Direct Democracy in Europe : Developments and Prospects
The initiative and referendum process offers extra channels of participation and can serve as an important supplementary institution in representative democratic systems. This first volume of the new series Direct Democracy in Modern Europe features sixteen systematic and broadly empirical approaches to the study of modern direct democracy within the context of European politics including - system contexts and effects of the initiative and referendum process - theoretical approaches and basic values in modern direct democracy - the quality and institutional design of direct democratic mechanisms - aspects of information and communication - institutional performance and economic effectiveness - transnational challenges and the development of direct democracy in Europe
Digital Economy and Social Design
The advent of the digital economy has the potential to dramatically change the conventional interrelationships among individuals, enterprises and society. There can be little doubt that to achieve vigorous socioeconomic developments in the 21st century, people will have to aggressively use information technology to boost innovation and to organically link the results of that innovation to solutions to global environmental issues and social challenges such as the opportunity divide. We are responsible for taking advantage of the opportunities opened up by the digital economy and for turning those opportunities into things that reflect our values and goals. The book examines the overall impact of the digital economy and the development of a practical institutional design.
Digital Economic Dynamics : Innovations, Networks and Regulations
This book analyzes the dynamics and impacts of software development and discusses new institutional and economic changes in the context of digital market economies.The book furthermore examines telecommunications regulation of fixed line networks, cable TV and mobile communications.
Designing Ubiquitous Information Environments : Socio-Technical Issues and Challenges; IFIP TC8 WG 8.2 International Working Conference, August 1-3, 2005, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A.
The book brings in diverse perspectives on ubiquitous information environments, from computer-supported collaborative work, institutional perspective, diffusion of innovation, management, sociology, individual cognition, and software engineering. It also covers a variety of technologies that make up ubiquitous information environments including RFID, wireless grid, GPS, mobile phones, and wireless local area network. The papers cover many contexts of ubiquitous computing including personal use, library, automobile, healthcare, police, professional knowledge work, remote diagnostics of machines, and marketing, attesting to the wide range of potential of ubiquitous information environments.
Decision Making for Complex Socio-Technical Systems : Robustness from Lessons Learned in Long-Term Radioactive Waste Governance
The long-term governance of radioactive waste continues to be a major complex and contentious socio-technical issue worldwide. Traditionally, it has been considered as mainly a challenge to scientists and engineers to develop technical "solutions" to specific problems. But increasingly these narrow solutions have been enlarged by wider societal considerations such as ethics, public involvement, control and retrievability – needs that have in the meanwhile been recognised by the nuclear community, at least in a general way. In this book, we analyse motives for a broad discourse as well as suggest prerequisites to launch it. The author attempts to give a novel, empirically based and technically sound treatment of fundamental issues in long-term management and governance. Written to be accessible to a wide selection of the interested public, the study proposes a combination of technical design issues, analysis methods and institutional backup in a dynamic procedure, and with involvement at all levels of political, commercial and social life.
Cultural heritage in a changing world
The central purpose of this collection of essays is to make a creative addition to the debates surrounding the cultural heritage domain. In the 21st century the world faces epochal changes which affect every part of society, including the arenas in which cultural heritage is made, held, collected, curated, exhibited, or simply exists. The book is about these changes; about the decentring of culture and cultural heritage away from institutional structures towards the individual; about the questions which the advent of digital technologies is demanding that we ask and answer in relation to how we understand, collect and make available Europe’s cultural heritage.
Countering Nuclear and Radiological Terrorism
One key outcome of this book is a better understanding of the independent contributions from across the international community of the scientific and technological components and the legal, policy and institutional components to combating nuclear/radiological terrorism. The book can serve as a tool for communicating the outcomes of the workshop to the multi-national scientific communities engaged in combating nuclear/radiological terrorism, and to those working at governmental and policy levels.
Corporate and Investment Banking : Preparing for a Career in Sales, Trading, and Research in Global Markets
Provides unique information to prepare graduates and newly hired corporate and investment banking professionals for a career in the global markets environment of large universal and international investment banks. It shows the interrelationship between the three specific business functions of sales, trading, and research, as well as the interaction with corporate and institutional clients. The book fills a gap in the available literature by linking financial market theory to the practical aspects of day-to-day operations on a trading floor and offers a taxonomy of the current banking business, providing an in-depth analysis of the main market participants in the global markets ecosystem. Engaging the reader with case studies, anecdotes, and industry color, the book addresses the risks and opportunities of the global markets business in today’s global financial markets both from a theoretical and from a practitioner’s perspective and focuses on the most important fixed-income financial instruments from a pricing, risk-management, and client-marketing perspective.
Coping With Institutional Order Flow
Handling the large orders of institutional participants presents some of the most complex problems for system design. How well are our current systems operating, and how effective are new facilities on the scene? To what extent is market quality impaired for all participants when institutional trading costs are not properly contained? Can institutional order flow be efficiently integrated with the orders of retail customers, or are separate facilities needed? What are the impediments to market structure change, and how might they best be overcome?
Control Systems Design : A New Framework
This book will be of great interest to academics and institutional researchers in control system design and to those studying for higher degrees in this area
Contemporary Treatment Techniques in Pediatric Dentistry
This clinical guide acquire a clear understanding of contemporary treatment protocols for primary and young permanent teeth while serving as a guide to integrate these procedures into their private or institutional practice. The background to the book is the emergence in recent years of important paradigm shifts in treatment concepts.
Contemporary Developments in Entrepreneurial Finance : An Academic and Policy Lens on the Status-Quo, Challenges and Trends
Provides a contemporary research-based overview of the latest trends in entrepreneurial finance and outlines expected future developments. Starting with the status quo in market regulations and the financing structure of SMEs, it addresses a broad range of new financing alternatives for innovative startups (e.g. business angel financing, venture capital and corporate venture capital), as well as recent social phenomena (e.g. crowdfunding and initial coin offerings (ICOs)). Incorporating qualitative, quantitative and mixed analytical methods, the book contributes to a better understanding of the financing world by reflecting both the researcher’s and the practitioner’s perspective.
Consumer driven electronic transformation : Applying new technologies to enthuse consumers and transform the supply chain
The Symposia have become important, unique - casions in the international calendar of business research. The papers c- lected here, first presented in Athens, represent an important contribution to the research literature of modern business. The wide-scale institutional development of collaborative practices in the European consumer goods business began in 1994 with the creation of ECR (“Efficient Consumer Response”) Europe, a joint initiative of ma- facturers and retailers working together to improve the quality and p- formance of the value chain. At the heart of ECR was a business envir- ment characterised by dramatic advances in information technology, shifts in consumer demand, and the increasing movements of goods across int- national borders. This new reality required a fundamental reconsideration of the most effective way of delivering the right products to consumers at the right price.
Commodity derivatives : Markets and applications
The second edition includes discussions of critical new topics like dual curve swap valuation, option valuation within a negative price environment using the Bachelier model, volatility skews, smiles, smirks, term structures for major commodities, and more. You’ll find case studies on corporate failures linked to improper commodity risk management, as well as explorations of issues like the impact of growing interest in electric vehicles on commodity markets.
Collective Consciousness and its Discontents: Institutional distributed cognition, racial policy, and public health in the United States
This book expands a recent mathematical treatment of the Baars model of individual consciousness to an institutional venue in which multiple ‘Global Workspaces’ cooperate, communicate, and compete. The result is an expansion of Dretske’s necessary conditions communications theory approach to high level cognition.
Collaborative curriculum design for sustainable innovation and teacher learning
This book provides insight into what it takes to actively involve teachers in the curriculum design process. It examines different aspects of teacher involvement in collaborative curriculum design, with specific attention to its implications for sustainable curriculum innovation and teacher learning. Divided into six sections, the book starts out by introducing the notion of collaborative curriculum design and discusses its historical and theoretical foundations. It describes various approaches commonly adopted to actively involve teachers in the (co-)design of curriculum materials. Sections two and three provide examples of what key phases in the curriculum design process - such as needs analysis, design and development, and implementation - look like across various collaborative curriculum design projects. Section four reports on the impact of collaborative curriculum design on student learning, teacher practices, teacher professional growth, and institutional change. Building on the research evidence about the outcomes of collaborative curriculum design, section five focuses on sustainability, scaling-up and curriculum leadership issues, which are key to the continuation and further evolution of curriculum innovations. Future perspectives are addressed in section six with emphasis on the infrastructure of a sustainable curriculum innovation.
Cognitive Economics
As a manifestation of a 'cognitive turn' observable in all social sciences, Cognitive Economics is concerned with the beliefs and mental operations held by actors placed within a dynamical and strategic environment. It appears as a synthesis of an educative research program, dealing with crossed expectations of actors, and an evolutionist research program on collective learning processes. The book mainly aims at extending the framework of game theory in order to better fit the results of rapidly increasing laboratory experiments concerned with individual choices and collective interactions. It also seeks to better explain some original economic phenomena involving boundedly rational agents in an institutional setting such as financial bubbles, job search or technological innovation.
Coercion and the State
A signal feature of legal and political institutions is that they exercise coercive power. The essays in this volume examine institutional coercion with the aim of trying to understand its nature, justification and limits. Included are essays that take a fresh look at perennial questions – what, if anything, can legitimate state exercises of coercive force? What is coercion in politics and law? – and essays that take a first or nearly first look at newer questions – may the state coercively hold certain terrorists indefinitely? Leading scholars from philosophy, political science and law examine these and related questions shedding new light on an apparently inescapable feature of political and legal life: Coercion.
Market Entry Strategies in Eastern Europe in the Context of the European Union : An Empirical Research into German Firms Entering the Polish Market
The preparations for market entry in a foreign country include various aspects and are influenced by factors inside and outside the firm. Based on face to face interviews with decision makers of 16 German firms Michael Klug analyses the applied strategy and the motivation for market entry and investigates different strategy theories like Porter's market based view for their suitability to explain the firms' strategy abroad. The author discusses the operational design including forms of market presence and marketing mix to realise a chosen strategy and shows the influence of the European Union as an institutional arrangement for firms preparing a venture abroad.
Maritime Work Law Fundamentals : Responsible Shipowners, Reliable Seafarers
As the title suggests, a fundamental challenge of this branch of international maritime law is to achieve a balance between the interests of the two main stakeholders. Institutionally, the effort to achieve this balance dates back a number of decades with its genesis mainly found in the work of the International Labour Organization. It has to be said that whilst this effort achieved great progress, it has led to a haphazard, plethora of legal instruments.



















