This open access book explores China's unique path to modernization, highlighting its journey from ancient civilization to modern society. It examines China's efforts from the mid-19th century's internal and external struggles to its contemporary economic achievements. The book covers historical, social, and economic aspects, emphasizing the balance between autonomous development and global int…
This open access edited volume introduces the concept of causal mechanisms to explore new ways of explaining the global dynamics of social policy, and shows that a mechanism-based approach provides several advantages over established approaches for studying social policy The introductory chapter outlines the mechanism-based approach, which stands out by modularisation and a clear focus on acto…
This open access book analyses the global diffusion of social policy as a process driven by multiplex ties between countries in global social networks. The contributions analyze links between countries via global trade, colonial history, similarity in culture, and spatial proximity. Networks are viewed as the structural backbone of the diffusion process, and diffusion is anlaysed via several su…
Dr. Rob Nijskens Rob is an economist in the Financial Stability Division of DNB since 2012, specializing in analyzing financial stability risks in commercial and residential real estate markets. Together with Melanie Lohuis and Willem Heeringa he authored the 2017 DNB Occasional Study “The housing market in major Dutch cities”. He has also written extensively on commercial real estate, bot…
This open access book unveils the hidden elite of Italy's third sector, offering a rare glimpse into the lives and minds of civil society's most influential leaders. Bridging elite and civil society studies, it presents pioneering research on these powerful yet understudied figures. Through in-depth analysis, the chapters reveal surprising insights about the elite's composition, attitudes, care…
This open access book examines how civil society organizations in Poland, Russia, and Sweden (re)act to transformations of opportunities and limitations in access to various forms of resources. The volume’s contributions discuss the constraints associated with different types of resources as well as organizations’ capacities to generate resources—or compensate for their lack—as they neg…
This open access book assesses how the Covid-19 pandemic caught higher education systems throughout the world by surprise. It maps out the responses of higher education institutions to the challenges and strategic opportunities brought about by the pandemic, and examines the effects such responses may have. Bringing together scholars and case studies from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, …
This open access book presents innovative strategies to address cross-cutting topics and foster transversal competences. The modernization of European legal education presents a compelling challenge that calls for enhanced interdisciplinary collaboration among academic disciplines and innovative teaching methods. The volume introduces venues towards education innovation and engages with complex…
This open access book offers a new approach to understandings of welfare in modern Britain. Foregrounding the agency individuals and groups claimed through experiential expertise, it traces deep connections between personal experience, welfare, and activism across diverse settings in modern Britain. The experiential experts studied in this collection include women, students, children, women who…
This open access book focuses on institutions that were produced and formed by the emerging welfare state. How were institutions experienced by the people who interacted with them? How did institutions as sites of experience shape and structure people’s everyday lives? Histories of institutions have mainly focused on the structures and power relations produced by institutional settings. Likew…