This volume offers a comprehensible account of the development and evolution of moral systems. It seeks to answer the following questions: If morals are eternal and unchanging, why have the world’s dominant religious moral systems been around for no more than a mere six thousand of the two hundred thousand years of modern human existence? What explains the many and varied moral systems acro…
This book provides an archival forum for researchers, academics, practitioners and industry professionals interested and/or engaged in the reform of the ways of teaching and learning through advancing current learning environments towards smart learning environments. The contributions of this book are submitted to the International Conference on Smart Learning Environments (ICSLE 2014). The foc…
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…
This edited volume offers a collection of papers that present a comparative analysis of the development of Shari’a in countries with Muslim minorities, such as America, Australia, Germany, and Italy, as well as countries with Muslim majorities, such as Malaysia, Bangladesh, Turkey, and Tunisia. The Sociology of Shari’a provides a global analysis of these important legal transformations a…
Recent advances in ICT have given rise to new socially disruptive technologies: AmI and the IoT, marking a major technological change which may lead to a drastic transformation of the technological ecosystem in all its complexity, as well as to a major alteration in technology use and thus daily living. Yet no work has systematically explored AmI and the IoT as advances in science and technolog…
This book focuses on the creation of space as an activity. The argument draws not only on aspects of movement in time, but also on a cultural and specifically social context influencing the creation of the spatial habitus. The book reconsiders existing theories of time and space in the field of urban planning and develops an updated account of spatial activity, experience and space-making. Rece…
This book presents a theory as well as methods to understand and to purposively influence complex systems. It suggests a theory of complex systems as nested systems, i. e. systems that enclose other systems and that are simultaneously enclosed by even other systems. According to the theory presented, each enclosing system emerges through time from the generative activities of the systems they e…
This book examines two major social changes experienced by European cities in the last two decades: post-industrial economic restructuring and new immigration flows. The link between both has been extensively discussed throughout a variety of theoretical approaches and in numerous descriptive contributions. Adding to those studies, this research focuses on three elements of migratory experience…
All people are equal, according to Thomas Jefferson, but all migrants are not. In this volume, twelve eminent scholars describe and analyse how in countries such as France, the United States, Turkey, Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark distinctions were made through history between migrants and how these were justified in policies and public debates. The chapters form a triptyc…
This book examines the origins and evolution of labor market policy in Western Europe, while paying close attention to the oeCD and the European Union as proliferators of new ideas. Three phases are identified: (a) a manpower revolution phase during the 1960s and 1970s, when most European governments emulated Swedish manpower policies and introduced/modernized their public employment services; …