"This book presents the ways in which three key issues of the modern world – transformation, digitalisation and sustainability – may be combined for the greater good and highlights which activities may be designed to integrate these three directly linked paths. It is an experience-derived and evidence-based analysis of how sustainable development impacts the transformation of the economy an…
Social robots are on the brink of entering our lives. However, little knowledge is available about how best to design them. This introductory chapter discusses the real-life social robots of the present as well as of possible futures—without, of course, forgetting the history of robots and their origins in fiction. From a design perspective, robots are promising and challenging. They suggest …
The chapter works through a constellation of fractured and fissured geo-graphical terms that give spatial expression to what Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze famously called ‘schizoanalysis’ and ‘geo-philosophy’. This constellation takes flight from a semiotic impasse bequeathed to us by the combined forces of structuralism and poststructuralism (especially in the work of Ferdinand de…
Memory matters. It matters because memory brings the past into the present, and opens it up to the future. But it also matters literally, because memory is mediated materially. Materiality is the stuff of memory. Meaningful objects that we love (or hate) function not only as aide-mémoire but are integral to memory. Drawing on previous scholarship on the interrelation of memory and materiality,…
Westminster model; UK politics; Brexit; thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JP Politics and government; thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JP Politics and government::JPB Comparative politics; thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JP Politics and government::JPH Political structure and processes::JPHC Constitution: government and the state
Accountability is not an event, but a process. The purpose of the present chapter is to discuss the three faces or phases of accountability: taking into account, keeping into account and giving an account. In doing so attention is paid to the fact that parties and candidates in the course of one election need to learn and take into account what voters want, that their activities as elected offi…
This chapter describes the role of trade credit in the functioning of enterprises. It presents the essence and the use of this form of finance, as well as placing it in a historical context. The chapter discusses the role of trade credit and the methods of trade credit management in business entities. It also describes the rules of trade credit administration, as well as the common reasons that…
Numerous studies have explored why some autocracies endure but others do not. Although they argue that party-based, parliamentary autocracies are relatively resilient, even during multiparty elections, because of the credible power/benefit-sharing among elites and masses, there have been insufficient studies to examine the exact mechanism of distributive politics. This book fills this gap by sy…
Chapters 1, 3 and 5 are available Open Access under CC-BY licence. Safeguarding adults at risk of abuse or neglect is a core area of social work practice but knowledge of how social workers make adult safeguarding decisions is limited. Applying recent sociological and ethnographic research to this area for the first time, this book considers how adult safeguarding practice is developing, with a…
"Polyphony and the Modern asks one fundamental question: what does it mean to be modern in one’s own time? To answer that question, this volume focuses on polyphony as an index of modernity. In the Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch showed that each moment in time is potentially fractured: people living in the same country can effectively live in different centuries – some making their alliance…