Open Access Books

Through a series of studies, the overarching aim of this book is to investigate if and how the digitalization/digital transformation process affects various welfare services provided by the public sector, and the ensuing implications thereof. Ultimately, this book seeks to understand if it is conceivable for digital advancement to result in the creation of private/non-governmental alternatives to welfare services, possibly in a manner that transcends national boundaries. This study also investigates the possible ramifications of technological development for the public sector and the Western welfare society at large. This book takes its point of departure from the 2016 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report that targets specific public service areas in which government needs to adopt new strategies not to fall behind. Specifically, this report emphasizes the focus on digitalization of health care/social care, education, and protection services, including the use of assistive technologies referred to as "digital welfare." Hence, this book explores the factors potentially leading to whether state actors could be overrun by other non-governmental actors, disrupting the current status quo of welfare services. The book seeks to provide an innovative, enriching, and controversial take on society at large and how various aspects of the public sector can be, and are, affected by the ongoing digitalization process in a way that is not covered by extant literature on the market. This book takes its point of departure in Sweden given the fact that Sweden is one of the most digitalized countries in Europe, according to the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), making it a pertinent research case. However, as digitalization transcends national borders, large parts of the subject matter take on an international angle. This includes cases from several other countries around Europe as well as the United States.

This research is part of the debate on sustainable tourism development and, in particular, on the impacts that tourist pressure generates in the cities of art: the analysis is indeed focused on the Historic Centre of Florence, which was admitted onto the World Heritage list in 1982. The site adopted a Management Plan which aims at, among other things, monitoring the five main threats, including tourism and the critical issues generated by its impacts. This study aims at developing a model for the improvement of the decision making process, using maps which represent the indicators developed through the analysis of pressure, status and impact factors as perceived by the local community and by a web mapping platform for integrated and participatory management. The tool is designed to be part of the monitoring envisaged by the Management Plan in order to implement controlled and shared management systems, improve dialogue between the different stakeholders, support the definition of strategies for the decentralization of tourist areas and decrease tourist pressure and the impacts it generates.

This book challenges the silence surrounding money, revealing its profound influences on personal and social identities and power dynamics in intercultural contexts. In this inimitable book, Fred Dervin continues to explore the notion of interculturality by offering a novel and critical exploration of the often-overlooked role of money, especially within the broad field of Intercultural Communication Education and Research (ICER). Adopting a robust interdisciplinary lens and drawing on concrete examples, the author combines, for example, financial education, literature, philosophy and sociology to critique the economic and moral dimensions of global interactions in today's confused and confusing world. From examining the commodification of intercultural relations to proposing shared responsibility and ethical reasoning, Money and Interculturality: A Theory provides a fresh perspective on how money shapes and often distorts interculturality. Based on a unique integration of contemporary, historical and literary insights, Dervin questions and deepens our understanding of interculturality while equipping readers with new vocabulary and frameworks to address the harsh realities of global, unpredictable and power-laden communication. This somewhat provocative book represents an essential reference for educators, practitioners, researchers and students seeking to investigate the connections between money and interculturality. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The Delphi-based scenarios (DBS) development implies the assumption of different choices, through the gathering of information and the assessment of alternative resolutions (Panpatte and Takale, 2019). During the last decades, the spread of environmental hazards has increased quickly, much to request different responses in order to develop a sustainable future for humanity planning the present (McMichael and Lindgren, 2011). Since the DBS is a creative process (Nowack et al., 2011), different figures are selected to make choices, including academics, stakeholders and citizens. However, one of the main challenges remains the measurement of expertise, in fact, during the process, the experts should be assessed based on their competences in order to avoid any conflict in the final results and, eventually, weigh their answers. In recent years, some contributions adopted the self-assessments for the experts’ evaluation (Sossa et al., 2019), but many issues still remain (such as strong subjectivity and cognitive biases which produce over or underestimation). We develop a new method to estimate the expertise by using Natural Language Processing to acquire information, extracting the contributions of experts in each topic. First, starting from a draft list of selected experts, we identify the category of reference (e.g., academia, industry, local authority, citizens etc.). We build a data repository with the personal pages (URLs) of each expert to then use Python to extract from the URLs, the number of contributions related to a keyword, different for each category (e.g., publications for academics, reports and projects for stakeholders etc.). Finally, we proceed adopting a coefficient of production with a weighted sum of the results. To practically demonstrate our approach, we applied this method to a cohort of known experts, part of the “Smart control of the climate resilience” (SCORE) H2020 European project to estimate their expertise in specific areas.

Der Autor untersucht auf der Datenbasis 1974 die finanziellen Auswirkungen der im Jahr 1969 in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland durchgeführten Finanzreform. In der empirischen Untersuchung stehen 2 Fragen im Mittelpunkt: 1. In welche Richtung und in welchem Ausmass verändern die einzelnen Massnahmen der Finanzreform die Finanzkraftunterschiede auf Länder- und Gemeindeebene? 2. Entspricht die reformbedingte Veränderung des regionalen Finanzkraftgefälles den angestrebten Zielen und wie ist sie aus regionalpolitischer Sicht zu beurteilen?

Based on a decade of research by two leading action sports scholars, this book maps the relationship between action sports and the Olympic Movement, from the inclusion of the first action sports to those featuring for the first time in the Tokyo Olympic Games and beyond. In an effort to remain relevant to younger audiences, four new action sports, surfing, skateboarding, sport climbing, and BMX freestyle were included in the Tokyo Olympic program. Drawing upon interviews with Olympic insiders, as well as leaders, athletes, and participants in these action sports communities, the book details the impacts on the action sports industry and cultures, and offers national comparisons to show the uneven effects resulting from Olympic inclusion. It reveals the intricate workings of power and politics in contemporary sports organisations, and maps key trends in this changing sporting landscape. Action Sports and the Olympic Games is a fascinating read for anybody studying the Olympics, the sociology of sport, action sports, or sport policy. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Welcome to the Anthropocene, the era in which humans have put a tangible mark on our planet. But also the era in which humans and technology have the potential to shape the necessary transitions towards a sustainable world. Technology and nature are often considered as two opposing phenomena. However, they are increasingly intertwined, for better or worse. In this book, we explore how technology and nature relate to one another in the moral design of new, green technology. This book is relevant for IT and engineering professionals, business leaders and policy makers with (green) innovation in their portfolios and students of (applied) science who are interested in either sustainable and green design of technology or in the application of technology – with an emphasis on AI and IT – to create a greener, more sustainable world. The chapters have been written by experts and leading researchers in an attractive, accessible, and practical writing style. Each chapter offers colourful examples and challenges the reader to critically think through moral decision-making and the design of innovations considering our planet’s perspective. This is a conceptual change in values. Nature should not be considered as a resource: it is the fabric of life that makes our own existence possible.

Published on the occasion of the 2019 exhibition “Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan,” The Saburo Hasegawa Reader encompasses a selection of writings by the Japanese artist, theorist, essayist, teacher, and curator Saburo Hasegawa (1908–1957), translated into English for the first time. Credited with introducing abstract art to Japan in the 1930s, Hasegawa also became influential as a lecturer on Japan and its aesthetic and philosophical traditions in New York and San Francisco before his premature death in 1957. A memorial volume, initiated by the Oakland Art Museum but left unpublished since the 1950s, as well as interviews from students at California College of Arts and Crafts, helps to establish Hasegawa as a thoughtful bridge between East and West and an engaging and thoughtful interpreter of classical and contemporary sources.

The chapter aims to investigate the reduction of the fuel consumption of conventional vehicles using mild-hybridization and considering the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC), using two topologies of electrical machines dedicated to integrated starter-alternator-booster (ISAB) applications: directly connected to the crankshaft (called ‘normal ISAB’) and indirectly through the belt system (called BSAB), respectively. The behaviour of ISAB and BSAB of a hybrid electric vehicle has been investigated with a multi-domain simulation software developed in Advanced Modelling Environment for performing Simulation (AMESim).

Die Südosteuropa-Studien werden von der in München ansässigen Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft, der wichtigsten Wissenschaftsorganisation der Südosteuropa-Forschung im deutschsprachigen Raum, herausgegeben. Sie dienen der vertieften und interdisziplinären wissenschaftlichen Darstellung wichtiger Themen aus der Südosteuropa-Forschung. Auch Fragen zur aktuellen politischen und sozio-ökonomischen Entwicklung in der Region Südosteuropa werden aufgegriffen. Herausgeber der Einzelbände sind renommierte Repräsentanten der deutschen und internationalen Südosteuropa-Forschung.

This open access book emphasizes that procuring goods at the expense of the environment and those who live there is no longer acceptable. Fortunately, there is now an unstoppable force, created by a collective of diverse stakeholders, driving the sustainability agenda. A company’s sustainability standards can only truly be as good as those along its entire supply chain. The purpose of this book is to encourage and inspire companies on their journey to transform into responsible and sustainable businesses by addressing the supply chain, which reflects a significant part of a company’s expenses and thus

The chapters in this book offer concrete examples from all over the world to show how community livelihoods in mineral-rich tracts can be more sustainable by fully integrating gender concerns into all aspects of the relationship between mining practices and mine affected communities. By looking at the mining industry and the mine-affected communities through a gender lens, the authors indicate a variety of practical strategies to mitigate the impacts of mining on women’s livelihoods without undermining women’s voice and status within the mine-affected communities. The term ‘field’ in the title of this volume is not restricted to the open-cut pits of large scale mining operations which are male-dominated workplaces, or with mining as a masculine, capital-intensive industry, but also connotes the wider range of mineral extractive practices which are carried out informally by women and men of artisanal communities at much smaller geographical scales throughout the mineral-rich tracts of poorer countries.

This open access book explores the hidden politics of time—the chronopolitics—that profoundly shapes the contours of academic life and knowledge production in contemporary universities. Moving beyond familiar critiques of academic acceleration, Ulrike Felt explores the diversity of time generators and the resultant complex, multilayered timescapes that govern scholarly work and life. The book examines the tensions inherent in models of linear careers and in simultaneous experiences of speed and waiting, and asks questions about the ownership of time. In doing so, it scrutinizes relations between time and quality, and points to the impact of time on how and what we can know, revealing how these temporal regimes create deep asynchronicities and fragmentations and perpetuate injustices and exclusions. Arguing for a more mindful approach to research, Felt advocates for rethinking academia through the lens of time, emphasizing the need for temporal care work in order to achieve sustainable and responsible change. Aimed at researchers, academic leaders, and policymakers, the book offers a compelling vision for a more responsive, long-term, and equitable academic future—one that challenges neoliberal models that prioritise speed, competitiveness, and efficiency.

Die Herausforderung, Entscheidungsträger mit «den richtigen Informationen zum richtigen Zeitpunkt in der richtigen Form» zu versorgen, legt nahe, die effiziente und effektive Verarbeitung der Berichtsinformationen aus den Perspektiven der Prozess- und Serviceorientierung zu betrachten. Damit sich Berichtsinformationen mit Hilfe von Berichtsservices zu einem Serviceorientierten Berichtsprozess zusammenfügen lassen, müssen die entsprechenden Dienste konzeptionell gestaltet und der resultierende Berichtsprozess in ein Architekturmodell eingebettet werden. Der Autor zeigt in dieser Arbeit, wie sich die innovativen Konzepte einer SOA und XBRL zu einem Architekturkonzept und Vorgehensmodell für die konzeptionelle Gestaltung Serviceorientierter Berichtsprozesse integrieren lassen.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Condominium and comparable legal architectures make vertical urban growth possible, but do we really understand the social implications of restructuring city land ownership in this way? Geographer and architect Megan Nethercote enters the condo tower to explore the hidden social and territorial dynamics of private vertical communities. Informed by residents’ accounts of Australian high-rise living, this book shows how legal and physical architectures fuse in ways that jeopardize residents’ experience of home and stigmatize renters. As cities sprawl skywards and private renting expands, this compelling geographic analysis of property identifies high-rise development’s overlooked hand in social segregation and urban fragmentation, and raises bold questions about the condominium’s prospects.