unfashionable in the first postwar decades.

This book examines the establishment and implementation of the AfCFTA, which is the largest free trade area globally, covering 54 African countries. It explores how this initiative has the potential to reshape Africa-EU relations by promoting intra-African trade, economic integration, and diversification, as well as inter-regional trade. Both continents have potential to serve as global actors in reshaping the global order in ways that can affect how multilateralism foster inclusive development. However, whether this will happen would be a function of how the EU and AU define their interests and relationship.

This book explores the history of, and approaches to, documentary production within China from the Cultural Revolution to the present day. It examines the institutionalisation of socialist realism during the PRC's revolutionary era; considers the emergence of the fluid xianchang aesthetics and the creation of contingent subjectivities in relation to physicist Carlo Rovelli's loop quantum gravity theory; explores two factory films through the angle of temporality; argues that time in the post-X era is multi-layered and can be experimented through a cinematic ruin aesthetics; and theorises ecological temporality in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre's ontology on being as freedom and Caroline Godart's analysis of difference.