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This book argues that society must rethink the notion of formal employment and instead introduce and spread the notion of "meaningful work" so that societies can become independent of economic growth. The excessive consumption of natural resources and the immense emissions resulting from our growth-oriented economic system surpass the planetary boundaries. Despite this, society and the economy still strive for economic growth in order to generate jobs, to finance the social security system and to assure tax income. However, these expectations are increasingly unrealistic, not least because technological developments such as digitalisation and robotisation will change and limit formal employm...
This book investigates an important source of the European Union's recent legitimacy problems. It shows how European integration is debated in mass media, and how this affects democratic inclusiveness. Advancing integration implies a shift in power between governments, parliaments, and civil society. Behind debates over Europe's 'democratic deficit' is a deeper concern: whether democratic politics can perform effectively under conditions of Europeanization and globalization. This study is based on a wealth of unique data from seven European countries, combining newspaper content analyses, an innovative study of Internet communication structures, and hundreds of interviews with leading political and media representatives across Europe. It is by far the most far-reaching and empirically grounded study on the Europeanization of media discourse and political contention to date, and a must-read for anyone interested in how European integration changes democratic politics and why European integration has become increasingly contested.
Buildings have a long lifetime, and so they are a major target for any structural changes in consumption patterns. Conversely, long lifetimes come with associated strong inertia. This book examines the opportunities to influence energy consumption in housing and buildings, and provides options for implementation at a macro, meso and micro level.
The present study is a slightly revised version of my PhD thesis which was accepted at the Economics Department of Dresden University of Technology in July 2008. It has a long and a short history. For it began, as suggested theme, as a fundamental evaluation of evolutionary economics for ecological economics, asking, especially, for what the two ?elds actually constitutes and, eventually, relates. In several years of unfruitful dwelling, however, neither of these two young, non-mainstream ?elds proved as constituted at a fundamental level as yet. Rather, ecological economics, founded at the end of the 1980s as an attempt to combine social and natural s- ence approaches(in particular economic...
This book is the result of selective research papers that were presented at the First International Conference on Semiotics and Visual Communication at the Cyprus University of Technology in November 2011. The conference was structured around the theme from theory to practice, and brought together researchers and practitioners who study and evaluate the ways that semiotic theories can be analysed, perceived and applied in the context of various forms in visual communication. Within a semiotic framework, the book explores research questions under five main thematic areas: Architectural, Spatial Design-Design for Three-Dimensional Products; Design for Print Applications; Design for Screen-Base...
This book provides a wide-ranging theoretical and empirical overview of the disparate achievements and shortcomings of global communication. This exceptionally ambitious and systematic project takes a critical perspective on the globalization of communication. Uniquely, it sets media globalization alongside a plethora of other globalized forms of communication, ranging from the individual to groups, civil society groupings, commercial enterprises and political formations. The result is a sophisticated and impressive overview of globalized communication across various facets, assessing the phenomena for the extent to which they live up to the much-hyped claims of globalization’s potential t...
Changes in production and consumption patterns are a crucial element in advancing the sustainability agenda. Many companies are now contributing to such efforts through a focus on sustainable innovation when developing new products and services. However, problematically, many such products fail as consumers reject them in the marketplace. User integration in product development is a well-suited approach to increase the usability and the marketability of new products. This book asks the following question: under what conditions can companies trigger sustainability-oriented organizational learning processes by integrating consumers in product development? The author analyses this question by s...
This book updates the original 'Global Journalist' (1998) volume with new data, adding more than a dozen countries, and providing material on comparative research about journalists - that will be useful to those conducting their own studies.
Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importanc...
In November 2016 the University of Brighton hosted a one day conference entitled “The Future of Human Rights in the UK”. Legal academics and practitioners from across the UK and Ireland attended to discuss the various topical issues that arise under the title of the conference. Papers were presented on terrorism and counter-terrorism, the role of the European Court of Human Rights, surrogacy and parental rights, union rights, social and economic rights and Brexit; to name but a few. This edited collection comprises a selection of the papers presented. It is a thought-provoking collection designed to make the reader ask themselves: what does the future of human rights in the UK look like?