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Presenting multidisciplinary and global insights, this book explores the nexus between economies, institutions, and territories and how global phenomena have local consequences.It examines how original and innovative economic related processes embed themselves in societies at the local level; how boundaries between the state and the market are placed under stress by unexpected changes. It explores whether new types of elites and forms of social inequalities are emerging as a result of institutional and economic changes, and whether peripheral areas are experiencing insidious forms of economic and institutional lock-in. Presenting empirical cases and useful analytical and conceptual tools, the book makes current economic and territorial phenomena more understandable.This is an important read for students and scholars in the fields of geography, sociology, political sciences, anthropology, economics, regional science, and international relations. It is also a valuable resource for policymakers, well-educated lay readers and economic, political and international relations journalists.

Dieser Open-Access-Sammelband vereint strukturierte Erfahrungsberichte und Reflexionen von Hochschullehrenden und Studierenden in der pluralen, sozioökonomischen Hochschulbildung. Neben der konkreten Inspiration, die diese Beiträge für andere Lehrende darstellen sollen, werden mit diesem Band erste Bausteine für eine plurale, sozioökonomische Hochschuldidaktik entwickelt. Sie verfolgt das Ziel, die Reflexion der gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen und die soziale Einbettung von ökonomischen Fragestellungen zum integralen Bestandteil eines jeden wirtschaftsbezogenen Studiums zu machen.

Neuroeconomics has emerged as a paradigmatic field where neuroscience and the social sciences are integrated in one analytical and empirical approach. However, the different disciplines involved often only relate to each other via the shared object of research, and less through the constructing of precise models of integrative mechanisms.Social Neuroeconomics explores the potential of philosophical and methodological reflections in the neurosciences and the social sciences to inform those efforts at cross-disciplinary integration, with a special focus on recent contributions to mechanistic explanations. The collected essays are drawn from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, economics, sociology and philosophy, and examine the ways and methods of constructing unified conceptual frameworks that can guide empirical work and hypothesis building. This is demonstrated in a range of applications, particularly regarding finance and consumer behavior. The concept of the ‘social brain'is also explored; a multilevel framework in which complex analytical categories such as emotions or socially mediated cognitive processes connect neuronal and social phenomena in specific mechanisms that generate behavior.This book addresses a wide audience across the various disciplines, reaching from the neurosciences to the social sciences and philosophy.

This anthropological study of university governance organizations has four main purposes. It aims to describe the principles of effective faculty governance organizations and shared governance; to help mobilize opposition to a large and extremely well-funded system of political attacks aimed at destroying faculty governance organizations; to demonstrate the value of the theory of human social organizations; and to enable universities to become more effective in generating the intellectual advances we must make in order to solve the current global crisis of sustainability and political instability. Political democracy depends on an educated public, and academic democracy is integral to producing such knowledge.

This book takes up the problems of social policy, state intervention and support in the hard times of austerity introduced by the Coalition government 2010-15, and continued under the Conservative government today. At a time when the economy is growing and pay levels finally rising, the necessity for more cuts in public expenditure is fiercely contested. The scope of state services, the levels of support for people in need, and the kinds of organizations that will deliver the services, will all be profoundly affected in coming years. The authors and editors assess some of these consequences visible now in the impact that expenditure cuts and reorganization have had on many areas of social policy, and explore the direction of change in the near future.Austerity Policies evaluates a wide range of changing form of state services and the transformations involving both the recipients and those delivering the services. It considers the past, presentand future of austerity as a policy, and the problems affecting particular groups such as offenders, looked after children, and professionals such as social care workers and those engaged with domestic violence. The collection will be of interest to students and scholars of social policy, criminology, sociology, politics and media studies.

Im Zentrum des essentials stehen die aktuellen Streiks von 2014/15, die in verschiedenen Branchen des Dienstleistungssektors stattgefunden haben, so bei der Bahn, der Lufthansa, der Post und den Kitas. Die Autorin verdeutlicht in ihrer Schrift den prägnanten Unterschied dieser Streiks zu denjenigen in der Industrie. Bei Ersteren ist nicht nur das bestreikte Unternehmen betroffen, sondern unmittelbar die Gesellschaft insgesamt und vor allem die BürgerInnen: Sie müssen den in Unordnung geratenen Alltag neu ordnen, was besonders für Erwerbstätige eine enorme Herausforderung bedeutet.

The overall aim of this book, an outcome of the European FP7 FET Open NESS project, is to contribute to the ongoing effort to put the quantitative social sciences on a proper footing for the 21st century. A key focus is economics, and its implications on policy making, where the still dominant traditional approach increasingly struggles to capture the economic realities we observe in the world today - with vested interests getting too often in the way of real advances. Insights into behavioral economics and modern computing techniques have made possible both the integration of larger information sets and the exploration of disequilibrium behavior. The domain-based chapters of this work illustrate how economic theory is the only branch of social sciences which still holds to its old paradigm of an equilibrium science - an assumption that has already been relaxed in all related fields of research in the light of recent advances in complex and dynamical systems theory and relateddata mining. The other chapters give various takes on policy and decision making in this context. Written in nontechnical style throughout, with a mix of tutorial and essay-like contributions, this book will benefit all researchers, scientists, professionals and practitioners interested in learning about the'thinking in complexity'to understand how socio-economic systems really work.

Through a series of conversations with prominent theorists and leading political activists in different parts of the world, this book explores the causes of the setbacks of both the reformist and revolutionary strategies of the socialist Left. Addressing the larger questions around the agenda(s) of socialism in the era of globalization, the interviewees believe that capitalism is not sustainable in the long run, due largely to its inherent contradictions, and that a post-capitalist social world order is inevitable and attainable. Despite notable differences, what emerges from this collection of voices and perspectives is a unified call to mobilize and organize for radical change through engagement with the various social groups that could play instrumental roles in the transition beyond a capitalist social formation.

Im zweiten Band seiner Trilogie zeigt Castells die beiden großen einander entgegengesetzten Trends in unserer Welt: Globalisierung und kollektive Identitätsbildung. Die Revolution der Informationstechnologie und die Erneuerung des Kapitalismus haben die Netzwerkgesellschaft begründet, gekennzeichnet durch die global agierende Wirtschaft, durch Flexibilisierung und Unsicherheit von Arbeit und durch eine Kultur der'realen Virtualität'. Aber daneben schaffen sich Prozesse kollektiver Identitätsbildung machtvoll Ausdruck. Sie stemmen sich gegen die Globalisierung und beharren auf kultureller Eigenständigkeit. Castells beschreibt und analysiert Ursprünge, Ziele und Wirkungen übergreifender Bewegungen wie Feminismus und Ökologie ebenso wie begrenzter Bewegungen, die sich auf Religion, Nation, Ethnie oder Familie beziehen.

Der erste Band der Trilogie untersucht historisch und anhand der aktuellen Krisen die Grundbegriffe des Geldes wie Kredit, Zins, Risiko und Kapitalanlage und zeigt, wie mit ihm menschliche Zusammenarbeit organisiert werden kann bzw. könnte. Der Autor zeigt den Nutzen, den das Missverständnis vom Wert des Geldes an sich für die Marktwirtschaft hat, sieht darin aber auch das wesentliche Hindernis zu deren bewusster Veränderung.

Ronald Staples geht der Frage nach, wie eine Organisation heute entscheiden kann, was übermorgen als neu gegolten haben wird. In einer detaillierten Fallstudie rekonstruiert der Autor diese Frage als Übersetzungsprobleme. Innovationsverfahren werden als Übersetzungsleistungen verstanden, die sich aus widerstreitenden Anforderungen an die Gestaltung von Zukunft ergeben. Die Innovationssemantik zeigt sich als eine spezifische Semantik einer Gesellschaft, die ihre Zukunft gestalten muss, ohne wissen zu können, wie diese Zukunft aussehen wird.

Based on the latest scientific discoveries, this “unauthorized biography” of the Humans recounts the story of our distant ancestors during the past 6 million years, since the line of our extended family separated from that leading to modern chimpanzees. The book explains how different species evolved, both anatomically and cognitively, and describes the impacts of climatic and environmental change on this process. It also explores the nature of relationships within and between species, describes their everyday lives, and discusses how isolated individuals became members of larger social groups. The concluding chapters highlight the paramount importance of the emergence of symbolic thought and discuss its contribution to the formation of institutions, societies, and economies. The multifaceted picture that emerges will help the reader to make sense not only of “what we were”, but also of “what we are”, here and now. The book is both entertaining and rigorous in integrating results froma wide selection of disciplines. It will be particularly suitable for people with a curious and open mind, keen to overcome long-standing prejudices on man's place in nature.

This book deals with slums as a specific question and a central focus in urban planning. It radically reverses the official version of the history of world cities as narrated during decades: slums are not at the margin of the contemporary process of urbanization; they are an integral part of it. Taking slums as its central focus and regarding them as symptomatic of the ongoing transformations of the city, the book moves to the very heart of the problem in urban planning. The book presents 16 case studies that form the basis for a theory of the slum and a concrete development manual for the slum. The interdisciplinary approach to analysing slums presented in this volume enables researchers to look at social and economic dimensions as well as at the constructive and spatial aspects of slums. Both at the scientific and the pedagogical level, it allows one to recognize the efforts of the slum's residents, key players in the past, and present development of their neighborhoods, and to challenge public and private stakeholders on priorities decided in urban planning, and their mismatches when compared to the findings of experts and the demands of users. Whether one is a planner, an architect, a developer or simply an inhabitant of an emerging city, the presence of slums in one's environment – at the same time central and nonetheless incongruous – makes a person ask questions. Today, it is out of the question to be satisfied with the assumption of the marginality of slums, or of the incongruous nature of their existence. Slums are now fully part of the urban landscape, contributing to the identity and the urbanism of cities and their stakeholders.

This edited volume seeks to enhance our understanding of the concepts of space and place in the study of digital work. It argues that while digital work is often presented as'placeless', work always takes place somewhere with a certain degree of local embeddedness. Contributors to this collection address restructuring processes that bring about delocalised digital work and point out limitations to dislocation inherent in the work itself, and the social relations or the physical artefacts involved. Exploring the dynamics of global value chains and shifts in the international division of labour, this book explores the impact these have on employment and working conditions, workers'agency in shaping and coping with changes in work, and the new competencies needed in virtual organisational environments. Combining different disciplinary perspectives, the volume teases out the spatial aspects of digital work at different scales ranging from team level to that of globalproduction networks.

Anhand einer bundesweiten empirischen Studie liefert das vorliegende Buch einen fundierten Überblick über die gewerblichen Produktivgenossenschaften - sowie die beschäftigungsorientierten Sozialgenossenschaften - in Deutschland und deren beschäftigten Mitglieder. Wenngleich die Genossenschaftsbewegung in Deutschland eine lange Tradition hat, dies belegen die ca. 21 Millionen Genossenschaftsmitglieder hierzulande, werden die Produktivgenossenschaften jedoch weder von der Gesellschaft noch von der Politik und Wissenschaft gebührend wahrgenommen. In manchen Ländern hingegen erfährt diese Genossenschaftsart öffentliche Anerkennung für ihre sozialpolitische Bedeutung. Das Buch beschreibt zudem den Beitrag der Produktivgenossenschaften für die Wohlfahrtspolitik in ausgewählten Ländern Europas und geht auf die historischen Hintergründe für die geringe Entfaltung dieser Genossenschaftsart in Deutschland ein.

Die Wohlfahrtsverbände als föderale Organisationen stehen unter zunehmendem Veränderungsdruck. Ihre föderale Organisationsform erfordert spezifische innovative Ansätze, um diesen Herausforderungen begegnen zu können. Der Band stellt in Grundsatzbeiträgen und Praxisberichten entsprechende Gestaltungsansätze zur Diskussion. Dem Management der Verbände wird Orientierungs- und Handlungswissen geboten für die Suche nach angemessenen Lösungen für die Ausrichtung ihrer Organisation an die neuen Rahmenbedingungen.

A richly transdisciplinary account of some fundamental characteristics of human societies and behaviorIn this book, acclaimed economist Herbert Gintis ranges widely across many fields—including economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, moral philosophy, and biology—to provide a rigorous transdisciplinary explanation of some fundamental characteristics of human societies and social behavior. Because such behavior can be understood only through transdisciplinary research, Gintis argues, Individuality and Entanglement advances the effort to unify the behavioral sciences by developing a shared analytical framework—one that bridges research on gene-culture coevolution, the rational-actor model, game theory, and complexity theory. At the same time, the book persuasively demonstrates the rich possibilities of such transdisciplinary work.Everything distinctive about human social life, Gintis argues, flows from the fact that we construct and then play social games. Indeed, society itself is a game with rules, and politics is the arena in which we affirm and change these rules. Individuality is central to our species because the rules do not change through inexorable macrosocial forces. Rather, individuals band together to change the rules. Our minds are also socially entangled, producing behavior that is socially rational, although it violates the standard rules of individually rational choice. Finally, a moral sense is essential for playing games with socially constructed rules. People generally play by the rules, are ashamed when they break the rules, and are offended when others break the rules, even in societies that lack laws, government, and jails.Throughout the book, Gintis shows that it is only by bringing together the behavioral sciences that such basic aspects of human behavior can be understood.

This book presents a collection of papers discussing especially social factors that support individuals, organizations, markets, and societies confronted with socio-economic crises. The papers were written mainly by international sociologists dealing with social resilience from different viewpoints and offering new theoretical perspectives as well as empirical facts. Why are so many researchers, politicians, and practitioners thinking and writing about resilience today? Social scientists have started only recently to deal with social resilience in various spheres. Since not long ago, resilience was strongly connected with the question of what makes individuals or ecosystems to overcome threats like disruption, catastrophes, external shocks etc. Thus, a new research perspective on resilience is offered.

In diesem Band wird das Spannungsverhältnis von Kontinuität und Wandel in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft aus einer interdisziplinären, wissenschaftlichen und praxisnahen Perspektive beleuchtet. Die Spannweite der Themen reicht hierbei von Arbeit und Beschäftigung, sozioökonomischen Transformationsprozessen auf regionaler Ebene über Veränderungen des Wohlfahrtsstaates und demografische Herausforderungen bis hin zu der Frage nach den Chancen und Grenzen wissenschaftlicher Politikberatung. Die Beiträge untersuchen sozialen Wandel in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft und nehmen zugleich die wiederkehrenden Muster gesellschaftlicher Transformationsprozesse in den Blick.Mit Beiträgen vonRasmus C. Beck, Fabian Beckmann, Jörg Bogumil, Torsten Bölting, Volker Eichener, Adalbert Evers, Rüdiger Frohn, Sigmar Gabriel, Anja Hartmann, Josef Hilbert, Bodo Hombach, Fabian Hoose, Michael Hüther, Andreas Kruse, Franz Lehner, Stephan Leibfried,Heiner Minssen, Gerhard Naegele, Michael Neitzel, Ludger Pries, Josef Schmid, Katrin Schneiders, Anna-Lena Schönauer, Klaus Schubert, Wolfgang Streeck, Christoph Strünck, Ismail Tufan, Helmut Voelzkow

Die Beiträge des Bandes analysieren unter internationaler Perspektive transdisziplinär aktuelle Prekarisierungstendenzen in verschiedenen Ländern. Sie beziehen sich auf diverse gesellschaftliche Teilbereiche. Die AutorInnen zeigen auf, wie sich Prekarität jeweils konkret in unterschiedliche soziale Strukturen einschreibt.

This open access book examines the economic, social, and psychological consequences of manufacturing plant closure at the individual level. Using an original data set of over 1,200 workers from Switzerland who lost their manufacturing jobs after the financial crisis of 2008, the author analyzes the determinants of reemployment, the sector of reemployment, and the change in wages over a two year period. In addition, coverage also explores how plant closure affects the social relationship between a displaced worker and his or her significant other, which includes a discussion of the coping strategies on the household level as well as how changes in a worker's social and occupational life affects overall satisfaction. Readers will discover that the burden of structural change disproportionately falls on the shoulders of workers aged 55 and older who often face substantial barriers when trying to return to employment. A larger portion of this group experience long-term unemployment and those who do manage to find a new job often suffer disproportionate wage loss. This result is intriguing in the context of the current demographic change and contradicts the common assumption that young and low-qualified individuals are at greatest risk of unemployment. Advanced age—and not low education—appears to be the primary obstacle to workers finding job satisfaction after being laid off because of market conditions.

Der Sammelband untersucht die Energiewende, ein in der medialen Berichterstattung regelmäßig diskutiertes Thema. Hierzu werden acht wirtschaftssoziologische Perspektiven vorgestellt, die die strukturellen Konflikte der Energiewende beleuchten und damit auf die Hürden einer ‚erfolgreichen'Umstellung der Energieproduktion und -verteilung aufmerksam machen. Dies ist der erste wirtschaftssoziologische Beitrag zur Energiewende.

This book analyzes national anti-poverty measures at a local level via a set of unique and up-to-date empirical studies of minimum income support schemes and activation measures in five European cities. In examining this'local welfare system'approach, it investigates the role that civil society organizations play, and the governance arrangements that prevail in contacts between public and civil society actors in local anti-poverty strategies. The current financial and economic crisis has caused increasing levels of poverty and unemployment, and put national minimum income protection schemes under severe strain. Combating Poverty in Local Welfare Systems therefore represents a timely and important intervention in the political and scientific debates as to whether more ‘local welfare'is the solution to the challenges facing European welfare states.

This book is about the past as well as the future in organisations in general and about an organisation's temporal contextualisation in particular. The author analyses, how organisations are able to construct a present with respect to their past and future. The study is based on an empirical case study, in which an R&D department has been followed for a six month-period in order to analyse how an organisation orients itself with respect to its past, present and future from the perspective of communication-centred social systems theory.

Das Buch widmet sich der Rekonstruktion der theoretischen Gehalte und einer immanenten Kritik der vier zentralen marktsoziologischen Konzeptionen der New Economic Sociology, verbunden mit den Namen Granovetter, White, Fligstein und Beckert. Die These lautet, dass die Ansätze ihr erklärtes Ziel, die Erklärung wirtschaftlicher als sozialer Sachverhalte, nicht verwirklichen können. Dazu werden ihre jeweiligen Inkonsistenzen und Leerstellen herausgearbeitet. Zuletzt wird gezeigt, dass nicht nur die Erklärungsstruktur der Ansätze, sondern auch ihre Erklärungslücken denen der Wirtschaftswissenschaft auf überraschende Weise ähneln.

Dieses Buch ist eine Einführung in die verhaltensorientierte Ökonomie, die auch unter den Bezeichnungen „außermarktliche Ökonomie', „Neue Politische Ökonomie'oder „Neuer Institutionalismus'bekannt ist. In ihm wird die ökonomische Denkweise auf sechs unterschiedliche Gebiete angewandt, die bewusst außerhalb des üblichen Themenkatalogs der Wirtschaft gewählt sind: - Natürliche Umwelt: Umweltschutz und Umweltmoral - Politik: Arbeitslosigkeit und Nationalsozialismus - Kunst: Theater und die Salzburger Festspiele - Familie: Patriarchalismus in China - Konflikt: Terrorismusbekämpfung durch Verweigerung der Anerkennung - Geschichte: Lösegeld für Gefangene Der interdisziplinäre Gehalt dieses Ansatzes wird deutlich. Der Autor setzt sich jedoch auch mit den Grenzen dieser Betrachtungsweise auseinander und gibt einen Ausblick auf Weiterentwicklungen, wobei vor allem ethische und psychologische Aspekte beleuchtet werden.

​Stephanie Bücherl präsentiert eine empirische Rekonstruktion der Controlling-Praxis und greift auf eine Datenbasis zurück, die im Rahmen einer teilnehmenden Beobachtung in der Finanzzentrale eines Weltkonzerns gewonnen wurde. Der „Anspruch“ der controllinggestützten Unternehmenssteuerung an Objektivität und Rationalität wird mit der empirischen „Wirklichkeit“ konfrontiert. Die Studie erbringt den fundierten Nachweis, dass die Diskrepanz von Anspruch und Wirklichkeit nicht zufällig auftritt, sondern selbst systematisches Ergebnis der Verankerung des Controlling in organisationalen Strukturen und Prozessen ist. Die Autorin beschreibt detailliert, mit welchen Techniken und Mechanismen das Controlling den Mythos zahlenbasierter Objektivität und Rationalität aufrechterhält.

Is or has economics ever been the imperial social science? Could or should it ever be so? These are the central concerns of this book. It involves a critical reflection on the process of how economics became the way it is, in terms of a narrow and intolerant orthodoxy, that has, nonetheless, increasingly directed its attention to appropriating the subject matter of other social sciences through the process termed'economics imperialism'. In other words, the book addresses the shifting boundaries between economics and the other social sciences as seen from the confines of the dismal science, with some reflection on the responses to the economic imperialists by other disciplines.Significantly, an old economics imperialism is identified of the'as if market'style most closely associated with Gary Becker, the public choice theory of Buchanan and Tullock and cliometrics. But this has given way to a more'revolutionary'form of economics imperialism associated with the information-theoretic economics of Akerlof and Stiglitz, and the new institutional economics of Coase, Wiliamson and North. Embracing one'new'field after another, economics imperialism reaches its most extreme version in the form of'freakonomics', the economic theory of everything on the basis of the most shallow principles.By way of contrast and as a guiding critical thread, a thorough review is offered of the appropriate principles underpinning political economy and its relationship to social science, and how these have been and continue to be deployed. The case is made for political economy with an interdisciplinary character, able to bridge the gap between economics and other social sciences, and draw upon and interrogate the nature of contemporary capitalism.

Blending elements of psychology, philosophy, and sociology with economics, Etzioni presents a bold new vision of the social sciences - one which proposes that broader moral, social and political concerns modify economic behaviour and shape individual decision-making. In establishing the necessitary of moral and social considerations in economic behaviour, he provides a provocative new framework for a more comprehensive, ethical and realistic approach to the social sciences today.