Citizenship is frequently invoked both as an instrument and goal of immigrant integration. Yet, in migration contexts, citizenship also marks a distinction between members and outsiders based on their different relations to particular states. A migration perspective highlights the boundaries of citizenship and political control over entry and exit as well as the fact that foreign residents rema…
Migrant protest has proliferated worldwide in the last two decades, explicitly posing questions of identity, rights, and equality in a globalized world. Nonetheless, such mobilizations are considered anomalies in social movement studies, and political sociology more broadly, due to 'weak interests' and a particularly disadvantageous position of 'outsiders' to claim rights connected to citizensh…
Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of …
How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions ? phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instan…
In 1989 news broadcasts all over the world were dominated for weeks by images of East Germans crossing the Berlin Wall to West Germany. But what did the East Germans expect to find when they excitedly broke through the Wall? And what did they actually find when they made it over to the other side? This study draws on fifteen months of research into both the lives of East Germans before the fall…
Never before in history was the interaction between people and their natural environment as complex and problematic as it is today. A proliferation of scientific research has yielded valuable insights into various aspects of this interaction from the angle of many disciplines - the natural sciences, the social sciences, archaeology and history, ecological studies. The diversity of approaches ha…
Hindu devotional traditions have long been recognized for their sacred geographies as well as the sensuous aspects of their devotees’ experiences. Largely overlooked, however, are the subtle links between these religious expressions. Based on intensive fieldwork conducted among worshippers in Bengal’s Navadvip Mayapur sacred complex, this book discusses the diverse and contrasting ways in w…
In 2001, goodwill amortization in the US was eliminated in favor of an impairment-only approach, which, according to critics, gives managers vast discretion and opportunities for earnings management. Prior research suggests that discretionary asset write-offs are associated with economic factors and managers’ financial reporting objectives. Based on a systematic literature review, this study …
The German pension system was the first formal pension system in the world, designed by Bismarck nearly 120 years ago. It has been very successful in providing high and reliable pension levels at reasonable contribution rates. While the generosity of the German pension system is considered a great social achievement, negative incentive effects of past reforms in the 1970s and 1980s and populati…
This book develops a new theoretical approach to the explanation of systemic financial crises in industrial and emerging market countries. In contrast to standard models, the present cyclical approach is consistent with the following three stylized facts. Firstly, systemic financial crises are a recurrent phenomenon generally accompanied by excessive boom-bust cycles. Secondly, the frequency of…