This book presents a life-oriented approach, which is an interdisciplinary methodology proposed for cross-sectoral urban policy decisions such as transport, health, and energy policies. Improving people's quality of life (QOL) is one of the common goals of various urban policies on the one hand, while QOL is closely linked with a variety of life choices on the other. The life-oriented approach argues that life choices in different domains (e.g., residence, neighborhood, health, education, work, family life, leisure and recreation, finance, and travel behavior) are not independent of one another, and ignorance of and inability to understand interdependent life choices may result in a failure of consensus building for policy decisions. The book provides evidence about behavioral interdependencies among life domains based on both extensive literature reviews and case studies covering a broad set of life choices. This work further illustrates interbehavioral analysis frameworks with respect to various life domains, along with a rich set of future research directions. This book deals with life choices in a relatively general way. Thus, it can serve not only as a reference for research, but also as a textbook for teaching and learning in varied behavior-related disciplines.

An anthropological study that compares a central London neighborhood with a London suburb in terms of family and community life, mobility, social status, and social interaction. The main sources of the authors' information were sample interviews from the two populaces. The main themes of this book are the differences between the London suburb and the East End, and the differences between the middle and working-class residents.

What happens when previously autonomous firms from different countries, each with their own identities, routines and capabilities, come together inside a single multinational corporation? Can a cooperative strategy be established that advances the development of the multinational as a whole, or do mutual misunderstandings and the unintended consequences of strategic interaction among the players' lead instead to endemic conflict and disintegration?
This book tackles these novel and important questions through an empirical study of the strategic constitution of an 'actually existing' multinational. It does so by tracing the historical construction of the multinational corporation from the confluence of multiple formerly independent firms and analyzing the interacting web of strategies pursued by different actors within it. The analysis reveals how workers, unionists, subsidiary managers, and corporate executives pursue separate strategic games rooted in their local contexts, whose global outcome contrasts sharply with idealized views of the multinational as an integrated and coordinated organization.
By comparing these findings to those of the broader literature, the book proceeds to a theoretical examination of the challenges of managing the multinational, and the difficulties of resolving them through conventional organizational means. The authors propose new procedural solutions aimed at fostering mutual recognition and knowledge exchange within the multinational corporation, and explore how a multinational public may be created to press for the necessary reforms in corporate governance. As the success of such reforms is far from preordained, the book concludes with a seriesof alternative scenarios that illustrate the many obstacles to a smooth continuation of the globalization process.
This is an important and original study of significance for researchers, academics, and advanced students of international business, business strategy, comparative management and organizational studies.

The book presents the lectures delivered during a short course held at Urbino University in summer 2015 on qualitative theory of dynamical systems, included in the activities of the COST Action IS1104 "The EU in the new economic complex geography: models, tools and policy evaluation". It provides a basic introduction to dynamical systems and optimal control both in continuous and discrete time, as well as some numerical methods and applications in economic modelling. Economic and social systems are intrinsically dynamic, characterized by interdependence, nonlinearity and complexity, and these features can only be approached using a qualitative analysis based on the study of invariant sets (equilibrium points, limit cycles and more complex attractors, together with the boundaries of their basins of attraction), which requires a trade-off between analytical, geometrical and numerical methods. Even though the early steps of the qualitative theory of dynamical systems have been in continuous time models, in economic and social modelling discrete time is often used to describe event-driven (often decision-driven) evolving systems. The book is written for Ph.D. and master's students, post-doctoral fellows, and researchers in economics or sociology, and it only assumes a basic knowledge of calculus. However it also suggests some more advanced topics.

This book explores different approaches to defining the concept of region depending on the specific question that needs to be answered. While the typical administrative spatial data division fits certain research questions well, in many cases, defining regions in a different way is fundamental in order to obtain significant empirical evidence. The book is divided into three parts: The first part is dedicated to a methodological discussion of the concept of region and the different potential approaches from different perspectives. The problem of having sufficient information to define different regional units is always present. This justifies the second part of the book, which focuses on the techniques of ecological inference applied to estimating disaggregated data from observable aggregates. Finally, the book closes by presenting several applications that are in line with the functional areas definition in regional analysis.

Following Frederick Jackson Turner's lead, most economic historians assume the West and its people were shaped by economic determinism. This study proposes a different path. The federal government, Malone claims, opened the frontier before waves of settlers arrived by constructing a network of roads and making improvements to rivers and harbors. The book begins by analyzing federal transportation expenditures from 1800 to 1860 and then moves on to look at early federal improvement programs and their effects on determining the direction of settlement in the New West. Settlement in the New West states—Arkansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota—accelerated after the government's projects were constructed. The tracking of internal improvement expenditures in sparsely settled regions shows the federal government had a significant role in initiating growth prior to the more widely acknowledged railroad developments after mid-century.

Culture, once a center-stage concept in anthropology, is now being discussed by talk show personalities and journalists and included in a wide range of academic disciplines. In view of the myriad uses and abuse of the concept, "The Relevance of Culture" sets the record straight through a careful survey of the development of the concept of culture, and the arguments and continuing relevance of it to theoretical discussions. The authors illustrate its roles in such diverse areas as risk and technology, nursing and health care, evolution, criminology, information, economy, geography, and even the uneven the understanding of suicide.

Noted shcolars apply their wit and wisdom to illustrate and analyze the role of culture, creating a definitive picture for scholars, beginning students of cultural anthroplogy, and related social sciences.

The book presents detailed case studies examining the Rhone Basin in the Canton Valais, Switzerland and the Aconcagua Basin in Valparaiso, Chile. In order to understand and assess the interplay of complex and interlinked environmental and socio-economic issues, the author looks beyond the technology, modelling, engineering and infrastructure associated with water resources management and climate change adaptation, to assess the decision-making environment within which water and adaptation policy and practices are devised and executed."

A revolutionary new understanding of the precarious modern human-nature relationship and a path to a healthier, more sustainable world.
Amidst all the wondrous luxuries of the modern world--smartphones, fast intercontinental travel, Internet movies, fully stocked refrigerators--lies an unnerving fact that may be even more disturbing than all the environmental and social costs of our lifestyles. The fragmentations of our modern lives, our disconnections from nature and from the consequences of our actions, make it difficult to follow our own values and ethics, so we can no longer be truly ethical beings. When we buy a computer or a hamburger, our impacts ripple across the globe, and, dissociated from them, we can't quite respond. Our personal and professional choices result in damages ranging from radioactive landscapes to disappearing rainforests, but we can't quite see how.
Environmental scholar Kenneth Worthy traces the broken pathways between consumers and clean-room worker illnesses, superfund sites in Silicon Valley, and massively contaminated landscapes in rural Asian villages. His groundbreaking, psychologically based explanation confirms that our disconnections make us more destructive and that we must bear witness to nature and our consequences. "Invisible Nature "shows the way forward: how we can create more involvement in our own food production, more education about how goods are produced and waste is disposed, more direct and deliberative democracy, and greater contact with the nature that sustains us.

Financial markets have often been seen by economists as efficient mechanisms that fulfill vital functions within economies. But do financial markets really operate in such a straightforward manner? The Sociology of Financial Markets approaches financial markets from a sociological perspective. It seeks to provide an adequate sociological conceptualization of financial markets, and examine who the actors within them are, how they operate within which networks, and under which cognitive and cultural assumptions. Patterns of trading, trading room coordination, cognition and emotions, and global interaction are studied to help us better understand how markets work and the types of reasoning underlying these institutions. Financial markets also have a structural impact on the governance of social and economic institutions. Until now, sociologists have examined issues of governance mostly with respect to the legal framework of financial transactions. Contributions in this book highlight the ways in which financial markets shape the inner working and structure of corporations and their governance. Finally, the book seeks to investigate the symbolic aspects of financial markets. Financial markets affect not only economic and social structures but also societal cultural images and frameworks of meaning. Barbara Czarniawska demonstrates how representations of gender relationships are a case in point. Arguing that financial markets are not simply neutral with respect to questions of gender but enhance certain images and interpretations of men and women. Addressing many important topics from a sociological perspective for the first time, this book will be key reading for academics, researchers, and advanced students of financial markets in Business, Management, Economics, Finance and Sociology.

Inequality is becoming an urgent issue of world politics at the end of the twentieth century. Globalization is not only exacerbating the gap between rich and poor in the world but is also further dividing those states and peoples that have political power and influence from those without. While the powerful shape more `global' rules and norms about investment, military security, environmental and social policy and the like, the less powerful are becoming `rule-takers', often of rules or norms they cannot or will not enforce. The consequences for world politics are profound. The evidence presented in Inequality, Globalization, and World Politics suggests that globalization is creating sharper, more urgent problems for states and international institutions to deal with. Yet at the same time, investigations into eight core areas of world politics suggest that growing inequality is reducing the capacity of governments and existing international organizations to manage these problems effectively. The eight areas surveyed include: international order, international law, welfare and social policy, global justice, regionalism and multilateralism, environmental protection, gender equality, military power, and security.

The book aims to present "traditional features" of regional science (as geographical concepts and institutions), as well as relatively new topics such as innovation and agglomeration economies. In particular it demonstrates that, contrary to what has been argued by recent economics literature, both geography and institutions (or culture) are relevant for local development. In fact, these phenomena, along with the movement of goods and workers, are among the main reasons for persisting development differentials. These intriguing relationships are at the heart of the analysis presented in this book and form the conceptual basis for a promising institutional approach to economic geography.

Taking eleven countries in Europe, Canada, South Africa, America, Latin America and Australia, this book discusses recurring barriers to cluster development in the renewable energy sector. The authors look at the real-world dynamics and tensions between stakeholders on the ground, with a particular focus on the relationships between SMEs and other actors. This trans-regional study is unique in its scale and scope, drawing on a decade of field research to show how by learning from the successes and failures of other clusters, costs and risk can be reduced. The book fills a significant gap in the literature for policymakers, managers and economic developers in a key market.

How Europeans, Africans, and Indians created the early southern landscape Britain's colonial empire in southeastern North America relied on the cultivation and maintenance of economic and political ties with the numerous powerful Indian confederacies of the region. Those ties in turn relied on British traders adapting to Indian ideas of landscape and power. In An Empire of Small Places, Robert Paulett examines this interaction over the course of the eighteenth century, drawing attention to the ways that conceptions of space competed, overlapped, and changed. He encourages us to understand the early American South as a landscape made by interactions among American Indians, European Americans, and enslaved African American laborers. / Focusing especially on the Anglo-Creek-Chickasaw route that ran from the coast through Augusta to present-day Mississippi and Tennessee, Paulett finds that the deerskin trade produced a sense of spatial and human relationships that did not easily fit into Britain's imperial ideas and thus forced the British to consciously articulate what made for a proper realm. He develops this argument in chapters about five specific kinds of places: the imagined spaces of British maps and the lived spaces of the Savannah River, the town of Augusta, traders' paths, and trading houses. In each case, the trade's practical demands privileged Indian, African, and non-elite European attitudes toward place. After the Revolution, the new United States created a different model for the Southeast that sought to establish a new system of Indian-white relationships oriented around individual neighborhoods.

In In Exile, Jessica Dubow situates exile in a new context in which it holds both critical capacity and political potential. She not only outlines the origin of the relationship between geography and philosophy in the Judaic intellectual tradition; but also makes secular claims out of Judaism’s theological sources. Analysing key Jewish intellectual figures such as Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt, Dubow presents exile as a form of thought and action and reconsiders attachments of identity, history, time, and territory. In her unique combination of geography, philosophy and some of the key themes in Judaic thought, she has constructed more than a study of interdisciplinary fluidity. She delivers a striking case for understanding the critical imagination in spatial terms and traces this back to a fundamental – if forgotten – exilic pull at the heart of Judaic thought.

This book is a practical, step-by-step introduction to microsimulation in demography. It shows how to use Modgen, a powerful and free microsimulation platform built by Statistics Canada. The authors' hands-on explanation of model development will help readers make their own. The book teaches how to create and run a simple cohort model with a single fixed-rate event, and builds upon this concept. It introduces how to develop both a single state life table as well as a multiple increment-decrement life table using the tools provided by Modgen. The authors illustrate how to easily upgrade an existing model by adding new modules and new dimensions as determinants of a risk already modeled. The integration of a fertility module and a base population allows the user to bring new actors into the simulation and transform a cohort-based model into a population-based one. The final addition of an international migration module allows the user to accomplish fully open, multi-regional projections. This accessible introduction will be of interest to researchers and students in population studies and other social sciences. It will also appeal to anyone interested in the computational modeling of population dynamics.

This book examines wayfinding from a broad public health perspective and articulates what needs to be done to create better wayfinding for all people regardless of age, ability, or mode of transportation. Addressing both science and the human experience, the book brings together a group of international experts to examine community wayfinding from a variety of viewpoints. It first presents a critical foundation for understanding wayfinding from an individual perspective. Next, it describes relevant design principles and practices by drawing upon architecture, environmental graphic design, universal design (UD), and urban planning. The book then goes on to examine wayfinding tools and innovative technologies ranging from maps to apps to complex systems. In addition, coverage includes case studies, lessons from wayfinding improvement initiatives, and recommendations for future research, practice, and policy. Overall, the book focuses on the economic and commercial benefits of good wayfinding, its potential impact on the health of individuals and communities, as well as strategies for the journey ahead. It will appeal to numerous professionals across many disciplines from architecture and cartography to public health and urban planning. Additionally, the book can help advance a dialogue among those interested in enhancing the livability of their communities.

This is the first collection of essays in which European and American philosophers explicitly think out their respective contributions and identities as environmental thinkers in the analytic and continental traditions. The American/European, as well as Analytic/Continental collaboration here bears fruit helpful for further theorizing and research. The essays group around three well-defined areas of questioning all focusing on the amelioration/management of environmentally, historically and traditionally diminished landscapes. The first part deals with differences between New World and the Old World perspectives on nature and landscape restoration in general, the second focuses on the meaning of ecological restoration of cultural landscapes, and the third on the meaning of the wolf and of wildness. It does so in a way that the strengths of each philosophical school-continental and analytic-comes to the fore in order to supplement the other's approach. This text is open to educated readers across all disciplines, particularly those interested in restoration/adaptation ecology, the cultural construction of place and landscape, the ongoing conversation about wilderness, the challenges posed to global environmental change. The text may also be a gold mine for doctoral students looking for dissertation projects in environmental philosophy that are inclusive of continental and analytic traditions. This text is rich in innovative approaches to the questions they raise that are reasonably well thought out. The fact that the essays in each section really do resonate with one another directly is also intellectually exciting and very helpful in working out the full dimensions of each question raised in the volume.

This book offers new perspectives of transdisciplinary research, in methodological as well as theoretical respects. It provides insights in the two-fold bio-physical and the socio-cultural global embeddedness of local living conditions on the basis of selected empirical studies from Latin America, Asia, Africa, Australia and Europe. The theoretical foundations of ecological research and sustainability policies were developed at the end of the nineteenth century. They are largely based on investigations of living spaces and the evolution and differentiation of varied life forms. This perspective is embedded in the practical and theoretical European problem situations of the past and lacks social and cultural differentiation. The transformation of spatial and natural relations as a result of the globalization process is so radical that new theories are needed to solve 21st century ecological problems. Moreover, in view of the lack of an ontologically sound and promising strategy for transdisciplinary problem solving, as well as an acceptable consideration of the power of cultural schemas relating to natural living's interpretations, there is a strong need to focus on sustainable social practices, habits and routines, rather than on predominantly living spaces or eco-topes. This book elaborates on the transdisciplinary approach by reflecting on the theoretical heritage and a global perspective of sustainability, by focusing on the primary role of a social approach in sustainability research and by putting emphasis on cultural dimension of sustainability. It postulates that global sustainability is grounded in a global understanding of our everyday activities.

Buck shines a new light on China's transition to capitalism by focusing on and analyzing the development of networks between the urban and rural factories that have produced the regional economy of greater Shanghai. These networks have incorporated millions of villagers into the national and the global economy. By getting inside these networks and watching as their restructuring unfolds, Buck reveals hidden aspects of major changes: China's transition from centralized planning to market economy, the transformation of Shanghai from industrial to financial center, and a wave of privatization that has swept away the last vestiges of socialism.

This book is a detailed study of children's everyday practices in a small, deprived neighbourhood of post-socialist Bratislava, called Kopcany. It provides a novel empirical insight on what it is like to be growing up after 25 years of post-socialist transformations and questions the formation of children's agency and the multitude of resources it comes from. What happens if we accept children's practices as cornerstones of communities? What is uncovered if we examine adults' co-presence with children in everyday community spaces? With a background in youth work, the author writes from the unique position of being able to develop in-depth insights into both children's life-worlds, and practitioners' priorities and needs.

Cultural landscapes are a product ofthe interactions between humans and natural settings. They are landscapes and seascapes that are shaped by human history and land use. Socioeconomic processes especially, but also environmental changes and natural disturbances, are some of the forces that make up landscape dynamics. To understand and manage such complex landscapes, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches are necessary, emphasizing the integration of natural and social sciences and considering multiple landscape functions. The spatial patterns of Asian landscapes are strongly related to human activities and their impacts. Anthropogenic patterns and processes have created numerous traditional cultural landscapes throughout the region, and understanding them requires indigenous knowledge. Cultural landscape ecology from a uniquely Asian perspective is explored in this book, as are the management of landscapes and land-use policies. Human-dominated landscapes with long traditions, such as those described herein, provideuseful information for all ecologists, not only in Asia, to better understand the human environmental relationship and landscape sustainability. "

This book introduces the reader to local development economics and policy, with a special focus on the place-based paradigm that covers its justification, its difficulties and the types of public intervention that it suggests. The starting point for the analysis is that economic development in lagging places is not to be expected as the result of a mechanism of automatic convergence between backward and advanced regions and that, therefore, the most appropriate development policy is not to maximize competition among all agents in all sectors and places. The failure of the Washington Consensus is examined, and the two competing positions to have emerged from this failure - spatially blind interventions and place-based policies - are contrasted. The main shortcoming of spatially blind policies, namely that immobile resources that could trigger or support a development process often remain untapped or "trapped", is emphasized. The limitations of the "big push" state intervention and wage flexibility solutions to this trap are analyzed and the merits of place-based policies that support intervention and can deal with uncertainty, risk and conflict are discussed.

Mediterranean inhabitants depend on natural resources for their livelihoods. Livestock production and forestry are key sources of income yet are carried out under harsh conditions such as limited land resources, marginal agricultural conditions, isolation, and scant equipment and infrastructure. Livestock is of particular importance in mountain production systems as they convert plant biomass into useful products for humans such as milk, meat and draught power. These products are key to the regions' sustainability. The main topics discussed in this book are: human geography of Mediterranean mountain territories; livestock production and natural resources; improving the efficiency of livestock systems in Mediterranean mountain areas; applications of new technologies for environmentally sound management of livestock and natural resources; and the role livestock plays in rural development and in safeguarding natural resources.