Open Access Books

Is time gendered? This international, interdisciplinary anthology studies the early modern era to analyse how material objects express, shape, complicate, and extend human concepts of time and how people commemorate time differently. It examines conceptual aspects of time, such as the categories women and men use to define it, and the somatic, lived experiences of time ranging between an instant and the course of family life. Drawing on a wide array of textual and material primary sources, this book assesses the ways thatgender and other categories of difference affect understandings of time.

In 2011, Professor Adrian J Bradbrook retired from a distinguished scholarly career spanning over forty years. During this time, he made a significant contribution to teaching and scholarship not only in property law — specifically to leasehold tenancies law and easements and restrictive covenants — but also to energy law, especially the emerging and growing field of solar energy. This book brings together those people who worked closely with Bradbrook, each an expert in their own right, to honour a career by critically engaging with the contributions Bradbrook made to property and energy law. Each author has chosen a topic that both fits with their own cutting-edge research and explores the related contributions made by Bradbrook. Most unusually, this collection ranges widely across property law, energy law and human rights.

In den letzten Jahren ist die ökologische Betroffenheit in vielen Branchen aufgrund gesetzlicher Verordnungen, umweltorientierter Konsumentenforderungen und einem ökologieorientierten Wettbewerbsdruck ständig gestiegen. Vor diesem Hintergrund hat sich die Arbeit eine umfassende theoretische und empirische Analyse von Ansatzpunkten zu einer ökologieorientierten Profilierung im vertikalen Marketing aus Herstellersicht zum Ziel gesetzt. Hierzu wird aufbauend auf den allgemeinen Besonderheiten einer ökologieorientierten Profilierung eine ökologische Betroffenheitsanalyse exemplarisch für die Elektrobranche durchgeführt. Danach erfolgt sowohl auf Konsumenten- als auch auf Handelsseite eine differenzierte Erfassung ökologieorientierter Segmente. Abschließend wird der Frage nachgegangen, welche ökologieorientierten Marktbearbeitungsstrategien für Hersteller sinnvoll sind und welche ökologieorientierten Profilierungsmaßnahmen empfehlenswert erscheinen. Darüber hinaus werden Implikationen für ein marktorientiertes Umweltmanagement abgeleitet.

Was ist rechte Ideologie? Anknüpfend an Karl Mannheims Studie zum konservativen Denkstil zeigt Felix Schilk, dass es ein spezifisches Muster gibt, wie rechte Akteure Geschichte und Gesellschaft erzählen: Mensch und Welt sind schon immer entzweit, die dekadente Gegenwart ist ein andauernder Verfallsprozess und in der Zukunft droht die unvermeidliche Apokalypse. Ein Beispiel dafür ist die sogenannte Neue Rechte, die diese konservativen Krisennarrative für ihren Kampf um Diskursverschiebungen und kulturelle Hegemonie nutzt. Da sie ihre Identität aus der Wiederholung der immer gleichen Untergangsballaden schöpft, ist sie als Erzählgemeinschaft zu verstehen.

This book examines how Gustav Radbruch, H. L. A. Hart, and Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde each addressed the question of the end of law, its function, and its normative foundation within the context of the modern legal and political order. Through a politico-theological reading, it highlights the tension between legal validity and moral legitimacy, as well as the extent to which law can maintain public order without compromising its own claim to justice. The analysis of Radbruch, Hart, and Böckenförde sheds light on how valid law can become unjust, demanding actions that may conflict with individual judgment or morality. It raises questions about natural law, the relationship between morality and law, and law’s ultimate purpose, suggesting that law and politics represent, at best, a relative good. It addresses the broader crisis of legal authority and state sovereignty, the expanding reach of state power, and whether law should instruct, command, or ultimately point beyond itself. The End of Law is of interest to scholars in legal theory, political theology, and the philosophy of law. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license

Mit der Verwaltungsreform vom 23. Juli 1952 gab sich die erst drei Jahre zuvor gegründete DDR eine (staatliche) Verwaltungsstruktur, die bis zur Wende 1989/1990 erhalten blieb. Die faktische Abschaffung der Länder und ihre Neugliederung in 14 Bezirke stellten den tiefgreifendsten Umbau der Staatsorganisation der DDR in all den Jahren ihres Bestehens dar. Die hier präsentierten 62 Quellen dokumentieren die Bildung und Etablierung der Bezirke in Brandenburg von 1952 bis 1960. Die Beweggründe und konzeptionellen Überlegungen der Initiatoren stehen ebenso im Blickfeld wie die konkreten Maßnahmen und praktischen Probleme des Übergangs von der Länder- zur Bezirksstruktur. Der Fokus richtet sich außerdem auf die Beziehungen zwischen den Instanzen, deren Qualität sich in Kontrollberichten, Verhandlungsprotokollen, intern gehaltenen Einschätzungen und nicht zuletzt in Erfahrungsberichten von Partei- und Staatsfunktionären niederschlug. Der informelle und interne Charakter dieser Quellen ermöglicht es, die bürokratische Praxis der DDR zu untersuchen und zugleich die Grenzen einer Selbstevaluierung des politischen und administrativen Systems zu erkennen.

This "open access" book presents the Proceedings of the First International Conference “A Digital Europe for Citizens”, which was organised by the Jean Monnet Module DigEUCit, “A Digital Europe for Citizens. Constitutional and Policymaking Challenges” and the CIJ (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Justice, Faculty of Law, University of Porto). It focuses on three main topics – data governance, digital markets, and digital services – and brings together chapters written by legal experts who address the EU’s accomplishments and future perspectives on the ongoing Digital Revolution, as well as the impact of digitalisation on the EU. Comparisons with other legal systems are also included. Adopting a holistic perspective with a focus on citizens, the book contends that constitutionalism must also be viewed in its role of ensuring democracy, an open and inclusive society, and a fair economy. It pursues an original, cross-sectoral and cutting-edge approach. In addition to discussing fundamental values and principles, the contributing authors address concrete and practical questions that arise from the EU’s policy and legal framework. The aim is to bring constitutionalism to the digital stage and to advance solutions and a proper framework, building on solid foundations. This comprehensive work will be of interest to legal scholars, academics, researchers and practitioners in the areas of European and constitutional law, data protection, competition and consumer law, as well as a larger audience of policymakers and digital entrepreneurs.

In the Supervisory Control Theory according to P.J. Ramadge und W.M. Wonham, the behaviour of a dynamical system is described by sequences of discrete events. Typical applications are production and transportation systems that are operated by programmable logic controllers. A challenge in this area is the controller design for systems consisting of a large number of components and requiring the coordination of various synchronous processes. The size of a model that describes their synchronous behaviour grows exponentially in the number of components. Hence, monolithic supervisor design using the Supervisory Control Theory in the context of large-scale systems requires a prohibitive amount of computational effort. In order to avoid large monolithic models, several hierarchical and modular procedures have been presented that structure the monolithic control problem vertically and horizontally into manageable synthesis sub-tasks. However, existing approaches are limited to modelling behaviours on a finite-time horizon, using *-languages. Whereas synthesis procedures of the monolithic controller design also include the controller design for behaviours that evolve on an infinite-time axis, so called ω-languages, offering thereby a more general field of application. In this thesis, a hierarchical and modular control approach for ω-languages is developed that is based on the use of abstractions. Therefore, known methods regarding the monolithic controller design for ω-languages are adopted to the hierarchical and modular control context. In addition, dynamical systems are modelled as input/output systems, following the Behavioural Systems Theory of J.C. Willems. For a practical perspective, algorithms to solve the presented hierarchical control problem on the basis of finite-state automata are elaborated and an example from the area of transportation systems is discussed. It demonstrates that the presented approach enables efficient controller design for large-scale systems modelled by ω-languages and reduces the respective computational effort.

This book presents in a systematic fashion a number of quantum field theoretic phenomena that have a topological underpinning. The systematics is provided by the homotopy groups of the configuration space: solitons and instantons are related to the zeroth and first homotopy groups respectively, and quantized parameters to the second. The close relation of some of these notions to anomalies is also discussed. These concepts have many applications, from particle physics to statistical and condensed matter physics. The focus is mainly on the former, but some particularly instructive examples of the latter are also described.

Socialism Now: Singing Activism after Yugoslavia traces the activities of the self-organized choirs that have emerged in the region in the twenty-first century. These collectives have been recuperating Yugoslav and international revolutionary, partisan, and workers’ songs and performing them alongside a contemporary socially engaged repertoire. Their singing activism demasks the privatization, dispossession, and political and social fragmentation that, instead of a promised capitalist dreamland, have shaped lives in the region after the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, the book offers a nuanced account of collective singing as a way of organizing against the adverse effects of neoliberal capitalism in its potentialities and limits. Taking a perspective on the politics of music and sound outside the usual understanding of social justice or social change, Socialism Now revalorizes the “lost” historical knowledge and lived experiences from the former Second World. The book’s central concept, strategic amateurism, proposes the key role of nonprofessional, communal leisure musical activities in building the structures for anti-capitalist organizing.

Social network sites are dynamic online socio-cultural arenas which give users ample and unprecedented opportunities for self-presentation through the meshing of language with other semiotic modes. With a focus on Facebook, one of the most widely-used online social network sites, this open access book brings together ideas and concepts related to language online, multimodality, and identity through five topical issues. These include place, time, profession and education, stance-taking, and privacy. The book features a discourse-centred online ethnography that provides authentic verbal and multimodal Facebook posts in both Greek and English . These are complemented with insights from interviews with Facebook participants. The examples bring to life various engaging instances of self- and other-presentation on Facebook identifying the ways in which users can: - locate themselves in terms of place and time; - announce activities, share and broaden their expertise and buttress solidarity among colleagues and fellow students; - communicate emotions, tastes, thoughts, opinions and assessments; - control the flow of textual information on their Facebook profiles to secure their privacy. Focusing on discourse manifestations of identity, this book also shows how Facebook can function as a space for vernacular literacy practices, a silo of relationships, a digital memory bank, a research tool, a knowledge forum, a cardiograph of a society, and a grassroots channel. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

This open access book offers a multidisciplinary dialogue on relational anthropology in contemporary economics. A particular view of the human being is often assumed in economic models, but seldom acknowledged let alone explicated. Addressing this neglected area of research in economic studies, altogether the contributors touch upon the importance and potential of virtues, the notions of freedom and self-love, the potential of simulation models, the dialectics of love, and questions of methodology in constructing a relational anthropology for contemporary economics. The overall result is a highly informative and constructive dialogue, establishing inter alia a research agenda for future collaborative and multidisciplinary study.

While public management has become widely spoken of, its identity and character is not well-defined. Such disparity is an underlying problem in developing public management within academia, and in the eyes of practitioners. In this book, Michael Barzelay tackles the challenge of making public management into a true professional discipline. Barzelay argues that public management needs to integrate contrasting conceptions of professional practice. By pressing forward an expansive idea of design in public management, Barzelay formulates a fresh vision of public management in practice and outlines its implications for research, curriculum development and disciplinary identity.

Auf den Ersten Weltkrieg folgte in Mitteleuropa ein grundlegender politischer Umbruch. Albert Dikovich arbeitet die Folgen dieser demokratischen Zeitenwende für die deutschsprachige Philosophie umfassend auf. Dabei wird zum einen untersucht, wie nach dem katastrophalen Gewaltereignis des Krieges und angesichts der akuten Eskalation im Inneren die Grenzen der moralisch legitimen Mittel politischer Konfliktaustragung neu gezogen wurden. Zum anderen wird der Zusammenhang zwischen rechts- und erkenntnistheoretischen Annahmen und Positionierungen innerhalb eines Spannungsfeldes konkurrierender politischer Neuordnungsentwürfe beleuchtet. Dabei zeigt sich, dass die damals geführten philosophischen Kämpfe um die Demokratie mit unserer Gegenwart mehr zu tun haben, als es der geschichtliche Abstand vermuten lässt. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Violence de la crise payée au prix fort par les classes populaires après l’éclatement de la bulle immobilière, plans d’austérité drastiques et chômage avoisinant les 25 %, renouveau de l’émigration des jeunes, multiplication des affaires de corruption touchant jusqu’à la famille royale, radicalisation de l’indépendantisme en Catalogne, crise du bipartisme et des partis socialiste et conservateur, les éléments « dramatiques » ne manquent pas dans le tableau de l’Espagne d’aujourd’hui. La crise économique, sociale et politique enclenchée depuis 2008 marquera toute une génération. Mais ce livre montre que cette période troublée a aussi été marquée par le renouveau de la contestation et l’essor de nouveaux mouvements sociaux : luttes contre les expulsions, mouvement des indignés mobilisés à Madrid en 2011, résistances syndicales contre les plans d’austérité, « marées » citoyennes contre les coupes budgétaires dans l’éducation et la santé, mobilisations féministes et républicaines, renouveau des pratiques artistiques critiques. Neuf spécialistes offrent des analyses de l’intérieur de l’actualité sociale et politique espagnole, de l’indignation citoyenne à l’émergence de nouvelles alternatives politiques telles que Podemos et Citoyens.