The United Nations declared 2012 the year of cooperatives, emphasizing that there is an alternative to privately owned firms. While greed and mismanagement have caused world financial and economic crises, co-ops offer another type of business for economic activities that is less exposed to aggressive capitalism. This book provides a problem-oriented overview of the development of cooperatives over the last fifty years. The worldwide study addresses the major challenges cooperatives face, such as the organizational innovations introduced in order to acquire necessary risk-capital and implement...

Tourism constitutes one of the most important economic and social activities in contemporary societies. This has not always been the case and, in fact, we must place the birth of modern tourism and its material culture in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. This book deals with this tourism in a very specific geographical space, the countries of southern Europe, and on a chronology centered on the 20th century and focusing on the different pillars of sustainability: economic, social and environmental. The aim of this book is to analyze how the maritime and coastal...