In post-industrial societies more and more people earn an income in creative knowledge work, a highly flexible labour market segment that demands a geographically mobile workforce. Creative knowledge work is based on an understanding of language, culture and symbolic meanings. This can best be obtained through local and national embeddedness. Yet, this necessity for embeddedness stands in contrast to the demand in geographical mobility. How is this contradiction solved by individuals? What new forms of place attachment does this bring about? This book introduces a showcase of 25 multilocal creative knowledge workers, who live in different countries at the same time. It investigates how continuous mobility becomes part of their lifeworld, and how it changes their feelings of belonging and practices of place attachment. Applying an innovative methodological mix of social phenomenology, hermeneutics and mental mapping, this book takes a detailed look at biographies and the role of places in mobile lifeworlds. Plug&Play Places brings forth the idea that places have to be understood as individual items, which are configured and then plugged into the 'system' of the own lifeworld. They can be 'played' without great effort once an individual needs to make use of them. This new type of place attachment is a form of subjective standardization of place, which complements the well-known models of objective standardization of places. Plug&Play Places is relevant for scientists who deal with mobility and its impact on individual lifeworlds, with transnational multilocality and with flexibilized labour markets. Furthermore, the book provides a detailed qualitative perspective which can enrich the explanations of quantitative research in the same field. It is an interesting reading also for practitioners engaged in urban planning, housing and real estate development. Robert Nadler holds a doctoral degree in Urban and Local European Studies from the University of Milan-Bicocca. He is a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography and published on creative industries, multilocality and labour mobility.

This book assesses recent migration patterns in Europe, which have significantly included 'return migration' against the stream of East-West migration. Since the Eastern enlargement of the EU, many regions of Central and Eastern European have experienced a loss of human resources in core industries, raising concerns about social, economic and territorial cohesion in the region. The success rates of national and regional governmental policy aiming to retain or re-attract skilled workers have been variable, yet return migration has emerged as a major element of migration flows. Bringing together leading researchers on this important topic in contemporary European geography, the contributors analyse a series of key issues. These include: theoretical frameworks in the field of return migration; the nexus between return migration and regional development; the effects of the global and European crisis on emigration and return migration; non-economic motivations for emigration and return; the intergenerational character of return migration, and; the reintegration of return migrants into post-socialist societies. Taken together, the chapters see return migrants as important agents of change, innovation and economic growth. The book will be of great interest for scholars and students of human, economic and political geography.

It can slowly drain the life force from your body over time. Or kill swiftly without warning. But you will never find it on a medical chart or see it listed on a death certificate. It's called stress. It exacts a tremendous toll on our lives. It saps our strength, robs our youth and makes us old before our time. We encounter it day in and day out, yet do little, if anything about it. It's no wonder. In today's 'pressure cooker society', the average lunch hour lasts about 11 minutes. Dinner is often consumed in less than 6 minutes (usually seated in front of the television). The average workday can last 10 hours or more. We seem to be living in a society where there's virtually no time for quality time. Strictly speaking, stress itself is not among the direct causes of ageing, yet it plays an extremely important role in the ageing process. It is a powerful force that serves as a catalyst in every known mechanism that causes us to age. Readers might be surprised to find out that this book has as much to do with ageing, life extension and specific measures we can take to postpone the inevitable as it does with stress. The fact is that stress and ageing are inextricably bound together.