This volume contributes to debates about the teaching profession by reviewing international and national reports on its status, as well as on reforms of various education systems. It proposes a global approach to the quality of the teaching profession as a decisive ingredient of education quality, including a conception of its identity and a vision of its future. Moreover, it is suggested that …
This book is the first monograph-form legal study on multilevel governance in the EU and represents a radical change in the approach to this topic. Particularly after the Treaty of Lisbon’s entry into force, research on multilevel governance can no longer remain confined to the analysis of political dynamics or of soft law arrangements. Multilevel governance emerges as a constitutional princi…
Maria Grazia Martino and her contributing authors highlight the different solutions found by European countries with different ecclesiastical law systems, different distributions of Christian denominations and different percentages of Muslim immigrants: Germany, Switzerland, France, Sweden, Italy and Greece. Churches and religious communities are actors from civil society. The state sets the fr…
From the perspectives of the political sciences as well as literature and language studies, this volume looks comparatively at Canadian and European constellations of cultural and linguistic diversity. By so doing, it takes Canada as exemplary for the effects of transnationalization, regionalization, and cultural and linguistic diversification on notions of citizenship and processes of identity…
Enrico Michelini illustrates that sport plays a very marginal role in the contemporary health promotion. This is the main result of the present analysis of national strategies for the promotion of physical activity issued by the health ministries of France, Germany, and Italy. All these health-strategies are rather ambiguous on this subject: They mention sport systematically as an abstract term…
This book addresses the critical knowledge gaps of mergers involving higher education institutions. It is based on a comparative research project (spring 2013-spring 2015) investigating the phenomena of mergers involving higher education institutions across the Nordic countries – Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. The study involved close to 30 scholars from the region, and aimed at sheddin…
This book provides an overview and discussion of the evidence base of effective school inspections; reflecting on issues of validity and reliability of school inspections in relation to school effectiveness research, unintended consequences and emergent roles and responsibilities of Inspectorates of Education. Chapters include findings from systematic literature reviews and primary research whi…
This book tests many of the assumptions, hypotheses, and conclusions connected with the presumed role of civil society organizations in the democratization of African countries. Taking a comparative approach, it looks at countries that have successfully democratized, those that are stuck between progress and regression, those that have regressed into dictatorship, and those that are currently i…
Ecstatic Encounters takes its readers to the threshold of Candomblé temples in Bahia, Brazil, where - for many generations -- members of this spirit-possession cult and curious outsiders have been meeting to marvel at each other's otherness. Having allowed himself to be baffled by Candomblé's mysteries and miracle productions, the author explores the notion of 'the-rest-of-what-is': the exces…
This volume is the first systematic scholarly study that analyses the complex relationship between history and religion. It considers religious groups as both producers of historical narratives and topics of historiography. From different disciplinary perspectives, the authors explore how religions are historicised. In so doing, they address the biases and elisions of current analytical and des…