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This book is a study of the objectives of Islamic Finance in the modern banking space and offers insight into the effects of changes and developments occurring in Islamic banking products and services.
The question of consumption emerged as a major focus of research and scholarship in the 1990s but the breadth and diversity of consumer culture has not been fully enough explored. The meanings of consumption, particularly in relation to lifestyle and identity, are of great importance to academic areas including business studies, sociology, cultural and media studies, psychology, geography and politics. The SAGE Handbook of Consumer Culture is a one-stop resource for scholars and students of consumption, where the key dimensions of consumer culture are critically discussed and articulated. The editors have organised contributions from a global and interdisciplinary team of scholars into six key sections: Part 1: Sociology of Consumption Part 2: Geographies of Consumer Culture Part 3: Consumer Culture Studies in Marketing Part 4: Consumer Culture in Media and Cultural Studies Part 5: Material Cultures of Consumption Part 6: The Politics of Consumer Culture
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics, ITBAM 2013, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in August 2013, held in conjunction with DEXA 2013. The 7 revised long papers presented together with 4 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address the following topics: critical health and intelligent systems in medical research, and obstetrics, neonatology and decision systems in cardiology.
This book contains substantially extended and revised versions of the best papers from the 14th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2012), held in Wroclaw, Poland, in June/July 2012. The 25 full and 3 invited papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 299 submissions. They reflect state-of-the-art research work focusing mainly on real-world applications and highlighting the benefits of information systems and technology for industry and services, thus connecting academia with the world of real enterprises. The topics covered are: databases and information systems integration; artificial intelligence and decision support systems; information systems analysis and specification; software agents and internet computing; human-computer interaction; and enterprise architecture. Chapter “Time Efficiency of Point-of-Sale Payment Methods: Empirical Results for Cash, Cards and Mobile Payments” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics, ITBAM 2015, held in Valencia, Spain, in September 2015, in conjunction with DEXA 2015. The 9 revised long papers presented together with 1 poster paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 15 submissions. The papers address the following two topics: medical terminology and clinical processes and machine learning in biomedicine.
Women are the world’s most powerful consumers, yet they are largely marketed to erroneously through misconceptions and patriarchal views that distort the reality of women’s lives, bodies, and work. This book examines the contradictions and mismatches between women’s everyday experiences and market representations. It considers how women themselves exhibit paradoxical behaviour in both resisting and supporting conflicting messages. The volume emphasizes paradox as a form of agency and negotiation through which women develop dialogical meanings. The contributions highlight the ways in which women transform inconsistencies and contradictions in advertising and marketing, global consumption practices, and material consumption into positive practices for living. The rich range of ethnographic accounts, drawn from countries including the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Denmark, Japan, and China, provide readers with a valuable perspective on consumer behaviour.
This second edition describes the open conflicts of the Reformation from Luther's first challenge to the uneasy peace of the 1560's.
In the latter part of 1939, German leader Adolf Hitler made a pact with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to invade Poland. Confident that British and French leaders would opt for a weak peace settlement, Hitler’s army stormed in from the north, south and west on September 1st, while Stalin’s Red Army invaded from the east on September 17th. This story, part fact and part fiction, is an account of the suffering endured by the Polish people at this time, many of whom were imprisoned in Siberia and forced to work under dreadful conditions. Yet when Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Poland’s exiled found common cause with their Russian captors to take up arms against Nazi oppression. Though the Allies emerged victorious in 1945, a heavy price was exacted from occupied Poland. Many survivors discovered they no longer had homeland to which they could return, their former communities now under firm Soviet control.
Whilst much has been written about early modern urban history, the majority of this work has focussed on Western Europe with relatively little available in English on towns and cities in the former communist East. However, in recent years urban scholars have increasingly looked to a much more inclusive picture of Europe that compares and contrasts development across the whole continent. Dealing primarily with Bohemia, Hungary and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this book provides an insight into a number of key issues concerning the economic, social and demographic trends in early modern East-Central European urban history. Taking a supra-national perspective, across a long time span, it examines the effects of migration, Reformation, state building and economic change on the transformation of medieval urban communities into early modern societies. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, particularly the registers of new citizens kept by many towns and cities, a fascinating picture of urban development and social structure is reconstructed that not only tells us much about East-Central Europe, but adds to our knowledge of the whole continent.