This book, the second volume of The Synergistic Effect of Sustainable Business Practices on Human Capital and Economic Performance, extends the research and insights of the first volume by focusing on the intersection of human capital development, economic performance, and sustainable business strategy. In an era of rapid technological advancement, shifting workforce expectations, and intensified ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) imperatives, organizations face the challenge of integrating sustainability not only into operational practices but also into the management and development of their human assets. This volume explores how strategic workforce management, employee engagement, and organizational learning contribute to sustainable economic outcomes at the firm, industry, and national levels. The book will covers theoretical frameworks linking sustainability, human capital, and economic performance, research Findings on the role of human resources in achieving sustainability-driven competitive advantage, case studies from diverse industries and geographies illustrating best practices in integrating HR strategy with sustainability objectives, policy implications for governments and international agencies in promoting sustainable and inclusive economic growth and future-oriented discussions on the Future of Work, workforce digitalization, and the skills required in a sustainable economy.

By combining perspectives from economics, human resource management, and sustainability science, this volume will serves as a valuable reference for academics, practitioners, and policymakers seeking to understand and leverage the synergies between people and profit in driving sustainable corporate performance.

Russia's devastating invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is a manifestation of a wider phenomenon: Russia's new, post-Soviet imperialism. This book provides a theoretically informed, critical account of Russian imperialism that is attentive to the interplay between economy and ideology, coercion and hegemony, structure and agency. While economic developments go a long way toward explaining the reemergence of Russia's imperialist impulses in the twenty-first century, a purely economic logic cannot account for the dramatic shift in Russian imperialism beginning with the annexation of Crimea and the instigation of a separatist insurgency in the Donbas. Nor can objective geopolitical developments, such as US and NATO military deployments, provide an adequate explanation for this shift. Instead, this book shows how the Kremlin's reaction to the Maidan revolution was rooted in the ideological consolidation of the previous years: the emergence of a total ideology that designates the West as Russia's eternal enemy and Ukraine as the West's geopolitical pawn. Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev examine Russian foreign policy and the Kremlin's project to remake the Russian people to better serve its imperialist agenda.

How can a small democracy resist the influence of a powerful authoritarian neighbor? Taiwan is frequently praised for its successful economic development and peaceful transition to democracy, serving as a model for other developing countries. However, it faces substantial challenges, both from internal political divisions and external geopolitical pressures. Taiwan's political landscape is shaped by several significant cleavages: national identity and ethnic disparities, economic inequality and class conflict, and generational and cultural differences. The greatest challenge to Taiwan's democracy comes from the influence of China, which has exploited these cleavages through economic leverage, propaganda, and political interference.

Under the heavy influence of Beijing's sharp power, Taiwan's democracy often faces threats of regression. Whenever China escalates its tactics, Taiwan's civil society has mobilized in response, playing a crucial role in resisting Beijing's strategies and defending democratic institutions. Thung-Hong Lin examines case studies - such as the 2014 Sunflower Movement, the 2019 support for the Hong Kong protests, and recent social movements in 2024 - to demonstrate how Taiwan's vibrant civil society is a key source of democratic resilience. This book also situates Taiwan's struggle within the broader context of US-China relations, showing how global geopolitics over the past half-century has shaped the island's destiny.

Practical Pronunciation offers an easy-to-follow road map for English learners to incorporate pronunciation into their everyday and professional speaking. With more than two decades of practice and expertise in teaching advanced English pronunciation and public speaking skills, DJ Kaiser guides readers through a series of hands-on strategies that bring pronunciation practice to life. Carefully ordered lessons cover segmentals, word stress, phrase rhythm and melody, the phrase focus syllable, and intonation. Balancing more advanced topics in pronunciation (like stress on compound nouns, intonation on various question types, and using gestures to bring focus to relevant content) with accessible language and practical strategies makes reaching pronunciation goals more attainable. The book includes access to video content and more than 4.5 hours of audio content. Practical Pronunciation is perfect for classroom instruction, small-group tutorials, and one-on-one tutoring sessions, or as a self-study tool for advanced independent learners.

CEFR Level: C1

Key Features

• A series of 210 audio recordings provides opportunities for learners to listen for key aspects of pronunciation and practice items from the book on their own.
• Twenty-nine videos provide short explanations and visual demonstrations of many of the strategies included throughout the book.
• Recommendations on ways to integrate digital tools into pronunciation exploration and practice provide learners and teachers with multiple ways to customize pronunciation practice to meet varied professional speaking contexts, academic goals, and personal interests.
• Practice items and exercises incorporate higher-frequency words from the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
• A glossary and several quick-reference charts make it easy to look up or clarify key terms and linguistic terminology or to visually review consonant and vowel charts.

This open access book from the Migration and Food Security (MiFOOD) Network addresses food security, health, and wellbeing among migrants and refugees who faced heightened vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a blend of survey data, personal narratives, and compelling images, it illustrates the consequences of the pandemic for migrants and refugees from Afghanistan, the DRC, Ghana, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe, living in the destination countries of Canada, South Africa, Ecuador, and Qatar. The contributors focus on four themes: the food security and health implications of public health responses to COVID-19; the impact of these measures on marginalised refugees and migrants in urban settings; gender differences in accessing food and food-related programs; and key policy lessons for vulnerable populations in times of crisis. This book will be useful to academics, students, and stakeholders engaged with migrant and refugee communities, as well as policymakers seeking actionable insights. While focused on COVID-19, its insights are relevant for future public health emergencies.

This open access book examines timely issues of integrated, international, and harmonized longitudinal research on child development and wellbeing. It describes the unique approach of the Growing up in Digital Europe (GUIDE) study, which is rooted in robust scientific inquiry and provides a solid evidence base for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers focused on child development in a digital world. Chapters employ a parallel structure, including background on each GUIDE topic as well as a summary of the current state of, future directions in, and recommendations for additional research. The book offers several select case studies that provide synergy and coherency across the chapters.

Key areas of coverage include:

• Holistic understanding of child wellbeing.
• Child development in the digital age.
• Child-centered research approaches.
• Cross-national harmonized questionnaire development.
• Potential for data linkage and biological data.
• Ethical considerations in an age of digital data.
• Fieldwork best practices, including translation.
• Sampling frames across diverse jurisdictions.

Growing up in Digital Europe is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as policy makers, educators, and related professionals in developmental, clinical child, and school psychology, family studies, clinical social work, migration studies, health psychology, economics, and all related disciplines.

This open access volume employs case studies in selected African countries to investigate the emergence and evolution of sustainable entrepreneurship within the continent. Utilizing a comparative approach, it integrates management, neo-institutional, and entrepreneurship theories to fully understand the meanings and practices of sustainable entrepreneurship across diverse African contexts. Though often viewed as homogenous, entrepreneurship practices in Africa exhibit variations shaped by cultural beliefs. Contributions explore three streams: individual (vision, emotion, rationality, and values and norms), organizational (entrepreneurial orientation, MSP, internal culture, routines), and context (opportunities, industry culture, isomorphisms). Drawing insights from experiences in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, this book is a valuable resource for researchers and policymakers focusing on the development of sustainable entrepreneurship in Africa.

This book explores the evolving landscape of entrepreneurship in higher education, showcasing how universities are becoming central players in regional innovation ecosystems. The central theme of this book is the innovative startup ecosystem in universities, with a particular focus on emerging and transitioning economies across Asia and Africa. Through a series of richly detailed chapters, this volume investigates how universities in countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and South Africa contribute to economic development by nurturing startups, facilitating technology transfer, and establishing business incubators. Using case studies, process documentation research, and field-based evidence, the book captures both institutional innovations and policy-level engagements that foster entrepreneurship and support MSMEs in diverse sectors including agriculture, aquaculture, digital services, and renewable technologies.

By integrating theory with grounded practice, this book offers a rare glimpse into the operationalisation of innovation at the university level highlighting success stories, challenges, and lessons learned in fostering startup culture in non-Western contexts. It demonstrates how academic institutions are transforming into entrepreneurial hubs, driving social and economic transformation. The reader will gain both conceptual clarity and empirical depth regarding how universities can align research, teaching, and outreach missions with startup development.

With a keen attention to how culture and elite conflict shape politics, The Great Separation upends deterministic understandings of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the market reforms that followed. This ambitious posthumous volume by sociologist Xiaohong Xu turns the existing scholarship on China's "neoliberalism" on its head by demonstrating that the effort to separate mass politics from economic policy had its origins well before the Reform and Opening-up era.

Over the course of the Cultural Revolution, unfolding factional dynamics and interpretive struggles enabled Chairman Mao and his radical colleagues to mobilize workers to advance their own political goals while neutralizing the masses' economic demands, symbolically separating the political from the economic. This set the stage for a more thoroughgoing depoliticization of the economy after 1989, when China faced challenges from students and workers whose economic grievances had rapidly morphed into political demands for democracy. The result was what Xu calls ordoeconomism: an ideology that valorizes economic development, rejects mass politics, and views the state as the apolitical guardian of the economy. As Xu demonstrates, while ordoeconomism may share some affinities with neoliberalism, it is a distinctively Chinese approach that must be understood on its own terms.

This book offers an analysis of reward-based crowdfunding based on empirical case studies and gift exchange theory. Reward-based crowdfunding projects aim to produce products that, in addition to their consumer value, also have value in terms of promoting a good cause. Supporters of the projects receive non-financial rewards for their financial contributions. The main rewards are the products of the projects. The book shows that the key to understanding reward-based crowdfunding lies in a three-way relationship between consumption, connection to a cause of deeper meaning, and belonging to a community of like-minded people. The connection between purchase and donation, between consumption and commitment, is thus established by the fact that supporters act as consumers on the one hand, but on the other hand associate a deeper meaning with the object of consumption, which motivates them to engage more strongly with this object than with 'normal' products. The book is aimed at social, media and economic scientists who are interested in the phenomena of the sharing economy, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

This book examines three scenarios of decarbonization to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of allocating carbon pollution-free sources across sectors (uses). For this purpose and looking at the EU target, the LSCOA (levelized social cost of abatement), the abatement speed (AS) and the cost of the avoided carbon cumulation (COACC) are estimated. The main conclusion is that accelerating the use of pollution-free sources in contestable end uses before the electricity supply is fully decarbonized is inefficient and ineffective compared to prioritizing their allocation to power generation, whether through renewables or carbon capture utilization and storage. Therefore, policies should focus first on decarbonizing the electricity supply. Only once this has largely been achieved, a deep penetration of pollution-free sources into contestable end uses (both "less difficult to abate and "hard to abate") should be promoted. Following this sequence leads to lower abatement costs and reduced carbon accumulation, minimizing the cost of avoided carbon accumulation in the atmosphere. Otherwise, indiscriminate acceleration risks slowing down the overall energy transition and undermining climate objectives (including limiting global warming). Regarding the specific decarbonization pathways, direct electrification emerges as the preferable carrier, whereas hydrogen is justified as feedstock for e-fuels supply, including imports from Middle East and North Africa countries.

Die Arbeit befasst sich mit der Frage ihrer Einfuehrung und zeigt dabei auf, dass zwar keine Kompetenz der Europaeischen Union im Rahmen der Wirtschafts- und Waehrungsunion besteht, wohl aber im Rahmen der ihr zugewiesenen sozialpolitischen Zustaendigkeit gem. Art. 153 AEUV sowie ueber den Europaeischen Sozialfonds. Dazu analysiert sie die historische Entwicklung sowie die systematischen Bezuege, aber auch vergleichbare Diskussionen zur US-amerikanischen Arbeitslosenversicherung. Sie zeigt daran anknuepfend Moeglichkeiten einer Einfuehrung ueber differenzierte Integration innerhalb, aber auch ausserhalb des Unionsrechts auf.

European Union policy on rural development and EU research programmes aim to help rural areas of the EU meet the wide range of economic, environmental and social challenges of the 21st Century. However, the challenges facing rural areas of Europe, and their people, remain significant and highly affected by the crises of our current era. This contributed volume comprises 12 research studies, exploring the intersection of research, policy and innovation strategy across the diverse rural regions of the Europe Union.

Conducted in different countries, these studies point to the challenges that lie at the heart of strategic planning in public policy. The book ultimately supports an EU vision for future rural development, digitalisation, sustainability planning and innovation strategy. It is not only a source of data on the problems faced by local communities in different European countries, but offers suggestions for practical use of bottom-up and multiactor perspective for policy-making, business development and community engagement at local, regional and national level. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of rural development, innovation strategy, the agricultural sector and EU policy.

This book highlights the interdisciplinary nature of entrepreneurship in today's rapidly changing global landscape. Written by leading scholars and industry experts, it examines how ethnicity shapes entrepreneurial practices among indigenous communities in Namibia. Drawing on diverse theoretical frameworks and real-world insights from local leaders, it offers a unique cultural perspective on entrepreneurship.

The volume explores how indigenous entrepreneurs balance modern economic demands with deep-rooted cultural values, while addressing the challenges and opportunities they face. By foregrounding authentic voices, it contributes to a deeper understanding of indigenous entrepreneurship. This book is an essential resource for researchers, students, practitioners, and communities interested in indigenous business and development.

This book takes the reader on a philosophical journey into the core of modern finance, bringing to light the ideas, values, and contradictions that shape Wall Street and, through it, the global economy. It shows how markets have moved beyond their original role as instruments of exchange to become autonomous systems of power and meaning-systems that do not merely mirror economic and social realities, but actively participate in producing them.

Bringing together philosophy, economics, and history, A Philosophical Walk Down Wall Street explores how financial markets generate knowledge, how mathematical models come to possess authority, and why crises continue to recur in spite of increasing technological sophistication. Through rich case studies, ranging from the 2008 financial crisis to algorithmic trading, the book argues that concepts such as efficiency, risk, and value are not simply neutral analytical tools, but embody substantive philosophical claims about the nature of the world.