This new book analyses the strategies, usages and wider implications of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms in the culture and communication industries that are reshaping economic, organizational and social logics. Platforms are the object of considerable hype with a growing global presence. Relying on individual contributions coordinated by s...
Researchers and practitioners from within the continent explore why Africa is so vulnerable to disease, and show how this vulnerability is closely linked to political and economic factors. They demonstrate how these same factors determine the way epidemics are treated.
Authors extract lessons from case studies in different parts of Africa; chall...
The figures are eye-opening: more than 1.6 billion works on 9 million websites are licensed under Creative Commons (CC). These materials constitute an extraordinarily rich repository for teaching, learning, sharing, and creative reuse. Knowing your way around CC will help you make the most of the Open Access (OA) and open educational resources (OER...
This open book explores the role of the ILO (International Labour Organization) in building global social governance from multiple and mutually complementary perspectives. It explores the impact of this UN´s oldest agency, founded in 1919, on the transforming world of work in a global setting, providing insights into the unique history and functio...
This open book addresses a variety of issues relating to bioethics, in order to initiate cross-cultural dialogue. Beginning with the history, it introduces various views on bioethics, based on specific experiences from Japan. It describes how Japan has been confronted with Western bioethics and the ethical issues new to this modern age, and how it ...
This open 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 div...
This open access short reader looks into the dynamics which have reshaped rural development and human landscapes in European agriculture and the role of immigrant people. Within this framework it analyses contemporary rural migrations and the emergence of immigrants in relation to the incorporation of agrarian systems into global markets, the Europ...
During the Cold War, American labour organizations were at the centre of the battle for the hearts and minds of working people. At a time when trade unions were a substantial force in both American and European politics, the fiercely anti-communist American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL - CIO), set a strong example...
This open book provides an updated and fully revised 4th edition of this authoritative analysis of Swiss democracy. It particularly explains the institutions of federalism and consensus government through political power sharing. In this new edition, the authors also address several important changes and challenges that have affected Swiss democrac...
In this open publication it is shown, that sustainable low carbon development is a transformative process that constitutes the shifting from the initially chosen or taken pathway to another pathway as goals have been re-visited and revised to enable the system to adapt to changes. However, shifting entails transition costs that are accrued through ...
This open book constitutes an ethnographic mosaic which depicts the contextual complexities of the life and work of seafarers who are employed in the international merchant cargo fleet. The collection is based upon the observations and interviews of researchers in multiple disciplines. It is woven together to offer a richly detailed insight into th...
This open book examines recent advances in how artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics have elicited widespread debate over their benefits and drawbacks for humanity. The emergent technologies have for instance implications within medicine and health care, employment, transport, manufacturing, agriculture, and armed conflict. While there has been...
This open volume provides an understanding of the different aspects of success, school continuity and social mobility among European Roma, including the motives justifying the high rates of school dropout and failure among this group. It offers a critical and reflexive perspective about social reality from a multidisciplinary and transversal point ...
This open book shares the experiences of Tropical Legumes III (TLIII) project in facilitating access to seed of improved legume varieties to smallholder farmers through innovation platforms. It highlights practices and guiding principles implemented in eight developing countries of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. This book details key processes ...
This open book provides a concise introduction to economic approaches and mathematical methods for the study of water allocation and distribution problems. Written in an accessible and straightforward style, it discusses and analyzes central issues in integrated water resource management, water tariffs, water markets, and transboundary water manage...
This open book is unique in its contents. No other title in the book market has tackled this important subject. It introduces innovation as a way of practice for world-class universities. It, then, discusses the criteria for being innovative in the academic world. The book selects some of the top innovative world-class universities to study the fac...
This open book explores how biometric data is increasingly flowing across borders in order to limit, control and contain the mobility of selected people, namely criminalized populations. It introduces the concept of bio-bordering, using it to capture reverse patterns of bordering and ordering practices linked to transnational biometric data exchang...
This open book summarizes the first two decades of the NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also how ...
This book is arranged and developed around the theme of "2050 China," it analyzes the factors and advantages of the Chinese road to socialist modernization, explores and summarizes the development goal and the basic logic of the socialist modernization of China, and further shows the general basis of the primary stage of socialism. Accord...
This open book offers a unique and practically oriented study of organisational and national conditions for implementing Responsible Research Innovation (RRI) policies and practices. It gives the reader a thorough understanding of the different aspects of RRI, and of barriers and drivers of implementation of RRI related policies. It shows how diffe...
This open book analyzes the transition toward a low-carbon energy system in Europe under the aspects of flexibility and technological progress. By covering the main energy sectors - including the industry, residential, tertiary and transport sector as well as the heating and electricity sector - the analysis assesses flexibility requirements in a c...
This open volume provides readers with an open access protocol collection and wide-ranging recommendations for preclinical renal MRI used in translational research. The chapters in this book are interdisciplinary in nature and bridge the gaps between physics, physiology, and medicine. They are designed to enhance training in renal MRI sciences and ...
This open book is geared towards providing insights and stimulating new thinking about the changing nature of services, service work and workers, and service experiences during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, particularly focusing on digital service technology. This book serves as a useful resource for business practitioners and academics ...
This open book focuses on how the design and use of innovative learning environments can evolve as teaching practices and education policies change. It addresses how these new environments are used, how teachers are adapting their practices, the challenges that these changes pose, and the effective evaluation of these changes.
The book reports on ...
This open book discusses financial crisis management and policy in Europe and Latin America, with a special focus on equity and democracy. Based on a three-year research project by the Jean Monnet Network, this volume takes an interdisciplinary, comparative approach, analyzing both the role and impact of the EU and regional organizations in Latin A...
This open book on the state of peacebuilding in Africa brings together the work of distinguished scholars, practitioners, and decision makers to reflect on key experiences and lessons learned in peacebuilding in Africa over the past half century. The core themes addressed by the contributors include conflict prevention, mediation, and management; p...
This open book presents recent research and hot topics in the field of real estate science in Japan. It features carefully selected English translations of peer-reviewed papers and excellent articles published in the Japanese Journal of Real Estate Sciences, as well as papers presented at the Japan Association of Real Estate Sciences (JARES) annual...
This unique open book features a selection of Living Cases on Corporate Governance, which were developed and compiled by chairpersons, members of the board of directors, and CEOs in various countries, working in close collaboration with prominent researchers. Each Living Case addresses a current issue that a given company or institution needs to re...
This open book provides the first-ever comparative study on criminal policy concerning the illicit trade of tobacco, conducted among four comparatively new EU Member States (Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Romania) and two "old" EU countries (Germany and Italy). The book addresses the national legal frameworks, current criminological situ...
This open handbook provides a multilevel view on family policies, combining insights on family policy outcomes at different levels of policymaking: supra-national organizations, national states, sub-national or regional levels, and finally smaller organizations and employers. At each of these levels, a multidisciplinary group of expert scholars ass...
This open book carefully explores the relationship between social democracy and its working-class electorate in Western Europe. Relying on different indicators, it demonstrates an important transformation in the class basis of social democracy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the working-class vote is strongly fragmented and social de...
This open book focuses on the issue of sustainability standards from the perspective of both global governance frameworks and emerging economies. It stems from the recognition that the accelerated pace of economic globalization has generated production and consumption patterns that are generating sustainability concerns. Sustainability standards (a...