In recent decades, due to unprecedented technological advancements, Europe has seen a move towards on-demand service economies. This has allowed the growth of self-employed professionals who are able to satisfy an increasing demand for flexible and high-skilled work. This book explores the need for reform of regulations in Europe, studying the variance in legal status, working conditions, social protection and collective representation of self-employed professionals. It provides insights into ways that policy could address these important challenges. Presenting the results of a wide-reaching European survey, this book highlights key issues being faced across Europe: the implementation of universal social protection schemes; active labour market policies to support sustainable self-employment and the renewal of social dialogue through bottom-up organisations to extend the collective representation of self-employed professionals. With its theoretically-informed, empirical and interdisciplinary comparative analysis, this book identifies and explains key strategies to resolve these challenges. This book will be of great benefit to both advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of labour and economic sociology, political science, industrial relations, human resource management and social law. It will also appeal to scholars, practitioners and policymakers concerned with the labour market and self-employment in the European context.

This book examines the role of imagination in initiating, contesting, and changing the pathways of global cooperation. Building on carefully contextualized empirical cases from diverse policy fields, regions, and historical periods, it highlights the agency of a wide range of actors in reflecting on past and present experiences and imagining future ways of collective problem solving. Chapters analyse the mobilizing, identity, cognitive, emotional, and normative effects through which imaginations shape pathways for global cooperation. Expert contributors consider the ways in which actors combine multiple layers of meaning-making through practices of staging the past and present as well as in their circulation. Exploring the contingency and open-endedness of processes of global cooperation, the book challenges more systemic and output-oriented perspectives of global governance. Its synthesis of ways in which imaginations inform processes of creating, contesting, and changing pathways for global cooperation provides a novel conceptual approach to the study of global cooperation. Interdisciplinary in approach, this authoritative book offers new ways of thinking about global cooperation to scholars and students of international relations, development studies, law and politics, international theory, global sociology, and global history as well as practitioners and policy-makers across various policy fields.

How are natures and animals integrated inclusively into research projects through Multispecies Ethnography? While preceded by a vision that seeks to question holistically how scientists can integrate natures and animals into research projects through Multispecies Ethnography, this book focuses on inter- and multidisciplinary collaboration. From an examination of the interfaces between social and natural science-oriented disciplines, a complex view of natures, humans, and animals emerges. The insights into interdependencies of different disciplines illustrate the need for a Multispecies Ethnography to analyze HumansAnimalsNaturesCultures. While the methodology is innovative and currently not widespread, the application of Multispecies Ethnography in areas of research such as climate change, species extinction, or inequalities will allow new insights. These research debates are closely interwoven, and the methodological inclusion of the agency of natures and animals and the consideration of Indigenous Knowledge allow new insights of holistic multispecies research for the different disciplines. Multispecies Ethnography allows for positivist, innovative, attentive, reflexive and complex analyses of HumansAnimalsNaturesCultures.

A Feminist Mythology takes us on a poetic journey through the canonical myths of femininity, testing them from the point of view of our modern condition. A myth is not an object, but rather a process, one that Chiara Bottici practises by exploring different variants of the myth of "womanhood" through first- and third-person prose and poetry. We follow a series of myths that morph into each other, disclosing ways of being woman that question inherited patriarchal orders. In this metamorphic world, story-telling is not just a mix of narrative, philosophical dialogues and metaphysical theorizing: it is a current that traverses all of them by overflowing the boundaries it encounters. In doing so, A Feminist Mythology proposes an alternative writing style that recovers ancient philosophical and literary traditions from the pre-Socratic philosophers and Ovid's Metamorphoses to the philosophical novellas and feminist experimental writings of the last century.