This book provides a balanced and nuanced study of how the super-sticky WeChat platform interweaves into the fabric of Chinese social, cultural, and political life. It keeps the wider global and national social media landscape in view and compares and contrasts WeChat with Weibo, QQ and other Western social media platforms.

This book offers policy makers, teachers and teacher trainers a framework for understanding inclusive education in the developing world. With a major focus on South Africa, it argues that planning for inclusive education must rupture old theories, assumptions, models and tools - including a recognition of how the history of special education has psychologized failure - with the mainstream taking ownership of the transformation to a fairer system. The author contends that for inclusive education to take hold, policy makers need to contextualize the curriculum to the needs of the...

The level of politicisation of the environment has been low in the UK. Economic concerns outweigh environmental ones in political debates, public policies and political agendas. Can the rise of social media communication change this situation?  Tweeting the Environment #Brexit argues that, although limited by the dynamics of the British context, the technological affordances of Twitter enabled social actors such as the Green Party, ENGOs, and their associates to advance their political and green claims in order to mobilise voters before the 2016 EU referendum and to express their concerns...

This work asks readers to reconsider punishment contracts in the United States. It illustrates the importance of state accountability and responsibility to those who are punished, while also focusing on the dual importance of desistance and re-entry. Looking across current criminological desistance literature, Stephen C. McGuinn shows the value of empowerment, meaning and, most of all, assimilation. Woven throughout the text, the work also captures the actual experiences of a man returning to society after eleven years in prison. He details his experiences in a daily journal, providing an...

Anselm Strauss observed 40 years ago that the idea of social world was suffering from weak conceptualization and application to those areas of social life where this formation figures prominently in everyday activities. This book provides a coherent statement about what social worlds consist of, what they do, where they fit in social theory.

Grafton Whyte introduces and explores a new academic theory for customer service delivery for Africa, aimed at addressing issues of poor customer service and poor service delivery. The V-Model of Service Quality (VMSQ) offers a powerful tool for measuring service quality, augmented by a service exchange model to provide a general framework for services, describe core components and provide contexts within which the VMSQ can operate. The VMSQ provides an indication of where problems may lie in a service operation, and an additional African Management Matrix identifies some of the historical...

Since it was established as a discipline in 1991, knowledge management has contributed significantly to our understanding of how firms can achieve competitive advantage. To build a foundation for competitive advantage, however, a company must first consider knowledge management as a strategic asset. It must truly grasp how knowledge management can be utilized to build the future of the company.  Here Jon-Arild Johannessen examines the history of knowledge management in order to highlight the contributions that the discipline can make to twenty-first-century strategic challenges. Through a...

This book examines precarious employment in Europe through the economic crisis. It draws on two main sources: theories of how the financial and debt crisis coupled with labour market reforms to exacerbate precarity in the workforce; and data from the European Labour Force Survey from 2005-12, capturing various aspects of precarious employment.

IT Service Management (ITSM) is an imperative part of achieving business maturity. Excellence in ITSM has previously been thought of only in terms of quality, customer satisfaction, and reduced costs – or, in other words, casting ITSM as only for technical units and not as part of the larger picture of business maturity. In this exciting new take on ITSM, leading expert Beverly Weed-Schertzer positions ITSM at the heart of company strategy to build a layered operating model. Delivering ITSM for Business Maturity: A Practical Framework helps business leaders and corporate thinkers navigate...

Heroes permeate our culture. But what makes a hero? And what makes heroes 'heroic'? This exciting and innovative study explores how charisma and human needs create images of individuals as heroes and villains.