During its brief existence Wikipedia has proved astonishingly successful. Its 2.8 million articles (in English alone) are available freely to all with access to the internet. The on-line encyclopaedia can be seen as the 21st century's version of earlier historical attempts to gather the world's knowledge into one place. This unique book first...
As future generation information technology (FGIT) becomes specialized and fragmented, it is easy to lose sight that many topics in FGIT have common threads and, because of this, advances in one discipline may be transmitted to others. Presentation of recent results obtained in different disciplines encourages this interchange for the...
The First Edition of this contemporary classic can claim to have put ‘consumer culture’ on the map, certainly in relation to postmodernism. Updated throughout, this expanded new edition includes a fully revised preface that explores the developments in consumer culture since the First Edition. Among the most...
This book investigates what is driving Iran's nuclear weapons programme in a less-hostile regional environment, using a theory of protracted conflicts to explicate proliferation.
Iran’s nuclear weapons program has alarmed the international community since the 1990s, but has come to the forefront of international security...
In recent years the ideal of achieving sustainable rural development has become a key dimension of EU, national, regional and local policy. Whether this ideal is achievable in the near future to any substantial degree is by no means certain. By examining a range of experiences from both the north and south of Ireland, this book asks what the...
The Caucasus is one of the most complicated regions in the world: with many different peoples and political units, differing religious allegiances, and frequent conflicts, and where historically major world powers have clashed with each other. Until now there has been no single book for those wishing to learn about this complex region. This book...
Over the next few years, political and financial power will move in the direction of individuals, companies and nations that are able to use energy in a more efficient way. This book describes this challenge and presents a way forward by which we may achieve the goal of increased energy efficiency in the different areas that need to...
"Su-un and His World of Symbols" explores the image which Choe Che-u (Su-un), the founder of Donghak (Eastern Learning) Korea's first indigenous religion, had of himself as a religious leader and human being. Su-un gave his life so that he could share his symbols, his scriptures and the foundational principals of his religion with all...
In the context of global efforts to control the production, distribution, and use of narcotic drugs, China's treatment of the problem provides an important means of understanding the social, political, and economic limits of national and international policies to regulate drug practices. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China was...
"Critical Social Theory and the End of Work" examines the development and sociological significance of the idea that work is being eliminated through the use of advanced production technology. Granter's engagement with the work of key American and European figures such as Marx, Marcuse, Gorz, Habermas and Negri, focuses his arguments...
This book traverses three pivotal human rights struggles of the post-September 11th era: the American human rights campaign to challenge the Bush administration's "War on Terror" torture and detention policies, Middle Eastern efforts to challenge American human rights practices (reversing the traditional West to East flow of human rights...
For the better part of its history sociology shared with commonsense its assumption of the ‘nature-like’ character of society – and consequently developed as the science of unfreedom. In this powerful and engaging work, first published in 1976, Professor Bauman outlines the historical roots of such a science and describes how...
