Books on the topic 'CITIZEN CENTRIC PROJECTS'

In the last few years, many researchers have highlighted the economic and cultural impact that crafts have on the development of territories, enhancing local identities and traditions. Various researches also point to the close relationship between trade (sometimes called ‘neighbourhood’ trade), crafts and historic centres, in terms of quality of life, and socio-economic and identity development of territories, showing their new centrality to processes of urban development and regeneration and the formation of social capital. It is evident how enterprise contributes to local development through social interactions based on negotiated and open collaborations between microenterprises, community and network. It was well argued how small business (commerce, crafts and neighbourhood stores) has always played an important role as a social garrison in sparsely populated areas, allowing cities and particularly urban centres to become more lively or livable, being able to give or take away quality from the city and the territory, attributing peculiarity, security and specificity to places or trivialising them in a homogenised landscape. Among the services of social utility recognised to the artisan workshop are: the guarantee of services useful to the livability of the place, the garrisoning of territories and the development of social relations, the promotion of local identity and its know-how, and the creation of employment opportunities through modest initial availability of capital. At the same time, the worsening recessionary dynamics that have occurred in the global economy over the past two decades and the disruptive digital transition have exposed such enterprises to increasing difficulties, disruptively accentuating the decline in competitiveness and propensity to innovate of a large proportion of craft SMEs, of which the socioeconomic literature does not see significant adaptations to the changed environment, such as reconfiguring the business model, adopting a totally new strategic plan adapting to the digital transition, generational transition, and adopting innovative organisational or system behaviours. This volume presents the Venice Original E-Commerce case – a project carried out by the Venice Metropolitan CNA thanks to the support of J.P. Morgan, the support of the Venice Rovigo Chamber of Commerce and the sponsorship of the City of Venice and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice – as a reference project intervention to focus on a possible model of intervention to support culturally-valued artisan micro-enterprises, intervening on the process of strategic renewal and the conditions to foster generational turnover, understood as an opportunity to fill the gap on the digitisation of the artisan sector.

The Cosmic Mystery Tour is a brief account of modern physics and astronomy presented in a broad historical and cultural context. The book is attractively illustrated and aimed at the general reader. Part I explores the laws of physics including general relativity, the structure of matter, quantum mechanics and the Standard Model of particle physics. It discusses recent discoveries such as gravitational waves and the project to construct LISA, a space-based gravitational wave detector, as well as unresolved issues such as the nature of dark matter. Part II begins by considering cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole and how we arrived at the theory of the Big Bang and the expanding universe. It looks at the remarkable objects within the universe such as red giants, white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes, and considers the expected discoveries from new telescopes such as the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile, and the Event Horizon Telescope, currently aiming to image the supermassive black hole at the galactic centre. Part III considers the possibility of finding extraterrestrial life, from the speculations of science fiction authors to the ongoing search for alien civilizations known as SETI. Recent developments are discussed: space probes to the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn; the discovery of planets in other star systems; the citizen science project SETI@Home; Breakthrough Starshot, the project to develop technologies to send spacecraft to the stars. It also discusses the Fermi paradox which argues that we might actually be alone in the cosmos

Exploring London's literary identity during the 1930s Anna Cottrell shows how vital writing was to the capital’s booming leisure scene on the eve of the Second World War. The book explores London and Londoners, with a focus on the way in which London's lower-middle-class citizens became inseparable from central London’s leisure scene in the period’s imagination. In contrast with Modernism’s flâneurs and flâneuses, the key figures of 1930s London literature were shop girls, clerks, dance hostesses, and financially insecure journalists whose leisure hours were spent in London’s cinemas, bars, and glittering teashops. Writing about this type of Londoner and her milieus was at the heart of the decade’s experiments in revitalising the British novel, which to many of the period’s writers and intellectuals appeared to lack energy and authenticity. Meticulous description was central to this project of re-energising British writing, and it is in passages describing London milieus such as the teashop and the Soho nightclub that this book locates the decade’s most original and astute meditations on modernity, mass culture, and the value of ordinary lives.

Reputation matters. This is the general consensus among social scientists on matters ranging from judgments about the character of political candidates to the image nation-states project to domestic and foreign audiences. And this is as it should be in democratic polities that run on opinion, for reputation is a species of opinion. But reputation is also a cause of concern for democratic citizens. We worry that political appearances are highly artificial, stage-managed affairs and that the rhetoric of people power is mere window dressing for what is in fact rule by elites. Our concerns find an echo in the fourth-century BCE democratic Athens and, specifically, in the dialogues of Plato. This book works with and through Plato’s writings to proceed from an initial and rather cynical view of reputation as a concern of the few, to a more optimistic one about its potential in a democratic context. It shows Plato’s interlocutors engage the many by either undermining their judgment or by challenging it. Whereas prominent Athenian citizens such as Socrates in the Apology and Gorgias undermine demotic judgment and diminish its value, marginal citizens such as the philosopher in the Theaetetus and noncitizen residents such as Cephalus of Syracuse challenge the many while still seeking their praise, thereby permitting reputation’s demotic potential to emerge. The non-democratic constitutions Plato outlines also bear witness to the demotic power of reputation, an ancillary to philosophical rule in the Republic and central to the mixed constitution of the Laws.

This chapter comments onImplementation, a book by Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky. It traces its roots to the Economic Development Agency’s Oakland project, designed to promote economic development in cities by increasing employment opportunities for minorities. It considers Pressman and Wildavsky’s account of why the Oakland program failed, as well as their central argument with regards to the role of politics and policy-making in implementation. It discusses the decline of implementation studies as the dominating subfield of public policy research and highlights some key concerns raised by Pressman and Wildavsky that continue to be influential. The chapter concludes by looking at debates about the merits of non-hierarchical coordination, informal interaction, and emergent networks.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book evaluates the social consequences of the post-1989 transition from state socialism to free market capitalism across Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Blending ethnographic accounts with economic, demographic, and public opinion data, it provides insight into the development of new, unequal, social orders. It explores the contradictory narratives on transition promoted by Western international institutions and their opponents, one of qualified success and another of epic catastrophe, and surprisingly shows that data support both narratives, for different countries, regions, and people. While many citizens of the postsocialist countries experienced significant progress in living standards and life satisfaction, enabling them to catch up with the West after a relatively brief recession, others suffered demographic and social collapses resulting from rising economic precarity; large-scale degradation of social welfare that came with privatization; and growing gender, class, and regional disparities that have accompanied neoliberal reforms. Transition recessions lasted for decades in many countries, exceeding the US Great Depression in severity. Some countries still have not returned to pre-1989 levels of economic production or mortality; some have lost more than one-fifth of their population and are projected to lose more. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this book deploys a sweeping array of data from different social science fields to provide a more holistic perspective on the successes and failures of transition while unpacking the failed assumptions and narratives of Western institutions, Eastern policymakers, and citizens of former socialist states.

How do armies fight and what makes them victorious on the modern battlefield? This book challenges long-standing answers to this classic question by linking the fate of armies to their levels of inequality. Introducing the concept of military inequality, the book demonstrates how a state's prewar choices about the citizenship status of ethnic groups within its population determine subsequent battlefield performance. Treating certain ethnic groups as second-class citizens, either by subjecting them to state-sanctioned discrimination or, worse, violence, undermines interethnic trust, fuels grievances, and leads victimized soldiers to subvert military authorities once war begins. The higher an army's inequality, the book finds, the greater its rates of desertion, side-switching, casualties, and use of coercion to force soldiers to fight. The book draws on Project Mars, a new dataset of 250 conventional wars fought since 1800, to test this argument. Project Mars breaks with prior efforts by including overlooked non-Western wars while cataloguing new patterns of inequality and wartime conduct across hundreds of belligerents. The book also marshals evidence from nine wars, ranging from the Eastern Fronts of World Wars I and II to less familiar wars in Africa and Central Asia, to illustrate inequality's effects. Sounding the alarm on the dangers of inequality for battlefield performance, the book offers important lessons about warfare over the past two centuries—and for wars still to come.

Daniel A. Rodríguez’s history of a newly independent Cuba shaking off the U.S. occupation focuses on the intersection of public health and politics in Havana. While medical policies were often used to further American colonial power, in Cuba, Rodríguez argues, they evolved into important expressions of anticolonial nationalism as Cuba struggled to establish itself as a modern state. A younger generation of Cuban medical reformers, including physicians, patients, and officials, imagined disease as a kind of remnant of colonial rule. These new medical nationalists, as Rodríguez calls them, looked to medical science to guide Cuba toward what they envisioned as a healthy and independent future. Rodríguez describes how medicine and new public health projects infused republican Cuba’s statecraft, powerfully shaping the lives of Havana’s residents. He underscores how various stakeholders, including women and people of color, demanded robust government investment in quality medical care for all Cubans, a central national value that continues today. On a broader level, Rodríguez proposes that Latin America, at least as much as the United States and Europe, was an engine for the articulation of citizens’ rights, including the right to health care, in the twentieth century.

The idea that states should provide a means-tested guaranteed minimum income for citizens who are unable to meet their basic needs is widely shared and has been a central component in the evolution of social citizenship rights in existing welfare states. However, an increasing number of activists and scholars defend the more radical option of establishing a universal basic income, that is, an unconditional income paid to all members of society on an individual basis without any means test or work requirement. Indeed, some political philosophers have argued that basic income is one of the most important reforms in the development of a just and democratic society, comparable to other milestones in the history of citizenship rights, such as universal suffrage or even the abolishment of slavery. Basic income or similar ideas, such as a basic capital or a negative income tax, have been advanced in many versions since the 18th century in different parts of the world and under a great variety of names. However, while these were previously often isolated and disconnected initiatives, basic income has more recently become the object of an increasingly cumulative research effort to shed light on the many aspects of this idea. It has also inspired policy developments and given rise to experiments and pilot projects in several countries.

On 9 November 2021, 9th International Scientific-Practical Conference “Managerial Sciences in the Modern World” was opened. This year, the event took place in the online format because of the strained epidemiological situation. A total of about 450 specialists took part in the conference. “Managerial Sciences” has already become a kind of brand, with more than half a dozen different round table discussions, sections”, said Arkady Trachuk, Dean of the Faculty “Higher School of Management” at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, who moderated the plenary session. He said that the 2021 conference participants included representatives from Latvia, Republic of Fiji, Kuwait, India, Uzbekistan, and Russia. Russia was represented by seven regions: Moscow and Moscow Region, Bryansk-, Tver-, Saratov-, Arkhangelsk regions, Republic of Tatarstan and Krasnodar Territory. Delegates from 25 universities, including 6 foreign higher educational establishments, took part in the sections’ work. The central event of the first day of the conference was a plenary session during which presentations were delivered by representatives of Germany, Slovenia, Uzbekistan and Russia. The plenary session was opened by Arkady Trachuk. His presentation focused on the goals of introducing digital technologies in the Russian industry. The speaker presented the results of the research implemented by a team of scholars from the Department of Management and Innovation at the Faculty “Higher School of Management”. Alexander Brem, Head of Technological Entrepreneurship and Digitalisation at Stifterverband Consulting Company funded by Daimler Foundation (Germany), talked about artificial intelligence as an innovation management technology. The expert is convinced that artificial intelligence will become the core technology to drive the technological development in the 21st century. Jörg Geisler, head of Finance and Risk Management at S-Kreditpartner GmbH, expert on consumer lending at savings banks (Germany), dwelled on an important subject – “Risk management at times of digital innovation” by the example of the banking industry. Samo Bobek, Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) at the University of Maribor, Professor of e-business and information management (Slovenia), delivered a presentation on “Digital transformation impact on business models”. His presentation dealt with digital transformation of business models. Azizjon Bobojonov, Head of International Project Office, Associate Professor of the Department “Digital Economy and Information Technologies” at Tashkent State University of Economics (Republic of Uzbekistan), talked in his presentation “Reinventing the services in the digital age” about new discoveries in the service industry in the epoch of digital transformation. The plenary session was followed by thematic sessions in the following areas: • Change management and leadership • Business strategies and sustainable development • International management and business • Theoretical issues of management • Theory and practice of project management • Corporate governance and corporate social responsibility • Operations and business process management • Strategic financial management • Public sector management and efficiency problems • Major cities and urban agglomerations management • Real sector investment management • Crisis and business continuity management • Systems analysis in management • Knowledge and talent management • Sports digitalisation management • Digital marketing and marketing communications • Shaping innovation strategy in the conditions of the fourth industrial revolution.