Ever since the 'golden age' of labour peaked around 1970, organised labour has been progressively weakened in Europe and elsewhere. The end of the era of welfare state expansion and increasing levels of social security constitute a potential threat to social cohesion in Europe. Concern about labour interests and social inclusion is very much an issue in the Europe of the early 21st century.
This is the main theme of this volume, which includes original and interesting articles dealing with conditions and developments in trade union organisation and conduct in the representation of...

This volume is a collection of contributions about the history and practice of travel and travel writing from a variety of academic disciplines including anthropology, history, linguistics and literary criticism. It brings together scholars from over ten different countries and reflects on what travel is and how travel writings function. It traces the history of travel and travel writing and the notion or idea of a European civilisation that permeates performances and perceptions. The notion of Europe appears as a set of quality standards as well as guidelines for experiences against which...

At the point in time when the abolition of slavery was being celebrated, another system of servitude was underway: indentureship. Indenture labor resulted in the transportation of one million Indians called coolies into British and French colonies. Unable or unwilling to return, a great majority of them stayed in the countries they had been shipped to and participated in the creation of new, creole cultures.
This book offers a close reading of literary works in French and in English by women writers whose ancestors originally came to the Caribbean or across the Indian Ocean as indentured...

What do people think Europe means? What are its values, what are its borders, and what does it stand for? An important topic, without doubt. But the authors of this research collection are not so much interested in what Europe thinks of itself, but rather in what others think of it. They take a number of scenarios from recent history, and examine how Europe has appeared to people in other parts of the globe: America, China, the Arab world, for example. But they go further, and pose the question for some parts of the world which are inside Europe, but which for one reason or another hover on...

Philosophy of science used to be identified with the logical and methodological analysis of scientific theories, and any allusion to values was considered as a deplorable intromission in a philosophical investigation that should remain strictly epistemological. As a reaction against this view, an opposite -sociological- approach downplayed the usual virtues of scientific knowledge (such as logical rigor and empirical adequacy) as artificial imageries that cover the actual nature of science, that is a social product submitted to all the kinds of social conditionings and compromises. A more...

C'est un defi de taille, pour les archivistes, les bibliothecaires, les museologues ou les documentalistes specialises, de conserver la memoire et la trace du spectacle vivant, dans une societe ou les techniques evoluent sans cesse. Les techniques d'enregistrement audiovisuel et les supports pour conserver les images se sont modifies. La mise en valeur de nouveaux medias est une gageure dans la conception des expositions. Enfin, les pratiques de recherche et l'essor conjoint des bases de donnees ont modifie la donne. Tels sont les nombreux sujets de reflexion qui se sont offerts aux membres...

This book investigates the concept of the heroic, questions what it is that makes the national hero an indispensable appendage to any possible interpretation of national identity, and asks why scholars stop short before coming to terms with this elusive phenomenon. It finds answers by following heroic traditions in Scotland, Norway and Lithuania from the early modern period to the twentieth century.
The book argues that heroic traditions prevailing trends in situating heroes in national history owe much to the early modern state. Both national heroes and the nation state had been...

The main objective of the contributions to this book is to bring together two seemingly different strands of thought: the competition-law analysis of the exercise of intellectual property, and the discussion about the proper limits of protection, which at present takes place inside the intellectual property community. Both are burdened with their own problems, particularly so in Europe, where market integration and the divide between exclusionary and exploitative abuses ask for a more dimensional approach, and where the shaping of intellectual property protection is under not only the...