Countries which take spatial planning seriously should take planning law and property rights also seriously. There is an unavoidable logical relationship between planning, law, and property rights. However, planning by law and property rights is so familiar and taken for granted that we do not think about the theory behind it. As a result, we do not think abstractly about its strengths and weaknesses, about what can be achieved with it and what not, how it can be improved, how it could be complemented. Such reflections are essential to cope with current and future challenges to spatial...

The debate on the free movement of labour within the EU has gained new momentum in the wake of the economic crisis. Building on the earlier Ashgate publication EU Labour Migration Since Enlargement, the editors have assembled a team of experts from across Europe to shed light on the critical issues raised by internal labour mobility within the EU in the context of economic crisis and labour market pressures. The book's chapters tease out the links between economic developments, regulatory frameworks and migration patterns in different European countries. A central focus is on issues of skills...

The environmental legacy of past industrial and agricultural development can simultaneously pose serious threats to human health and impede reuse of contaminated land. The urban landscape around the world is littered with sites contaminated with a variety of toxins produced by past use. Both public and private sector actors are often reluctant to make significant investments in properties that simultaneously pose significant potential human health issues, and may demand complex and very expensive cleanups. The chapters in this volume recognize that land and water contamination are now almost...

The rise of popular social movements throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and North America in 2011 challenged two hegemonic discourses of the post-Cold War era: Francis Fukuyama's 'The End of History' and Samuel Huntington's 'The Clash of Civilizations.' The quest for genuine democracy and social justice and the backlash against the neoliberal order is a common theme in the global mass protests in the West and the East. This is no less than a discursive paradigm shift, a new beginning to the history, a move towards new alternatives to the status quo. This book is about difference...

Engaging with some of the central issues in the sociology of religion, this volume investigates the role and significance of churches and religion in contemporary Western and Eastern Europe. Based on an extensive international research project, it offers case studies of various countries (including Finland, Ireland, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Russia, Estonia, Hungary and Croatia), as well as cross-country comparisons. Researching more precisely the present social relevance of church and religion at different levels, The Social Significance of Religion in the Enlarged Europe raises and...

Issues of religious diversity in the workplace have become very topical and have been raised before domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights. Examining the controversial and constantly evolving position of religion in the workplace, this collection brings together chapters by legal and social science scholars and provides a wealth of information on legal responses across Europe, Turkey and the United States to conflicts between professional and religious obligations involving employees and employers. The contributors examine how case law from the European Court of Human Rights,...

The volume demonstrates the suitability of the theory of social constructivism in portraying and analyzing the diversity of the phenomenon of corruption. The approach of social constructivism taken in this volume is able to reconstruct the 'construction of corruption' both from a societal perspective, by assessing it as generally accepted or tolerated behaviour in more or less standardized rule-governed social situations, and from the perspective of actors who perceive corrupt behaviour as problem solving in everyday life. The volume proves the usefulness of a social construction perspective...

The eighteenth century is renowned for the publication of Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, which reference sources still call the first English dictionary. This collection demonstrates the inaccuracy of that claim, but its tenacity in the public mind testifies to how decisively Johnson formed our sense of what a dictionary is. The essays and articles in this volume examine the already flourishing tradition of English lexicography from which Johnson drew, as represented by Kersey, Bailey, and Martin, as well as the flourishing contemporary trade in encyclopedic,...

In this sequel to her 2000 anthology, Valerie Sanders again brings together an influential group of women whose autobiographical accounts of their childhoods show them making sense of the children they were and the women they have become. The fourteen women included juxtapose recollections of the bizarre with the quotidian and accounts of external events with the development of a complex inner life. Reading and acting are important themes, as is the precariousness of childhood, whether occasioned by a father's financial pressures or the early death of a parent. Significantly, most grew up...

Hein and Moon take up a serious problem of contemporary global governance: what can be done when international trade rules prevent the realization of basic human rights? Starting in the 1990s, intellectual property obligations in trade agreements required many developing countries to begin granting medicines patents, which often rendered lifesaving drugs unaffordable. At stake was the question of what priority would be given to health-particularly of some of the world s poorest people-and what priority to economic interests, particularly those of the most powerful states and firms. This book...