This book explores the sharing economy from an operational perspective, utilizing advanced technologies and optimization techniques to improve efficiency, sustainability, reliability, customer satisfaction, and decision-making support for stakeholders. It introduces a multi-level framework that covers various aspects of sharing economy operations, including supply and demand dynamics, platform management, and stakeholder decisions related to pricing, behavior, and operations. The book provides a thorough analysis of operational challenges in areas such as ride-sharing, operations management, crowd-shipping, security, healthcare matching, hospitality, and tourism. Advanced solutions, including data analytics, optimization models, blockchain, smart pricing, and artificial intelligence, are presented as tools to effectively address these issues. Additionally, the book examines the opportunities and challenges associated with the adoption of these technologies across different segments of the sharing economy, from demand and supply to platform operations. Ultimately, it offers a comprehensive overview of how digital, optimization, and advanced technologies can shape a more efficient, sustainable, and customer-focused future for the sharing economy.

This book examines how different forms of proximity influence the knowledge processes necessary for sustainable innovation. Exploring five key dimensions-geographical, cognitive, institutional, organizational, and social-it shows how the most effective combinations of these dimensions support strong, sustainability-oriented innovation networks.

Through an analysis of how these dimensions interact, the book identifies common patterns in successful collaborations. It provides practical guidance for companies, policymakers, universities, and civil society organizations designing innovation networks or selecting partners for collaborative projects. Policy actors will find guidance for crafting strategies that promote sustainability more effectively.

At its core, the book introduces a refined analytical framework for studying multiactor settings, which are typical of sustainable innovation. It addresses the complexity of sustainability challenges and the dispersed, context-specific knowledge they require. Drawing on innovation systems research and sustainability science, the book provides a deeper understanding of how sustainable innovations take shape and thrive.

This book offers a rigorous and historically grounded analysis of Black women's political thought, activism, and institutional engagement across six decades. This book begins with 1965-a pivotal year in which the Voting Rights Act fundamentally transformed political participation for African Americans and, notably, the year Kamala Harris was born. This temporal convergence serves as the book's organizing framework, illustrating how the expansion of voting rights and the evolution of Black feminist politics created the conditions that made Harris's Vice Presidency possible. Drawing on political science, history, gender studies, and Black feminist theory, the chapters trace major developments in U.S. political life from 1965 to 2025. Topics include the interventions of Michelle Wallace, Ntozake Shange, and Alice Walker, as well as the implications of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings for understanding gendered political vulnerability. The analysis also engages the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, showing how contemporary movements-including Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the resistance to book bans-extend a longer tradition of Black feminist political critique. The text foregrounds key analytical concepts such as linked fate and Black feminist epistemology, making it an essential resource for scholars and students of American politics, African American studies, and feminist theory. By situating Kamala Harris's Vice Presidency within a broader historical trajectory, the book demonstrates that Black feminist political behavior is indispensable to understanding the development of modern U.S. democracy.

With each edition of Black Feminist Politics, Duchess Harris solidifies its position as an essential and enduring text that affirms the vital importance of using a Black Feminist analysis to interpret US politics, society, and culture.

Crystal M. Moten, author of Continually Working: Black Women, Community Intellectualism and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee

This volume shows how modern econometric techniques, computational tools, and interdisciplinary approaches are reshaping the analysis of growth, financial markets, and microeconomic behavior in an increasingly complex global economy. Featuring select contributions presented at the 2025 International Conference on Applied Economics (ICOAE) held in Bratislava, Slovakia, this volume applies cutting-edge methodologies such as machine learning, genetic algorithms, wavelet transforms, ARIMA-GARCH modeling, and emerging uses of quantum computing to examine financial efficiency, cryptocurrency dynamics, sovereign debt restructuring, ESG risk, and corporate performance.

A central theme is sustainability and structural transformation in which links between economic growth, environmental degradation, green finance, circular-economy practices, and pathways to net-zero emissions are explored. The book also analyses how digitization, innovation, and R&D investment influence development across regions such as the EU, MENA Africa, and OECD economies.

Bridging methodological advancement with policy relevance, this volume serves researchers, policymakers, and advanced students seeking rigorous analysis to inform decisions in sustainable development, financial stability, and digital transformation.

This book offers contemporary insights into the intersection of sustainable development, leadership, innovation, and organizational performance in a global context. Featuring 30 selected papers presented at the 20th Academy of Global Business Advancement (AGBA) World Congress held in Bangkok, Thailand, this book brings together research from scholars across Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States addressing real-world challenges in public governance, green management, digital transformation, and global business. The work also highlights critical themes such as artificial intelligence in marketing and governance, internationalization of global firms, the post-pandemic effects on SMEs, and sustainable practices in hospitality and manufacturing. By offering comparative and cross-country perspectives, this book provides a comprehensive understanding of global trends shaping business and entrepreneurship in an increasingly interconnected and digitalized world. This book is a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and graduate students in the fields of business, economics, sustainability, innovation management, and public administration.

This book analyses the evolution of competition and shifts in user behaviour over the past quarter-century, since 2000, within Japan's network media market from an economic perspective. It focuses on Japan's distinctive media market, characterised by the traditionally high market share of terrestrial advertising broadcasts and public service broadcasting, and conducts a step-by-step empirical analysis over time based on a wealth of data-a feature that is unique. Furthermore, by analysing not only the platforms but also viewer behaviour on the demand side, and by examining the state of digitalisation and internet distribution, the study offers a comprehensive analysis. Additionally, by focusing on bias in the newspaper market-where political impartiality is not mandated by law-and exploring the possibility of skewed reporting frequency and volume rather than content itself, the book makes a novel contribution. It thus serves as a scholarly work that offers valuable insights for future institutional design in the media market.

This open access edited volume offers a new global perspective on migration governance by rethinking the political economy of migration beyond Western-centric frameworks. Using the concept of assemblages of migration, the book conceptualises migration governance as historically layered, polycentric, infrastructural, stratified, embodied, and co-produced through formal institutions and everyday practices. The book offers critical insights into migration in non-Western regions and advances a more comprehensive, globally inclusive migration studies agenda. Through empirically rich case studies spanning Asia, Africa, Eurasia, and Europe, contributors examine colonial legacies, regional mobility regimes, diaspora governance, gendered migration, family migration, and migrants' everyday legal navigation. By bringing together perspectives from international political economy, political science, socio-legal studies, anthropology, history, and migration studies, the volume advances a genuinely multidisciplinary and global approach to migration governance. It is essential reading for scholars, students, and policymakers interested in comparative migration studies, global political economy, and the governance of mobility in non-Western contexts.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of China's economic governance model-its astonishing success in improving the lives of average people and its future challenges. Beginning with a comparative history of the Chinese and US economies from 1979 to 2025, the discussion analyzes the distinct historical phases of China's transformation. The author stresses that the details of a nation's financial system determine whether a sustainable fundamental transformation is possible.

Challenging conventional theories, the author attributes China's achievements to its ability to combine a government-planned financial system that promotes capital investment in infrastructure and industry, highly competitive markets in almost all sectors of the economy, and Confucian/socialist social capital. Using these systems, China created a benevolent cycle of high investment, fierce competition, and rapidly rising real wages.

Looking into future, the author argues that China is now in the midst of a further transition to a new growth model based on industrial upgrading. The crucial roles of industrial clusters and rural entrepreneurs are highlighted, emphasizing China's ability to apply new technologies to farming, small businesses, and manufacturing. Stressing the need for internal competition and rising wages to sustain growth, he concludes that China's unique blend of state facilitation, social capital, strong competition and adaptive reforms offers a viable model for balancing technological progress with broad-based prosperity.

Deradicalisation and Rehabilitation of Violent Extremist Offenders in the Global South: Lessons from Bangladesh offers a rigorous, evidence-based framework for understanding and responding to violent extremism in Bangladesh - with adaptable insights for other nations across the Global South. Structured around four interconnected outputs, the volume moves systematically from strategic diagnosis to operational implementation.

Part I presents a comprehensive needs-mapping study, drawing on comparative analyses of international case studies from Indonesia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Colombia. It profiles 103 violent extremist offenders spanning faith-based militants, left-wing extremists, and ethno-nationalists, identifying socio-demographic patterns, psychological vulnerabilities, and radicalisation pathways that underpin the need for tailored interventions.

Part II introduces the first operational training manual of its kind in South Asia, adopting a whole-of-society approach across four progressive stages: preparatory work, deradicalisation, rehabilitation, and policy reform. The manual outlines detailed counselling modules across religious, psychological, cultural, educational, and legal dimensions, with gender sensitivity and human rights compliance embedded throughout.

Part III evaluates a pilot intervention conducted in Bangladesh between August and December 2023, assessing outcomes for 32 beneficiaries using a multidimensional framework that combines counsellor evaluations, self-assessments, and independent observations.

Part IV presents a standardised Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) toolkit aligned with OECD-DAC principles, designed for scalability across prison, community, and counterterrorism settings.

Collectively, the volume provides a transformative shift from fragmented, reactive approaches to a structured, rights-compliant, and institutionally sustainable architecture for deradicalisation and rehabilitation - offering a replicable model for Global South countries confronting the complex challenges of terrorism and violent extremism.

A Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Volume 2 unveils the rich diversity and enduring legacy of the Greek manuscript tradition preserved in one of North America's largest collections. Building on the acclaimed first volume, this second and concluding volume offers comprehensive illustrated descriptions of eighty-four manuscripts and fragments housed in the University of Michigan Library's Special Collections Research Center. The discovery of twenty-three previously unknown manuscripts and fragments significantly expands our understanding of Byzantine and post-Byzantine book culture, illuminating the remarkable continuity of Greek scholarly, liturgical, and artistic traditions from the ninth through the nineteenth centuries.

Each entry integrates codicological features, handwriting analysis, textual content, decoration, binding, provenance, and references to earlier scholarship as well as high-quality color plates to illustrate representative pages, script types, and illuminations. Among the exceptional highlights are a fragment of The Great Calculation According to the Indians by Maximos Planoudes, preserving portions of this rare mathematical treatise otherwise lost; an illuminated 1371 copy of The Heavenly Ladder by John Klimax, created by the renowned scribe Joasaph II of the Hodegon Monastery in Constantinople; and a newly identified manuscript containing rare patristic homilies linked to the sixteenth-century Choniates scriptorium in Venice.

This seminal volume provides a rigorous doctrinal analysis of contemporary slavery through the lens of criminal law and legal dogmatics. It addresses the modern paradox of universal prohibition coexisting with thriving exploitation, offering a robust instrument for law interpretation in both domestic and international courts.

The treatise is organized into four sections. Section I establishes conceptual foundations, diagnosing slavery as an organic product of structural vulnerability within the global neoliberal model rather than a historical anomaly. It further provides a profound constitutionalist perspective on human dignity, a concept essential for a comprehensive understanding of slavery.

Section II maps international standards, tracing the evolution of Article 4 of the ECHR and ILO benchmarks. It elucidates the critical shift from legal ownership to the de facto exercise of powers attaching to ownership, maintaining the severity threshold required to distinguish human rights violations from mere labour malpractice.

A cornerstone of the work is the Anti-Slavery Model Legislation (The Guide to Domestic Legislation) in Section III. This template defines and provides penal frameworks for ten stand-alone forms of exploitation, including slavery, servitude, and forced labour. This section also offers comparative analyses of European and South American legal landscapes.

Section IV addresses institutions of heightened criminal relevance, including the non-punishment provision for victims, complexities in global supply chains, and the challenges of "borderless" criminal jurisdiction. It tackles corporate "ubiquity" and "forum shopping," proposing models to ensure accountability in fragmented productive networks.

By assembling preeminent legal scholars and practitioners, this book transcends sociological description to provide the dogmatic precision required to narrow the space of impunity. It serves as an indispensable resource for understanding how diverse jurisdictions regulate the most heinous affronts to human freedom and legal personality.

This textbook provides a practice-oriented and scientifically grounded introduction to key topics relevant for leaders and leadership-interested individuals in the policing context. Students (in both bachelor's and master's programs) as well as practitioners will find useful information on personnel selection and development, teamwork, conflict management, motivation, leadership styles, authority, and much more - for deepening lecture content or applying the material in professional practice

This brief reconceptualizes the immigration-crime relationship by examining how immigration reshapes low-skill labor markets in ways that may disproportionately disadvantage economically marginalized Black workers. Challenging the prevailing consensus that immigration either reduces crime or has no effect, it shifts attention away from immigrant offending and toward the structural conditions under which immigration may indirectly elevate crime among Black populations. Rather than treating immigration as uniformly beneficial or criminogenic, the brief argues that its social consequences are unevenly distributed across racial and economic groups.

Results from longitudinal analyses of city-level data drawn from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the U.S. Census show that higher levels of immigration are associated with increased weekday and weeknight/weekend crime levels among Black but not White offenders. These findings suggest that competition within low-skill labor markets may weaken legitimate employment opportunities for some economically vulnerable Black workers, thereby increasing exposure to criminogenic pressures.

Integrating perspectives on labor market segmentation, strain, routine activity, and race-specific opportunity, the brief develops a theoretical framework linking immigration, racial inequality, and urban crime. By reframing the immigration-crime debate through the lens of economic displacement and racial inequality, this work offers a provocative, policy-relevant account of how immigration and racial justice agendas intersect in contemporary urban America.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of clan crime and criminal families, with a particular focus on Europe. It examines the phenomenon through anthropological, criminological, and socio-political perspectives, with particular attention to kinship, migration, media framing, gender, intergenerational transmission, and institutional responses. Rather than treating 'clans' as fixed or culturally homogeneous entities, it explores the conditions under which kinship-based networks may become involved in criminal activities.

It covers a range of topics, including:

• the concepts of families, clans, and tribes;
• the emergence of 'clan crime' in European media and political discourse;
• migration, marginalisation, and criminal opportunities;
• kinship, loyalty, secrecy, and conflict regulation in criminal clans;
• women's roles and the intergenerational continuity of crime;
• interventions and policies to prevent and tackle serious and organised crime in kinship-based networks across Europe.

Ideal for academics, policymakers, law enforcement professionals, and social services practitioners, this volume provides a nuanced and empirically grounded account of clan- and family-based crime in contemporary Europe.

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.

This short book introduces students of criminology to the 'critical dimension' of that subject. The focus of this volume is on how the critique proffered in and by 'critical criminologies' is itself not above criticism. Indeed, 'critical criminologies' would do well to acquire a self-reflective and self-critical attitude towards their own pre-conceptions and the desires that underpin them.

This argument is explored and developed across a number of themes and topics, including: an overview of the basic trends in critical criminology between WW2 and the turn of the century; the most recent splintering within the 'critical dimension' of criminology; the problem of criminalization; how power and discourse not only shape and reshape life conditions but also mystify the latter; the structural origins and forms of harm and violence; the continuing search for 'alternatives'; and finally, the crimes of the powerful. Ultimately, the book debates the multiformity, inescapability and ineradicability of critique in the 'critical dimension' of criminology.

This book examines why Iran carries out a high number of executions and takes positions that differ markedly from much of the Western world, where the death penalty has largely been abolished. According to the UN, at least 1,639 people were executed in Iran in 2025. Seen through Western eyes, these spectacles of punishment, along with the deadly crackdown of protesters, suppression of women and ethnic minorities, brutal prisons, mandatory wearing of the Hijab, morality policing, and cruelty to animals make Iran seem an alien and barbaric society. A common-sense assumption often relegates Iran to the sphere of oppression and brutality, blames the reign of clerics, despotic leaders, or attributes it to Islam and Shariah rules. This book's argument though is that these contemporary characteristics of Iranian society, so repulsive to most modern sensibilities, should be understood as the product of long-term cultural trends that began during the 19th century when Iran was known as Persia. They were then reinforced by Western-inspired attempts to 'civilize' and modernize the country that came to be known as Iran in the 20th century. The cumulative effects have been to bring about a central state, sensibilities, and interdependencies between citizens where there is a public tolerance of suffering and a celebration of pain - as seen most vividly in regular, public executions.

This book is a groundbreaking exploration into the intricate relationship between generational shifts in offending populations and effective therapeutic approaches. It delves deep into the evolution of criminal behavior across different eras, shedding light on the societal influences that shape offender profiles. By examining innovative therapeutic interventions and ethical considerations in treating generational offenders, this volume offers a compelling and insightful perspective on the dynamic nature of crime and rehabilitation. Spanning disciplines and offering a fresh perspective on traditional criminology, it is a must-read for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers seeking a deeper understanding of the complexities of criminal behavior in an ever-changing world.

This book seeks to broaden the analytical lens through which we understand domestic violence by centering those whose experiences have been marginalized by both public discourse and academic scholarship. Domestic violence against men exists: it is violent; it is often fatal; and it is systemically silenced and ignored, particularly in the South African context. This book emerges from that silence. Drawing from qualitative research conducted in Hillbrow, Johannesburg-a city both deeply complex and violent, this book is a groundbreaking documentation of the lived experiences of African men who have been physically violated by their female partners. They are human stories-raw, painful, often shocking, told in the voices of survivors, their feelings, thoughts of sadness, their fears, and vulnerabilities. It draws attention to women's capacity and agency in willfully initiating and intentionally perpetrating severe violence against their male counterparts, which is widely underestimated in existing literature. Importantly, the focus here is solely on physical violence-burns, stabs, hits, and bites. Using a nuanced lens, this book offers not only narrative accounts but also analytical reflections on what these stories reveal about gender, power, vulnerability, and the institutional neglect of male victims in South Africa, but are placed separately from the stories. This book extends to theoretical underpinnings to understanding the dimensions of severity, motivation, and frequency of domestic violence-in this case against men. It aims to benefit the fields of gender studies, social work, psychology, and public health, while also informing policymakers, practitioners, and advocacy groups. It is both a call to action and a contribution to the global discourse on domestic violence.

Through newly transcribed and translated lectures, Deleuze explores Spinoza's philosophy concerning questions of good and evil and humanity's potential for realizing a full life

Available for the first time in English, On Spinoza presents the annotated transcripts of Gilles Deleuze's fifteen seminars on the seventeenth-century philosopher's Ethics, delivered at the experimental University of Vincennes at the behest of Michel Foucault. Spinoza's ambitious treatise was central to Deleuze's thought, and his course provides an accessible framework for understanding the vitality of Spinoza's philosophy.

In an informal classroom setting, Deleuze addresses fundamental aspects of Spinoza's thought: How does one undo the negativity of harmful passions such as hate, resentment, and envy? How can a system of moral judgment based on good and evil be replaced by a more sophisticated ethics of the good and the bad? And since such questions commit Spinoza to a new theory of signs, Deleuze also delves into his thinking on how these signs should guide human existence and the differences between concepts of eternity, experienced in the here and now, and the immortality promised by philosophy and religion.

Building gradually from session to session, Deleuze shows how Spinoza rejects a hierarchical reality dominated by an authoritarian and impenetrable God, instead proposing a world ruled by light and reason in which all beings are equal. Annotated by David Lapoujade and including recorded exchanges with Deleuze's students, On Spinoza offers a rare window into Deleuze's teaching, offering readers a guide for linking Spinoza to other philosophers - including Deleuze himself.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with image accompanied by short alt text and/or extended description.