The concept of "environment" refers to the physical surroundings of human societies. However, the word "environment" is nearly always used in the context of problematic environmental problems and conditions. This book examines different ways in which social scientists study environmental change and environmental problems. History and geography of the relationship between environment and society is explored, as well as social dilemmas and cultural considerations faced when confronting environmental issues. Society's perception of, and response to, environment and risk are examined in detail. Causes of local and global environmental problems, together with the policies implemented to control them and how these affect, and are affected by, the interests of organizations, are also considered.
"Society and Its" "Environment: An Introduction" is the completely revised, expanded, and internationalized edition of Tellegen and Wolsinks's renowned Dutch textbook.

Hardbound. Volume 5 covers many ethical problems in bioethics from the relevance of the law in making medical decisions, to genetics, and to assisted reproduction. Authors apply ethical theory, meta-ethical theory and valuational perspectives to a variety of ethical issues.

Part I of Volume 34 of "Studies in Symbolic Interaction" contains 12 outstanding contributions by leading activist scholars on Commodity Racism, Chief Illiniwek, and Native American Sport Mascots. Part II, New Interpretative Works, contain seven performance narratives - black womanhood, masculinity, whiteness, and gender, sexual violation, old civilization and democratic citizenship.

We are in a race against time to save urban children from educational failure and to reform urban school systems before people give up on them. The authors examine the effectiveness of three reform approaches: systems reform, mayoral influence, and external state or federal intervention, using case studies from seven large cities, as well as state and national trends.

The social and economic transformation of large American cities after World War II laid the seeds for the crisis in urban education that has festered and grown since the 1950s. Decades of appalling test scores and failure rates, and of unsuccessful piecemeal efforts to improve urban education, have led the public and policymakers to embrace radical solutions to reform.

Three approaches to the reform of urban school governance are discussed and analyzed, using data from seven large cities (Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and New York), national trends, and a statewide analysis of Maryland's school accountability system. The first approach, systems reform, focuses on improving the governance of urban education by overcoming policy fragmentation through standards for student performance, student assessments, and accountability, among other things. Strong mayoral roles offer a second reform approach that largely reverses the Progressive-era reforms of the last century separating schools from city politics. Its supporters believe urban mayors can restore accountability, stability, and political support for urban schools. The third reform approach assumes that external intervention by federal or state authorities is needed to restore accountability and improve system performance.

Once known for his historically significant landmark decisions on civil rights, free speech, the right-to-die, and for banning discrimination, New York Chief Judge Sol Wachtler rose to the top of his profession and was a high roller in state politics a potential candidate for governor. But in a matter of months, this rising judicial star exploded in a whirlwind of scandal over an affair with socialite Joy Silverman.
Award-winning Albany Times Union legal reporter John M. Caher has followed Wachtler's career, the stalking scandal that led to his ignominious fall, and the former judge's efforts to redeem his reputation. Despite the media's feeding frenzy over Wachtler's infamous arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment, the judge's amazing life deserves a biography. With Wachtler's full cooperation, Caher offers an objective look at the life and mind of the most powerful judge on the New York State bench. Without excuses he closely examines and explains the dark side that doomed Wachtler, toppling him from the mountain where he had once reigned supreme.
King of the Mountain is a forthright picture of Wachtler's persecuted boyhood in North Carolina, his early years in law, his rise to the top of New York political circles, and his appointment as chief judge by Gov. Mario Cuomo. Caher chronicles Wachtler's impact on the national scene, through his judicial and administrative decisions, and his role in shaping the court and influencing other judges to follow his ground-breaking lead, the steamy affair, and his efforts to rise from the ashes of disgrace and shame.

What role does justice play in the formation of public opinion and the scholarly debates about social problems? Does the perception of injustice force problems to appear on the political agenda? Does the perception of an injustice give momentum to social change? Or are violations of self-interest or threats to one's material welfare the more important factors? Or are empathy-driven concerns for the needy and the disadvan taged motivations to solve societal problems? What is known about the role justice concerns play in leadership? In several chapters of this volume, justice concerns and justice motives are viewed in relation to other concerns and motivations; welfare, self-interest, altruism. It is argued that the consensus of political theorists converges on mutual advantage as the main criterion of acceptable solutions to solving socie tal problems. In economics, self-interest is considered the driving force and provides the criterion of acceptable solutions. Sociological and social psychological exchange theories share these basic assumptions. Thus, questions are raised and answered concerning how justice and these other important motives appear in the analyses of societal prob lems and the search for solutions. Moreover, in addition to the issue of conflicting motives-self interest, altruism, justice-it is commonly recognized that the definition of what is just and what is unjust is open to question. In public as well as in scientific dialogues, diverging views about justice have to be integrated or decided upon."

Sport has long held a special place in the affections of western industrial societies. This status has protected sport from critical scrutiny and meant that social inequalities and other problems, such as sexual harassment and abuse, have all-too-often been ignored or tacitly condoned. Further, general research on institutional sex offending has been much slower to develop than individual, pathological analyses. There is reason to believe that sport research could contribute to a wider understanding of institutional abuse. But for that to happen there needs to be a concerted effort by both sport and non-sport researchers to share their work more often and more openly. The sport-based researchers whose work is reported here bring many different approaches to this work. It is their hope that this book will take this work to a wider audience, both to increase awareness of sexual abuse in extra-familial settings and to attract critical interest in the sharing of research perspectives between those working inside and outside sport. CONTENTS: Sexual harassment and abuse in sport: The research context Celia Brackenridge and Kari Fasting . Prevalence of sexual abuse in organised competitive sport in Australia Trisha Leahy, Grace Pretty and Gershon Tenenbaum . coping with sexual harassment in sport: Experiences of elite female athletes Kari Fasting, Celia Brackenridge and Kristin Walseth . Running the gauntlet: An examination of initiation/hazing and sexual abuse in sport Sandra Kirby and Glen Wintrup . Sexual harassment of women in athletics vs academia Karin Volkwein, Frauke Schnell, Shannon Devlin, Michele Mitchell and Jennifer Sutera . Defining appropriateness in coach-athlete sexual relationships: The voice of coaches Joy Bringer, Celia Brackenridge and Lynne Johnston . The Child Protection in Sport Unit Steve Boocock . Reflections on the special issue on sport: implications for education and professional practice Carole Oglesby . Review essay: Three books on sexual harassment and abuse in sport Keith Lyons (plus extensive bibliography, list of websites and other resources)

Food activism is core to the contemporary study of food - there are numerous foodscapes which exist within the umbrella definition of food activism from farmer's markets, organic food movements to Fair Trade. This highly original book focuses on one key emerging foodscape dominating the Italian alternative food network (AFN) scene: GAS (gruppi di acquisto solidale or solidarity-based purchase groups) and explores the innovative social dynamics underlying these networks and the reasons behind their success. Based on a detailed 'insider' ethnography, this study interprets the principles behind these movements and key themes such as collective buying, relationships with local producers and consumers, financial management, to the everyday political and practical negotiation involving GAS groups. Vitally, the author demonstrates how GAS processes are key to providing survival strategies for small farms, local food chains and sustainable agriculture as a whole. Beyond Alternative Food Networks offers a fresh and engaged approach to this area, demonstrating the capacity for individuals to join organised forms of alternative political ecologies and impact upon their local food systems and practices. These social groups help to create new economic circuits that help promote sustainability, both for the environment and labor practices. Beyond Alternative Food Networks provides original insight and in-depth analysis of the alternative food network now thriving in Italy, and highlights ways such networks become embedded in active citizenship practices, cooperative relationships, and social networks.

As entertainers, corporations, and even the government pander to the lowest common denominator, American life becomes increasingly vicarious, prefabricated, and bereft of meaning. This book examines contemporary American consciousness, considering the factors that have driven society toward gossip and sensationalism at the cost of substance and depth. Celebrity news, video games, cookie-cutter schools, and shopping, shopping, shopping. As entertainers, corporations, and even the government pander to the lowest common denominator, American life becomes increasingly vicarious, prefabricated, and bereft of meaning. This book examines contemporary American consciousness, considering the factors that have driven society toward gossip and sensationalism at the cost of substance and depth. Arden discusses the growing epidemic of acrimony, superficiality, attention deficit disorder, and complaints of ennui. He targets the reasons why American children have expressed their confused rage with deadly weapons, why a president boasts that he earned Cs in college, and why society has drifted into craving entertainment laced with violence and cheap thrills. The book is provocative reading for concerned citizens, as well as for scholars and researchers involved with contemporary American culture and society.

The articles here are not only about time, they are investigations from a specific temporal perspective: the calendrical event of the millennium. This arbitrary marker has provided a challenge and focus to the International Society for the Study of Time and to thinkers in all disciplines to take stock of what has gone before and what lies ahead, approaching the event of the millennium from the standpoint of time itself, and asking critical questions about the nature and experience of time.

Divided into six areas, including literature and language, music, psychology, sociology, history, and marking time, the collection is specific in content and broad in implication. Each article makes a contribution to scholarship within an individual discipline, and yet each transcends the bounds of discipline in its approach to broader issues involving the study of time. There is no other source like The Study of Time series that focuses so intensely on the nature and experience of time from diverse perspectives in all academic disciplines. This volume reveals the range and magnitude of intellectual endeavor in interdisciplinary research inspired by the enduring human fascination with time.

The purpose of this volume is to bring together a set of chapters that investigate the communication practices through which Chinese societies are creating their civil foundations for the next millennium. Civic Discourse, Civil Society, and Chinese Communities, reflects both the emphasis on analyzing specific discursive practices in particular Chinese societies and on understanding the role that discursive practices play in the development of civil society more generally.

How does religion maintain or challenge discourses on national identity? What are the roles that religion plays on all sides - from Islamophobia of the radical right to the Christian alliances on both sides of the Atlantic, to the Islamic beliefs and practices of European citizens as well as migrant communities - in the constitution of Fortress Europe? Are there any alliances shaping between belief and unbelief on either side of the battle for the future of Europe? These questions and more motivate the chapters in this timely interdisciplinary collection, with contributions focusing on diverse contexts throughout Europe involving a broad range of religious identifications and actors.

DESCRIPTION: This volume of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society presents a diverse array of articles by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars. Their work spans the social sciences, humanities, and law. It examines new perspectives on the relationship of law and values and race and the law. The articles published here exemplify the exciting and innovative work now being done in interdisciplinary legal scholarship. TABLE OF CONTENTS: List of contributors; Law and Values: Interpretive freedom and divine law: early rabbinic renderings of divine justice (C. Halberstam); Rawls' law of peoples: an expansion of the prioritization of political over religious values (E. Carpenter); Post modernity and the fading of individual responsibility (J. Krapp); Race in Law; Passing phantasms/sanctioning perfomativities: (re)reading white masculinity in Rhinelander v. Rhine lander (N. Hers); Tortious race, race torts: hate speech, intentional infliction, and the problem of harm (P.L. Rivers); Before or against the law? Citizens' legal beliefs and experiences as death penalty jurors (B. Steiner).

The book develops a practical approach to public policy issues that have continued to be intractable because of a lack of emphasis on transcultural understanding. Sustained examples help to increase the readability and the accessibility of theory and methodology.
The key themes address the issue that:
-Management needs to be more systemic. Critical Systemic Praxis is the process whereby we find ways to work across discipline areas and sectoral areas, in order to address complex social, political, economic and environmental problems.
-The way we define and address problems depends on an ability to work with, rather than within knowledge areas.
-By introducing the notion of governance we can extend traditional management from an organisational context to an inter-organisational context and locate governance as the goal for sustainable social and environmental justice.

The core aspects of praxis are:
-Respectful listening and dialogue to set up appropriate contexts for participatory design.
-Participatory designs based on participatory action research to map tacit and explicit knowledge of participants (professional and ordinary citizens).
-Strategic decision making across discipline areas, cultural contexts and knowledge areas.
-Action learning to transfer the policy and practice learnings.
-Mainstreaming the approach to governance in the social, political, economic and environmental sectors. The book develops a systemic approach to public policy issues. Examples are used throughout to exemplify theory. The integrated approach to policy and practice is ideally suited to addressing the socio-economic and environmental issues.

This book offers a geographic dimension to the study of innovation and product commercialization. Building on the literature in economics and geography, this book demonstrates that product innovation clusters spatially in regions which provide concentrations of the knowledge needed for the commercialization process. The book develops a conceptual model which links the location of new product innovations to the sources of these knowledge inputs. The geographic concentration of this knowledge fonns a technological infrastructure which promotes infonnation transfers, and lowers the risks and the costs of engaging in innovative activity. Empirical estimation confinns that the location of product innovation is related to the underlying technological infrastructure, and that the location of the knowledge inputs are mutually reinforcing in defining a region's competitive advantage. The book concludes by considering the policy implications of these fmdings for both private finns and state governments. This work is intended for academics, policy practitioners and students in the fields of innovation and technological change, geography and regional science, and economic development. This work is part of a larger research effort to understand why the location of innovative activity varies spatially, specifically the externalities and increasing returns which accrue to location. xi Acknowledgements This work has benefitted greatly from discussions with friends and colleagues. I wish to specifically note the contribution of Mark Kamlet, Wes Cohen, Richard Florida, Zoltan Acs and David Audretsch. I would like to thank Gail Cohen Shaivitz for her dedication in editing the final manuscript."

There has been increasing concern during the last decade to improve the quality of working life in Europe. Many industries are seeking to improve both working conditions and job satisfaction for their employees. The Quality of Working Life examines the issues raised by quality-of-working-life experiments, explores pioneer work done in Europe, and highlights specific developments in both Western and Eastern European countries.

This volume offers one of the first systematic analyses of the rise of modern social science. Contrary to the standard accounts of various social science disciplines, the essays in this volume demonstrate that modern social science actually emerged during the critical period between 1750 and 1850. It is shown that the social sciences were a crucial element in the conceptual and epistemic revolution, which parallelled and partly underpinned the political and economic transformations of the modern world. From a consistently comparative perspective, a group of internationally leading scholars takes up fundamental issues such as the role of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the shaping of the social sciences, the changing relationships between political theory and moral discourse, the profound transformation of philosophy, and the constitution of political economy and statistics.

John Mingers' new volume, Self-Producing Systems: Implications and Ap plications of Autopoiesis, is a much-needed reference on autopoiesis, a subject penetrating many disciplines today. I can genuinely say that I enjoyed reading the book as it took me stage by stage through a clear and easy-to-grasp understanding of the concepts and ideas of auto poiesis and then, as the book's title suggests, on through their applica tions. I found the summary in Chapter 12 particularly useful, helping to crystalize the main points of each chapter. The book conveyed enthusi asm for the subject and stimulated my interest in it. At times the book is demanding, but only because of the breadth of the subject matter, the terms and concepts associated with its parts, and the challenge of keep ing hold of all this in the mind at once. This is an exceptional text. ROBERT L. FLOOD Hull, UK Preface In recent years Maturana's and Varela's concept of autopoiesis, origi nally a biological concept, has made a remarkable impact not just on a single area, but across widely differing disciplines such as sociology, policy science, psychotherapy, cognitive science, and law. Put very briefly, the term autopoiesis connotes the idea that certain types of sys tems exist in a particular manner-they are self-producing systems. In their operations they continuously produce their own constituents, their own components, which then participate in these same production pro cesses."

There are at least three times as many nations as states in the world today. This book addresses some of the special challenges that arise when two or more national communities re the same (multinational) state. As a work in normative political philosophy its principal aim is to evaluate the political and institutional choices of citizens and governments in states with rival nationalist discourses and nation-building projects. The first chapter takes stock of a decade of intense philosophical and sociological debates about the nature of nations and nationalism. Norman identifies points of consensus in these debates, as well as issues that do not have to be definitively resolved in order to proceed with normative theorizing. He recommends thinking of nationalism as a form of discourse, a way of arguing and mobilizing support, and not primarily as a belief in a principle. A liberal nationalist, then, is someone who uses nationalist arguments, or appeals to nationalist sentiments, in order to rally support for liberal policies. The rest of the book is taken up with the three big political and institutional choices in multinational states. First, what can political actors and governments legitimately do to shape citizens' national identity or identities? This is the core question in the ethics of nation-building, or what Norman calls national engineering. Second, how can minority and majority national communities each be given an adequate degree of self-determination, including equal rights to carry out nation-building projects, within a democratic federal state? Finally, even in a world where most national minorities cannot have their own state, how should the constitutions of multinational federations regulate secessionist politics within the rule of law and the ideals of democracy? More than a decade after Yael Tamir's ground-breaking Liberal Nationalism, Norman finds that these three great practical and institutional questions have still rarely been addressed within a comprehensive normative theory of nationalism.

This book outlines Bayesian statistical analysis in great detail, from the development of a model through the process of making statistical inference. The key feature of this book is that it covers models that are most commonly used in social science research - including the linear regression model, generalized linear models, hierarchical models, and multivariate regression models - and it thoroughly develops each real-data example in painstaking detail.

"This well-crafted anthology provides us with rich material to stretch our thinking, concerning Sociology of Education, beyond the customary Eurocentric framework. It is comprehensive in scope, covering a variety of issues relevant to the educational scene in sub-Saharan Africa. The volume draws on the work of emerging and well established writers who focus on different areas that feature in the educational debate in Africa: inclusive education, school curricula, higher education, gender and equity, colonial and anti-colonial education, and African educational philosophies. It is a boon for scholars engaged not only in sociology of education but also in Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Curriculum Studies, Comparative Education, Social Theory and Philosophy of Education."--Peter Mayo, University of Malta, author of "Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education "and "Liberating Praxis,"

What are the origins of charisma? Are these the same in the various forms of public life, in politics and the media as well as in religion? This interpretation of charisma argues that the basis of charisma in all its forms must be found in the often-obscure symbolic intersection between the inner world of the charismatic and external social and political reality. As illustrations of various facets of this argument, the author provides general analyses of charisma in politics, religion and the media, as well as individual studies of Churchill, Hitler, Krishnamurti, Bialik and Chaplin. This volume is intended for use on courses in political philosophy and theory, cultural and media studies, philosophy, psychology and history.

Advances in Quality-of-Life Theory and Research is relevant to quality-of-life researchers working in the areas of Social Medicine, Sustainable Development, Social Indicators Research and Health Psychology/Behavioral Medicine.
This volume contains 14 chapters that represent a culmination of programmatic research in the science of quality of life (QOL). Each chapter offers interesting findings in different areas of QOL research and, together, the chapters reflect the very basic premise that QOL research is a broad interdisciplinary topic explored in a multidisciplinary manner. The research methods and conceptual models used by the different authors are exemplary and can induce QOL researchers to conduct future research in QOL in other cultures, geographic areas, and different socio-economic and demographic groups as well as in different QOL domains.

This volume presents articles by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars spanning the social sciences, humanities, and law. It examines new perspectives on political relationships, politics and legal reform, and law and the family.