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New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research

Interest in social innovation continues to rise, from governments setting up social innovation 'labs' to large corporations developing social innovation strategies. Yet theory lags behind practice, and this hampers our ability to understand social innovation and make the most of its potential. This collection brings together work by leading social innovation researchers globally, exploring the practice and process of researching social innovation, its nature and effects. Combining theoretical chapters and empirical studies, it shows how social innovation is blurring traditional boundaries between the market, the state and civil society, thereby developing new forms of services, relationships and collaborations. It takes a critical perspective, analyzing potential downsides of social innovation that often remain unexplored or are glossed over, yet concludes with a powerful vision of the potential for social innovation to transform society.

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Mobilizing Adults for Positive Youth Development : Strategies for Closing the Gap between Beliefs and Behaviors

"In today's fast-paced, often-dehumanizing world, increasing positive adult involvement and influence is particularly vital. To further that goal, Mobilizing Adults for Positive Youth Development: Strategies for Closing the Gap between Beliefs and Behaviors brings together, in one concise volume, the advice and expertise of leading scholars dedicated to affecting positive youth development. Taken together, the chapters in this book provide a multifaceted, multidisciplinary blueprint for social change." "Mobilizing Adults for Positive Youth Development: Strategies for Closing the Gap between Beliefs and Behaviors is a must-have volume for both practitioners and researchers - in fact, for anyone interested and involved in working toward achieving positive youth development.

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Mobile Professional Voluntarism and International Development : Killing Me Softly?

This book explores the impact that professional volunteers have on the low resource countries they choose to spend time in. Whilst individual volunteering may be of immediate benefit to individual patients, this intervention may have detrimental effects on local health systems; distorting labour markets, accentuating dependencies and creating opportunities for corruption. Improved volunteer deployment may avoid these risks and present opportunities for sustainable systems change. The empirical research presented in this book stems from a specific volunteering intervention funded by the Tropical Health Education Trust and focused on improving maternal and newborn health in Uganda.

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Methodological approaches to societies in transformation : How to make sense of change

This book provides methodological devices and analytical frameworks for the study of societies in transformation. It explores a central paradox in the study of change: making sense of change requires long-term perspectives on societal transformations and on the different ways people experience social change, whereas the research carried out to study change is necessarily limited to a relatively short space of time. This volume offers a range of methodological responses to this challenge by paying attention to the complex entanglement of qualitative research and the metanarratives generally used to account for change.

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International labour organization and global social governance

This book explores the role of the ILO (International Labour Organization) in building global social governance from multiple and mutually complementary perspectives. It explores the impact of this UN´s oldest agency, founded in 1919, on the transforming world of work in a global setting, providing insights into the unique history and functions of the ILO as an organization and the evolution of workers’ rights through international labour standards stemming from its regulatory mechanism.

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Indigenous Cultures and Sustainable Development in Latin America

This book outlines development theory and practice over time as well as critically interrogates the “cultural turn” in development policy in Latin American indigenous communities, specifically, in Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

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Geographies of Schooling

This book explores the complex relationship between schooling as a set of practices embedded in educational institutions and their specific spatial dimensions from different disciplinary perspectives.The book covers a broad range of topics, all examined from a spatial perspective: the governance of schooling, the transition processes of and within national school systems, the question of small schools in peripheral areas as well as the embeddedness of schooling in broader processes of social change. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, the book offers deep insights into current theoretical debates and empirical case studies within the broad research field encompassing the complex relationship between education and space.

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Forest Policies and Social Change in England

The book stresses how values and perceptions shape policies, and conversely how policies can modify perceptions, and also how policies can fail if they do not take perceptions into account. She concludes that many of the issues facing English forestry in the 21st century – from leisure, health and amenity provision, through education and rural as well as urban regeneration, to biodiversity conservation – go well beyond both national borders and the scope of forestry. This novel synthesis provides a valuable resource for advanced students and researchers from all areas of natural resource studies, including those interested in social history, socio-economics, cultural geography and environmental psychology, as well as those studying landscape ecology, environmental history, policy analysis and natural resource management.

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Entertainment-Education Behind the Scenes : Case Studies for Theory and Practice

This book tracks the latest trends in the theory, research, and practice of entertainment-education, the field of communication that incorporates social change messaging into entertaining media. Sometimes called edutainment, social impact television, narrative persuasion, or cultural strategy, this approach to social and behavior change communication offers new opportunities including transmedia and digital formats

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Emerging States at Crossroads

This volume analyzes the economic, social, and political challenges that emerging states confront today. Notwithstanding the growing importance of the ‘emerging states’ in global affairs and governance, many problems requiring immediate solutions have emerged at home largely as a consequence of the rapid economic development and associated sociopolitical changes. The middle-income trap is a major economic challenge faced by emerging states. This volume regards interest coordination for technological upgrading as crucial to avoid the trap and examines how various emerging states are grappling with this challenge by fostering public-private cooperation, voluntary associations of market players, and/or social networks. Social disparity is another serious problem. This volume argues that the economic, social, and political problems are interwoven in the sense that the emerging states need to build political consensus in order to tackle the economic and social difficulties. Democratic institutions have not always been successful in this respect.

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Emerging States and Economies : Their Origins, Drivers, and Challenges Ahead

This book asks why and how some of the developing countries have “emerged” under a set of similar global conditions, what led individual countries to choose the particular paths that led to their “emergence,” and what challenges confront them. If we are to understand the nature of major risks and uncertainties in the world, we must look squarely at the political and economic dynamics of emerging states. Their rapid economic development has changed the distribution of wealth and power in the world. Yet many of them have middle income status. To global governance issues, they tend to adopt approaches that differ from those of advanced industrialized democracies. At home, rapid economic growth and social changes put pressure on their institutions to change. This volume traces the historical trajectories of two major emerging states. It also analyzes cross-country data to find the general patterns of economic development and sociopolitical change in relation to globalization and to the middle income trap.

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Disrupted Development and the Future of Inequality in the Age of Automation

This book examines the future of inequality, work and wages in the age of automation with a focus on developing countries. The authors argue that the rise of a global ‘robot reserve army’ has profound effects on labor markets and economic development, but, rather than causing mass unemployment, new technologies are more likely to lead to stagnant wages and premature deindustrialization.

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Developing Prosocial Communities Across Cultures

Skillfully combining psychological knowledge and humanitarian wisdom, Developing Prosocial Communities across Cultures shows how nurturing environments can be rooted in the common concerns of people and institutions, while giving readers the steps toward achieving this goal. Psychologist/activist Forrest Tyler emphasizes individuals’ collective responsibilities—to themselves, each other, and society—and describes a coordinated balance of discrete social changes brought about by civic action, policy changes initiated by officials, and collaboration between professionals and the community. Instructive examples from locales as varied as Colombia, Jordan, and the United States offer models from which readers can form unique, innovative solutions.

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Conviviality at the Crossroads : The Poetics and Politics of Everyday Encounters

Conviviality has lately become a catchword not only in academia but also among political activists. This open access book discusses conviviality in relation to the adjoining concepts cosmopolitanism and creolisation. The urgency of today’s global predicament is not only an argument for the revival of all three concepts, but also a reason to bring them into dialogue. Ivan Illich envisioned a post-industrial convivial society of ‘autonomous individuals and primary groups’ (Illich 1973), which resembles present-day manifestations of ‘convivialism’. Paul Gilroy refashioned conviviality as a substitute for cosmopolitanism, denoting an ability to be ‘at ease’ in contexts of diversity (Gilroy 2004)

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Contemporary family lifestyles in Central and Western Europe : Selected cases

This introductory chapter approaches two basic categories of the whole monography which is a family and a lifestyle. The first subchapter deals with the complexity around the definition of the term family nowadays and difficulties with its definition.

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Consumer behavior over the life course : Research frontiers and new directions

Examines consumer behavior using the “life course” paradigm, A multidisciplinary framework for studying people's lives, structural contexts, and social change. It contributes to marketing research by providing new insights into the study of consumer behavior and illustrating how to apply the life course paradigm’s concepts and theoretical perspectives to study consumer topics in an innovative way. Also oresenting applications of the life course approach in such research topics as decision making, maladaptive behaviors (e.g., compulsive buying, binge eating), consumer well-being, and cognitive decline.

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Community Quality-of-Life Indicators : Best Cases II

This book is second in a series covering best practices in community quality-of-life (QOL) indicators. The first volume in this series is a compilation of cases of best work in community indicators research. This second volume continues to build on the goal of the series and includes eleven cases (chapters). The cases in both volumes describe communities that have launched their own community indicators programs.

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