This book explores how customer service can become the singular competitive differentiator for organizations in the digital era.

Given the pace of digitization and the rise in customer expectations post-pandemic, organizations must focus on customer-centricity in all functions in the digital age, providing factors, enablers, and processes for customer service and sharing best practices based on research from global experts.

The book is a valuable resource for students and researchers keen on understanding the new digital landscape in customer service to develop, maintain, and enhance customer relationships.

This edited volume extends current voluntourism theorizing by critically examining the intersections among various forms of work-leisure travel and language learning/teaching. The book's contributors investigate volunteer tourism and its cognates such as working holidaymaking, international internships, and gap year labor, as discursive fields in which powerful ideas about language(s), their speakers, and pedagogical practices are propagated worldwide. The various authors' chapters shed light on the hegemony of global English, the social consequences of linguistic commodification and neoliberal rationalities, the ways in which speaker identity positions can alter the exchange value of languages, and how language competencies are tied to power in the labor market, among related topics. This volume will be of interest to readers in Applied Linguistics, Critical Sociolinguistics, Educational and Linguistic Anthropology, Tourism and Leisure Studies, Migration and Mobility Studies, and Language Teaching and Learning.

The world is entering a new technological age in which great changes are expected in all areas of human interest, life, and activity. These changes have been brought on by past and present man-made events, which have had both positive and negative consequences. The coming millennium will be marked by significant social, political, demographic, and technological changes, and will definitely differ from the last century.

The future will bring more leisure time, a higher standard of living, and a better quality of life for us all. Technology Advancement, Trends and Innovations for the Future in Tourism examines recent and the most probable changes and answers questions such as: How will AI, service robots, and voice control affect tourism? Is this new era transforming the very essence of travelling?

The authors present a wide range of visionary insights, as well as operational takeaways.

This book re-evaluates the diffusion and positioning of fashion and luxury brands following the impact and disruption of digital transformations, particularly on existing omni-channel models and touchpoints and consumer behaviours. By exploring the importance of digital transformation and discussing the benefits and challenges it has created for the fashion industry, this book provides insights into the role of various digital technologies, systems and strategies in generating and maintaining brand value and equity, customer engagement and experiences and connecting the marketplace and marketspace.
Chapters 2 and 16 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via Springer Link.

"Published in cooperation with gLAWcal - Global Law Initiatives for Sustainable Development, Hornchurch, Essex, United Kingdom".

The first communication between human beings, the one between the newborn and the mother, happens through touch. Strangely this first way of relating to each other has barely been considered by our education and our culture, which have favoured sight to the detriment of touch. And yet touching and being touched means experiencing ourselves as living beings. For lack of such a touch, we do not perceive the limits nor the sensitive potential of our bodies. Then we remain immersed in a natural or a cultural universe, incapable of reaching our own individuation and of knowing our fundamental difference from the other(s).

Desire, in particular sexuate desire, is a call for touching one another anew. But this touch requires us to have gained our autonomy and to be able to open up to and commune with the other as transcendent to ourselves while staying in ourselves. This book unveils and explores how touch can act as a basic living mediation in love and,more generally, in our comprehensive individual and collective human becoming. It also considers how touch can contribute to founding a culture respectful of difference instead of subjecting them to an ideal of sameness. We need touch as mediation to fulfil our humanity and to build a truly human thinking and world.

This Palgrave Pivot examines the history of the largely urban offence once known as vitriol throwing because the substance most commonly used was strong sulphuric acid, oil of vitriol. A relatively rare form of assault, it was motivated largely by revenge or jealousy and, because it was specifically designed to blind and mutilate, commonly targeted the victim's face. The incidence of what was thus widely acknowledged to be an exceptionally cruel crime plateaued in the period 1850-1930 amid a sometimes surprisingly lenient legal response, before declining as a result of post-war social changes. In examining the factors that influenced both the crime and its punishment, the book makes an important contribution to criminal justice history by illuminating the role of gender, law and emotion from the perspective of both victim and perpetrator.

Writing Constitutions intends to serve as a practical manual for those writing constitutions or interested in their design. It is the first systematic and universal approach to coherently capture concepts and contents of a modern constitution. Volume II is a user-friendly guide covering the current best practice in human rights and contains a draft catalogue of human rights. It empowers judges, lawyers, civil rights activists, legislators, and academics to draft and interpret over 70 Human Rights and strengthen democracies.

Writing Constitutions comes in three volumes:

- Volume I: Institutions

- Volume II: Fundamental Rights

- Volume III: Constitutional Principles

Probing Human Dignity from multiple disciplinary backgrounds by scholars from a variety of countries and different cultures is an intense intellectual and emotional venture. The intensity emerges from an encounter with Human dignity that challenges individuals, communities, and society at large to navigate different spheres of human action, including ethical, moral, religious, and legal realms. Difficulties arise in the attempt to bridge the conversation about Human Dignity across cultures and traditions. This volume addresses such difficulties, exploring new horizons of the discourse and offering a mosaic of the quest for Human Dignity.

Alas, the denial of a person's dignity continues to manifest in contemporary life, through injustices often related to personal hardship, crisis, unrest, or upheaval. This collection confronts such injustices with sensitive, complex, nuanced, and academically rigorous engagement.

The authors worked together as an international and interdisciplinary research group within the framework of the 2nd Intercontinental Academia of the UBIAS network (University-Based Institutes for Advanced Studies). This volume reflects their journey, their fruitful collaboration, and their scholarly endeavors. The result is a collection that serves as a fresh and exciting contribution to the contemporary Human Dignity discourse.

This book investigates the complex relationship between the development of modern empires, nation, and the history of tropical medicine. Broadening existing historiographical perspectives, it explores imperialism outside of the British Empire, drawing on case studies from other colonial experiences in Africa, Asia, and South America in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Each of these systems adopted different approaches to colonial health and medicine. By studying their diversity, it is possible to obtain a more comprehensive picture of what we now call 'tropical medicine.' The authors emphasise that the British model cannot be adapted to all colonial experiences, drawing on relevant cases from both interoceanic and continental empires. The collection comprises three sections. The first examines the role of tropical medicine in the evolution and collapse of empire in countries such as Portugal and the Netherlands. The second part analyses the links between tropical medical institutions and imperial commercial and political expansion in Britain and Brazil. Finally, the authors tackle the crucial interrelated circulation of people, objects, and ideas amongst countries including Brazil, China, Italy, and Spain. Using a medical lens to analyse the inter-connected processes of nation-building and colonial expansion in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, this book provides valuable reading for scholars of imperialism and medical history alike.

Chapter 7 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Winner of the Edward Goodwin Ballard Prize as announced at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy Meeting on September 27, 2024

The book offers a systematic reconstruction of the disagreement between Husserl and Heidegger from the former's perspective, but without falling into any form of Husserlian apologetics. The main thesis is that Husserl's critique of Heidegger's existential analytics as a form of philosophical anthropology entails a deeper fundamental thesis, namely that Heidegger confuses the object of first philosophy (the transcendental determination of the subject) with metaphysics (in the Husserlian sense of the expression). Addressing the Husserl-Heidegger confrontation, this text provides the first systematic reconstruction of Husserl's conception of the system of philosophy from the perspective of his later works, with a special focus on the Cartesian Meditations. At stake in Husserl's critique of Heidegger's philosophy in Being and Time is the refusal to transcendentalize the irrational aspects and nature of our human existence. This first volume addresses Husserl's doctrine of transcendental idealism with the aim of elucidating the distinction between first philosophy, second philosophies and what Husserl calls last philosophy. This volume appeals to students and researchers.