Social housing has long been delivered through mixed economy mechanisms, but there has been little focus in housing studies on what this means for housing organisations themselves. This book presents recent international research applying concepts of social enterprise and hybridity to illuminate organisational behaviour in the housing sector. It addresses critiques of the explanatory value of these concepts by exploring their underlying meanings and their application to diverse case studies worldwide. The concepts are found to be most useful where they inform dynamic analysis of hybridisation and identify underlying change mechanisms, rather than simply providing static descriptions of hybridity. Various chapters in the book show how analysis can be enriched by drawing on institutional theory to develop concepts such as competing organisational logics, trade-offs between social and commercial goals and resource transfers. The Book also looks at policy as a driver for hybridisation and to the regulatory challenges for policy systems that have come to rely on hybrid forms of delivery. A research agenda is proposed building on these conceptual frameworks to develop systematic approaches to data collection and analysis to enable clearer and more consistent meanings to emerge. This book was published as a special issue of Housing Studies.

This book represents a new direction in the study of religion and marriage by using a postmodern theoretical framework focusing on gendered discourse and culture, to examine the meaning of sacred marriage within social contexts. Drawing upon data from in-depth interviews of couples in long-term, sacred marriages living in the American Midwest, together with an analysis of Christian marriage advice manuals, Sacred Marriages explores how couples use religious and nonreligious discourses and cultures to give their marriages meaning, and how those sacred meanings are used in their daily lives and the spaces that they embody. The study shows how religious and secular beliefs are combined to formulate cultural strategies for approaching the sacralization of marriage, and how religious and nonreligious discourses and cultures are ordered, depending on circumstances and social contexts. This often results in other relationships being subordinated in favour of the sacred bond believed to exist between husband and wife. The book argues that sacred marriage is a malleable concept, as people bend religious culture to form new and altered sacred marriages during emotional extremes. A thoughtful examination of long-term Christian marriages, this volume will appeal to scholars of religion and sociology with interests in marriage and the family.

Social housing has long been delivered through mixed economy mechanisms, but there has been little focus in housing studies on what this means for housing organisations themselves. This book presents recent international research applying concepts of social enterprise and hybridity to illuminate organisational behaviour in the housing sector. It addresses critiques of the explanatory value of these concepts by exploring their underlying meanings and their application to diverse case studies worldwide. The concepts are found to be most useful where they inform dynamic analysis of hybridisation and identify underlying change mechanisms, rather than simply providing static descriptions of hybridity. Various chapters in the book show how analysis can be enriched by drawing on institutional theory to develop concepts such as competing organisational logics, trade-offs between social and commercial goals and resource transfers. The Book also looks at policy as a driver for hybridisation and to the regulatory challenges for policy systems that have come to rely on hybrid forms of delivery. A research agenda is proposed building on these conceptual frameworks to develop systematic approaches to data collection and analysis to enable clearer and more consistent meanings to emerge. This book was published as a special issue of Housing Studies.

Humans have expanded out into their solar system and the Off Earth Settlers have created a truly free society. Independent people living the life they want with no interference. But this life hangs in the balance. Living off Earth requires a great deal of energy which means a great deal of methane is needed. Luckily a ready supply is laying right here on the surface of Pluto, an icy rock at the edge of mankind's space. Timothy Krane and his crew are here, struggling constantly against the unforgiving environment and the unrelenting cold, to keep the supply line running. Everything changes when they discover a murderer among them. This is followed by a series of seemingly pointless and increasingly deadly acts of sabotage which crank up the pressure cooker they are living in. Thrust into a role he is ill prepared for, Krane must work to uncover those responsible as he tries to prevent his crew and the miners from splitting into warring factions and, as always, to keep the methane moving.

This research is concerned with the prehistory of the region which now forms the border between England and Wales. Whilst the Anglo-Welsh border is a relatively modern construct, and has shifted over time, the area is made up of distinctive topography, dividing the lowland Midland Plain from the hill country of central Wales. This also means that there are noticeable changes in both the flora and fauna of the areas to the west and east of the modern boundary. These are discussed in detail in Chapter 1, where the case is made that the region is, in the broadest sense, a natural borderland and a valid unit of study. Chapter 2 sets out to discuss the ways in which people living within landscapes which are both topographically and archaeologically distinct may have thought about their world and their relationship to other people within it. Chapters 3 to 5 explore the networks of production, distribution and consumption. The final chapter considers the issues raised in the earlier chapters, discuss the ways in which the landscape was used and perceived and how this changed over time. The relationships between extraction and deposition; the uses of stone and metal; the wider links between classes of objects; local traditions of production and consumption and the links between the study area and the wider world are all considered. The raw data on which this discussion is based is presented as a series of Appendices.

Wet, wooded and largely unattractive is how some have characterised the northern Midlands in the Bronze Age. In this thesis, David Mullin undertakes an archaeological investigation of the ill-studied regions of Cheshire, northern Shropshire and northern Staffordshire. Despite the paucity of work carried out to investigate the prehistory of the area, Mullin pieces together evidence for Bronze Age burials, lithics, settlements, the exploitation of the landscape, metalwork and metal production. He argues for the importance of social networks, memory and attachments to the landscape in the Bronze Age and highlights the potential of the area for more thorough archaeological research.