How are businesses responding to global changes in markets driven by changes in technology? Whatever the industry, the trends are familiar: globalization and the rise of industrial conglomerates, mergers and acquisitions, the networking of businesses and markets, outsourcing and shifts in the distribution of resources and production, all reflected in the emergence of new players, new products and services and new forms of competition. As arguably the first knowledge-based business, book publishing provides an ideal setting for the study of challenge and opportunity. The industry is currently experiencing fierce levels of competition, extreme financial pressures, restructuring and the threat of technology-induced obsolescence. Added to these are the challenges posed by new and potential entrants to the market, the emergence of new products and services, new ways of doing business, including trading in virtual markets, and the vulnerability of traditional business models. The suitability of book publishing as a context for researching the emergence of knowledge-based business becomes all too apparent. Through combining primary research with secondary analysis drawn from the relevant literatures, Books, Bytes and Business is both a readable and informative account of business in the knowledge-based economy.

This important book addresses critical themes in the development of archaeology as a reflexive, self-critical discipline in the modern world. It explores the ethical, political and cultural tensions and responsibilities which need to be addressed by archaeologists when working within networks of global ecologies and communities, examining how authoritarian traditions can exacerbate the divide between expert and public knowledge. Moreover, it analyses how localized acts of archaeology relate to changing conceptions of risk, heritage, culture, identity, and conflict. Bringing insights from Alain Schnapp, Michael Shanks, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Ulrich Beck, John Urry and others to cross-disciplinary discussions of these themes, Unquiet Pasts shows how archaeological discourse can contribute towards engaging and understanding current dilemmas. It also shows how archaeology, as a localized and responsibly exercised practice, can play a part in building our commonly shared and experienced world.

With its celebrated World Heritage List, UNESCO steers the global heritage agenda through the definition and redefinition of what constitutes heritage and by offering the highest-level forum for heritage professionalism. While it is the national governments that nominate sites for inclusion in the World Heritage List, and the intergovernmental World Heritage Committee that makes the final decision on inclusion or non-inclusion, it is the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) for cultural heritage that determines whether the necessary level of 'outstanding universal value' is met. Focusing on the discourses of ICOMOS and their transmission to the local context, this book is the first in-depth historical analysis of the construction of heritage value in the context of cities illustrated through a case study of Old Rauma in Finland. The book contributes to the understanding of the discursive and constructed nature of World Heritage values as opposed to intrinsic values, critically scrutinizes the role of ICOMOS in making valuations concerning urban heritage, and sheds light on the interactions and tensions of universal and local (urban) perspectives in the practice of heritage valuation. Valuing World Heritage Cities is the first in-depth historical analysis of the construction of heritage value in the context of cities in the transnational discourses of heritage. This unique and timely contribution will be of interest to scholars and students working in Heritage Studies, Cultural Geography, Urban Studies and Tourism.

How have Jews experienced their environments and how have they engaged with specific places? How do Jewish spaces emerge, how are they contested, performed and used? With these questions in mind, this anthology focuses on the production of Jewish space and lived Jewish spaces and sheds light on their diversity, inter-connectedness and multi-dimensionality. By exploring historical and contemporary case studies from around the world, the essays collected here shift the temporal focus generally applied to Jewish civilization to a spatially oriented perspective. The reader encounters sites such as the gardens cultivated in the Ghettos during World War II, the Israeli development town of Netivot, Thornhill, an Orthodox suburb of Toronto, or new virtual sites of Jewish (Second) Life on the Internet, and learns about the Jewish landkentenish movement in Interwar Poland, the Jewish connection to the sea and the culinary landscapes of Russian Jews in New York. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, with a strong foothold in cultural history and cultural anthropology, this anthology introduces new methodological and conceptual approaches to the study of the spatial aspects of Jewish civilization.

The need for public libraries to tackle social exclusion and engage in social justice becomes ever more urgent as the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, and the very survival of public libraries in the heart of the community is open to debate. If public libraries are to develop and grow in the future and become relevant to the majority of their local communities, then they need to abandon outmoded concepts of 'excellence' and fully grasp the 'equity' agenda. This book examines the historical background to social exclusion and the strategic context in terms of government and professional policy. The authors propose a compelling manifesto for change and outline practical ways in which public libraries can be transformed into needs-based services.

Research into the ways in which the past is constructed and consumed in the present is now reaching a mature stage. This maturity derives from the general acceptance that heritage as a social and cultural construct is closely connected to the making and maintaining of identity at all spatial scales. This unique book contributes to the developing discourse by focusing on 'heritage from below' in a field where the literature on the relationship between heritage and identity has, rightly, been focused on national identity. Never before have the contemporary manifestations and the theoretical structuring framework of the idea of heritage from below been discussed in the depth offered by this book. The authors first establish the concept and then engage with the actual practice and practitioners of heritage from below in the UK, Europe, Australia and North America.

Blogging and other types of social media such as wikis and social networking sites have transformed the way we use the internet in recent years. It is a transformation that business is eager to exploit. In order to do so, a clear commercial strategy needs to be established; does your organization wish to use the media actively as a business tool, or do you need to respond to the use of social media by others? Blogging and Other Social Media will address this question with practical guidance on using social media as well as the risks associated with it. A collaboration by leading thinkers and business users of social media, the book contains detailed and practical advice on the various forms of social media - their applications, advantages and disadvantages, how these technologies are evolving, and whether or not their use will benefit your business. The section covering social media and the law explains the risks and remedies related to abuse of copyright, defamation, privacy, data protection and user contracts as well as the opportunities and threats for online reputation. If you are looking to encourage your employees but want to protect your business from the threats this emerging media presents, get a copy of this practical guide and study it before you start including social media as part of your corporate marketing or communications strategy.

The performance of heritage takes place in prestigious institutions such as museums and archives, in officially sanctioned spaces such as jubilees and public monuments, but also in more mundane, ephemeral and banal cultural practices, such as naming of phenomena, viewing exhibitions or walking in the countryside. This volume examines the performance of Nordic heritage and the shaping of the very idea of Norden in diverse contexts in North America, the Baltic and the Nordic countries and examines the importance of these places as sites for creating and preserving cultural heritage. Offering rich perspectives on a part of Europe which has not been the centre of discussion in the Anglophone world, this volume will be of value to a wide readership, including cultural historians, museum practitioners, policy-makers and scholars of heritage, ethnology and folkloristics.

Sweeping changes have taken place in the financial sector during the twentieth century. Two of the most notable changes have been the growth of global markets and institutions, and the introduction of computerisation. This volume charts the course of concentration and internationalisation in banking and also examines the influence and implications of new technologies on the industry's record-keeping practices. The exploration of concentration and internationalisation begins in the late nineteenth century and examines the effect of a wide range of factors, from macro-economic influences such as the liquidity crisis of the 1930s and the oil price rises of the 1970s, to the role of national regulation in the creation of financial markets and innovative products. The role of individual banks and their particular policies is also brought into focus. Some of Europe's most eminent bankers provide a contemporary dimension by discussing possible future developments in continental banking.

Collaboration within digital humanities is both a pertinent and a pressing topic as the traditional mode of the humanist, working alone in his or her study, is supplemented by explicitly co-operative, interdependent and collaborative research. This is particularly true where computational methods are employed in large-scale digital humanities projects. This book, which celebrates the contributions of Harold Short to this field, presents fourteen essays by leading authors in the digital humanities. It addresses several issues of collaboration, from the multiple perspectives of institutions, projects and individual researchers.

The past hundred years of Europe are distilled in the experiences of the citizens of Strasbourg. From the turn of the twentieth century until 1945, Europe's ruling idea of nationalism rendered Strasbourg/StraAYburg the prize in a tug-of-war between the two greatest continental powers, France and Germany. Then, in the immediate post-war period, ideals for European unity set up various European institutions, some headquartered in Strasbourg, which have gradually created a partially supranational Europe. At the end of the 1950s, a third theme arises: the large-scale settling in Strasbourg and other such richer, western European cities of persons from poorer lands, frequently ex-colonial territories, whose appearance and cultural practices render them essentially "different" to local eyes: expressions of racism thereby jostle with professions of multiculturalism. Now in the globalisation era, the issue of "immigration" has broadened yet further into transnationalism: the experience of persons who are embedded in varying manner in both Strasbourg and in their land of origin. Based on in-depth, lively interviews with 80 men and 80 women ranging from 101 to 20 years, and from all over the world (France, Germany, Alsace-Lorraine, Portugal, Italy, ex-Yugoslavia, Albania, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Cameroon, and Afghanistan amongst other countries), the author draws out of these compelling testimonies all sorts of compelling insights into issues of identity, race, nationality, culture, politics, heritage and representation, giving a unique and valuable view of what it means (and has meant over the past century) to be a European.

The cultural and narrative turn has had a considerable impact upon research in the social sciences as well as in the arts and humanities, with Ken Plummer's Documents of Life constituting a central text in the turn towards to narrative, biographical and qualitative methodologies, challenging and changing the nature of research in sociology and further afield. Bringing together the latest research on auto/biographical and narrative methods, Documents of Life Revisited offers a sympathetic yet critical engagement with Plummer's work, exploring a range of different kinds of life documents and delineating a critical humanist methodology for researching and writing about these. A rich examination of the methods and methodologies associated with contemporary research in the social sciences and humanities, this book will be of interest to those concerned with the use and importance of biographical and narrative sources and documents of life investigations. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, social anthropologists and geographers, as well as scholars of cultural studies and cultural history, literary studies and library, archive and cultural management, social policy and medical studies.

Offering a wide range of critical perspectives, this volume explores the moral, ideological and literary landscapes in fiction and other cultural productions aimed at young adults. Topics examined are adolescence and the natural world, nationhood and identity, the mapping of sexual awakening onto postcolonial awareness, hybridity and trans-racial romance, transgressive sexuality, the sexually abused adolescent body, music as a code for identity formation, representations of adolescent emotion, and what neuroscience research tells us about young adult readers, writers, and young artists. Throughout, the volume explores the ways writers configure their adolescent protagonists as awkward, alienated, rebellious and unhappy, so that the figure of the young adult becomes a symbol of wider political and societal concerns. Examining in depth significant contemporary novels, including those by Julia Alvarez, Stephenie Meyer, Tamora Pierce, Malorie Blackman and Meg Rosoff, among others, Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture illuminates the ways in which the cultural constructions 'adolescent' and 'young adult fiction' share some of society's most painful anxieties and contradictions.

There has been much academic interest in the role of museums as places where understanding of the past is shaped and legitimised for a wide and increasingly diverse public. This book focuses on the museum representations of the Highland Clearances - a much neglected aspect of one of the most disputed and politically-charged issues in modern Scottish history. Drawing together a range of inter-disciplinary themes and notions, it considers the cultural legacy of the period, brings to light the socially and historically conditioned meanings and values encapsulated in museum narratives of the Clearances, and shows the significance of collective memory in the negotiations inherent in heritage work. Examining both national and local museums in Scotland and concluding with comparisons with Australian museums of migration, Dynamics of Heritage contributes to our understanding of the processes of heritage construction, and its relationship to issues of memory and other modes of engagement with the past.

Taking the significant Faro Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (Council of Europe 2005) as its starting point, this book presents pragmatic views on the rise of the local and the everyday within cultural heritage discourse. Bringing together a range of case studies within a broad geographic context, it examines ways in which authorised or 'expert' views of heritage can be challenged, and recognises how everyone has expertise in familiarity with their local environment. The book concludes that local agenda and everyday places matter, and examines how a realignment of heritage practice to accommodate such things could usefully contribute to more inclusive and socially relevant cultural agenda.

This volume brings together an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars to discuss frameworks of value in relation to the preservation of historic environments. Starting from the premise that heritage values are culturally and historically constructed, the book examines the effects of pluralist frameworks of value on how preservation is conceived. It questions the social and economic consequences of constructions of value and how to balance a responsive, democratic conception of heritage with the pressure to deliver on social and economic objectives. It also describes the practicalities of managing the uncertainty and fluidity of the widely varying conceptions of heritage.

This ambitious and innovative volume stretches over time and space, over the history of modernity in relation to antiquity, between East and West, to offer insights into what the author terms the 'geographical unconscious.' She argues that, by tapping into this, we can contribute towards the reinstatement of some kind of morality and justice in today's troubled world. Approaching selected moments from ancient times to the present of Greek cultural and aesthetic geographies on the basis of a wide range of sources, the book examines diachronic spatiotemporal flows, some of which are mainly cultural, others urban or landscape-related, in conjunction with parallel currents of change and key issues of our time in the West more generally, but also in the East. In doing so, The Geographical Unconscious reflects on visual and spatial perceptions through the ages; it re-considers selective affinities plus differences and identifies enduring age-old themes, while stressing the deep ancient wisdom, the disregarded relevance of the aesthetic, and the unity between human senses, nature, and space. The analysis provides new insights towards the spatial complexities of the current age, the idea of Europe, of the East, the West, and their interrelations, as well as the notion of modernity.

In Participative Transformation, Roger Klev and Morten Levin insist that participative learning and developmental processes are essential in organizational change. They focus on introducing the kind of learning and development that shapes a self-sustaining developmental process that is an integral part of the daily activities of an organisation. This process is essentially one of collective reflection in order to develop alternatives for action, experimentation to achieve desired goals, then collective reflection on the results achieved. Reflection on own practice can contribute to direct improvements of own practice, but may also contribute to new practices, new frameworks of understanding, and to processes involving other participants and fields of interaction. The first part of the book provides an introduction to participative change management and particularly to the concept of co-generative learning inherited from action research, in which change becomes a joint management and employee learning, development, and knowledge creating process. In the second part, the focus of each chapter is on an aspect of the practice of leading change. There is practical guidance for leaders, internal problem owners, external change agents, or action researchers on how employees can be actively engaged in shaping their own work conditions. Readers will learn how experiencing negative results as well as success can form a basis for continued development, even on how to handle an organisational development process when it is in terminal trouble, to ensure there is still learning from it.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Universal Postal Union (UPU) are the two major international organisations that are involved in the regulation of international communications. The ITU deals with electronic communications including radio. The UPU deals with mail. As such, both organisations are of major importance in modern life. This volume provides an up-to-date analysis of their development from inception to the present as they have responded to technical and political change. It also makes suggestions for the future. The volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers and students, policy-makers, government officials and administrators, and legal staff in telecommunication and postal organisations.

What shapes the role of Information and Communication Technologies in our everyday life? Despite the speed with which information and communication technologies such as the PC, mobile telephone and internet have found their way into society, there remains a good deal of debate surrounding their adoption and use. Through empirical studies covering a broad range of everyday life and work settings, this volume provides grounded insights into the social dynamics influencing how ICTs are both shaped and experienced. Specifically, the book examines the contributions of diverse disciplines to our understanding of these processes, the symbolic nature of technologies, the influence of design on the experience of ICTs, the role of users in influencing that design, the social constraints affecting the use of those technologies, and strategies for evaluating the social consequences of ICT innovations.

Cultural sustainability is a very important aspect of the overall sustainability framework and is regarded as the fourth pillar alongside the other three: environmental, economic, and social sustainability. However, the concept is neither fully explored, nor widely accepted or recognized. This book elicits the interplay of nature-culture-architecture and theorizes the concept of cultural sustainability and culturally sustainable architecture. It identifies four key themes in Chinese philosophy: Harmony with Heaven, Harmony with Earth, Harmony with Humans, and Harmony with Self, along with Greek philosopher Aristotle's physics: form, space, matter, and time, it sets them as criteria to evaluate the renewed and new courtyard housing projects constructed in China since the 1990s. Using an innovative architectural and social science approach, this book examines the political, economic, social, and spatial factors that affect cultural sustainability. Supported by a multiplicity of data including: field surveys, interviews with residents, architects, and planners, time diaries, drawings, photos, planning documents, observation notes, and real estate brochures, the book proposes new courtyard garden house design strategies that promote healthy communities and human care for one another, a concept that is universally applicable. The volume is a first opportunity to take a holistic view, to encompass eastern and western, tangible and intangible, cultures in the theorization of cultural sustainability and culturally sustainable architecture. It is a comprehensive contribution to architectural theory.

The new mobilities paradigm has yet to have the same impact on archaeology as it has in other disciplines in the social sciences - on geography, sociology and anthropology in particular - yet mobility is fundamental to archaeology: all people move. Moving away from archaeology's traditional focus upon place or location, this volume treats mobility as a central theme in archaeology. The chapters are wide-ranging and methodological as well as theoretical, focusing on the flows of people, ideas, objects and information in the past; they also focus on archaeology's distinctiveness. Drawing on a wealth of archaeological evidence for movement, from paths, monuments, rock art and boats, to skeletal and DNA evidence, Past Mobilities presents research from a range of examples from around the world to explore the relationship between archaeology and movement, thus adding an archaeological voice to the broader mobilities discussion. As such, it will be of interest not only to archaeologists and historians, but also to sociologists, geographers and anthropologists.

Uniting a team of international and interdisciplinary scholars, this volume considers the views of early twentieth-century European thinkers on the creation, dissemination and management of publicly available information. Interdisciplinary in perspective, the volume reflects the nature of the thinkers discussed, including Otto Neurath, Patrick Geddes, the English Fabians, Paul Otlet, Wilhelm Ostwald and H. G. Wells. The work also charts the interest since the latter part of the nineteenth century in finding new ways to think about and to manage the growing body of available information in order to achieve aims such as the advancement of Western civilization, the alleviation of inequalities across classes and countries, and the promotion of peaceful coexistence between nations. In doing so, the contributors provide a novel historical context for assessing widely-held assumptions about today's globalized, 'post modern' information society. This volume will interest all who are curious about the creation of a modern networked information society.

The World Wide Web is truly astounding. It has changed the way we interact, learn and innovate. It is the largest sociotechnical system humankind has created and is advancing at a pace that leaves most in awe. It is an unavoidable fact that the future of the world is now inextricably linked to the future of the Web. Almost every day it appears to change, to get better and increase its hold on us. For all this we are starting to see underlying stability emerge. The way that Web sites rank in terms of popularity, for example, appears to follow laws with which we are familiar. What is fascinating is that these laws were first discovered, not in fields like computer science or information technology, but in what we regard as more fundamental disciplines like biology, physics and mathematics. Consequently the Web, although synthetic at its surface, seems to be quite 'natural' deeper down, and one of the driving aims of the new field of Web Science is to discover how far down such 'naturalness' goes. If the Web is natural to its core, that raises some fundamental questions. It forces us, for example, to ask if the central properties of the Web might be more elemental than the truths we cling to from our understandings of the physical world. In essence, it demands that we question the very nature of information. Understanding Information and Computation is about such questions and one possible route to potentially mind-blowing answers.

Overuse of the internet is often characterized as problematic, disruptive, or addictive, with stories frequently claiming that online use interferes with relationships, or that 'excessive' time in front of computer screens is unhealthy. The Multiplicities of Internet Addiction contests the claim that computers - specifically Internet use - are addictive, arguing that use of the Internet is now a form of everyday leisure engaged in by many people in Western society. Offering an analysis of the nature of addiction alongside a detailed empirical study of home computer use, this book will be of interest not only to sociologists of culture and popular culture, but also to scholars of media, ICT and education.