This book offers a comprehensive exploration of contemporary issues in consumer law. Organized by the International Association of Consumer Law (IACL) and presented at the 18th World Consumer Law Conference in Hamburg, it examines multifaceted challenges across various jurisdictions and sectors. It begins with an analysis of the integration of consumer protection into financial services, featuring insights into Brazilian over-indebtedness frameworks and South African corporate responsibility. A significant portion is devoted to trade obligations and faulty goods, including comparative studies involving Ghana, the UK, and the EU, alongside discussions on product durability.
The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach, exploring the intersection of consumer law with competition law, gender studies, and intellectual property. It brings together international perspectives, ranging from gender protection in Argentina to trademark analysis in China. In the digital context, the book addresses evolving challenges such as Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), blockchain, and the liability of online platforms under EU and Turkish law. It also examines the impact of artificial intelligence in healthcare, deceptive design practices, and the important link between consumer protection and environmental sustainability.
Covering emerging areas such as food law and the protection of international tourists, this book is an essential resource for legal scholars, practitioners, and policymakers navigating the complex landscape of modern consumer protection.

This volume advances a critical conversation at the intersection of business management, innovation, and sustainable development by offering an integrated, multidisciplinary perspective on how organizations can navigate complexity while driving long-term societal value. Bringing together insights from human resource management, technological transformation, and inclusive economic systems, the book develops a coherent framework for understanding how organizations translate strategy into impact.

Structured across five thematic sections, the volume examines: the role of inclusive and ethical leadership in shaping organizational cultures; the mechanisms through which creativity and adaptive capabilities support resilient business models; the linkages between finance, development, and economic inclusion; the strategic implications of emerging digital technologies; and the growing influence of ESG and sustainability frameworks on organizational practice.

Distinguished by its integration of theory and application, the book draws on established and emerging perspectives; including human-centered management approaches, innovation systems thinking, and digitally enabled transformation to illuminate the pathways through which organizations respond to contemporary challenges. It offers both conceptual clarity and practical insight into how firms can align performance with broader societal outcomes.

This volume will be of particular interest to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers seeking to understand how management and innovation can be mobilized to address global development challenges. By situating organizational strategy within a broader socio-economic context, it provides a rigorous and forward-looking contribution to the evolving field of responsible and sustainable business.

In an era of supply chain volatility and rapid technological disruption, warehouse operations must evolve beyond mere efficiency. This book offers a practical roadmap for designing and managing warehouses that are not only fast and lean but also resilient, adaptive, and intelligent.

Drawing on real-world case studies and research-backed frameworks, the book explores the next generation of warehouse systems. It introduces tools such as automation readiness frameworks, orchestration resilience principles, digital twins, and AI-enhanced Lean Six Sigma to help practitioners address coordination failures, design gaps, and the need for human-in-the-loop oversight.

The book is structured in three parts to guide readers from foundational insights to strategic transformation. Part I redefines smart warehousing through a resilience lens, analyzing why many high-tech warehouses remain fragile. Part II offers practical tools, frameworks, and emerging technologies to operationalize resilient design. Part III focuses on transformation, addressing workforce readiness, education, ethical automation, and the strategic roadmap to 2030.

Whether you're a warehouse manager, operations strategist, or technology leader, this book equips you to build smarter systems that thrive under pressure.

This book explores the portmanteau as a popular language trend. A portmanteau is a lexical blend in which at least one of the two original words is shortened in the process of combination, such as brunch (breakfast + lunch) or motel (motor + hotel). Although portmanteaus have a long history in the English language, they are experiencing a significant proliferation in online communication. The power of the portmanteau lies in its ability to bring concepts together both sonically and n writing. In doing so, portmanteaus carry the associations of their source words through multiple and shifting contexts, making them complex sites of rhetorical inquiry. This book examines the portmanteau form by analyzing a range of contemporary blend words. It theorizes a method of "critical portmanteau decomposition" that illustrates the ways the portmanteau's form contributes to its functioning by forging conceptual associations between its components. These associations become clear when the blend is "decomposed" into its constituent parts: the source words and the extra linguistic contexts surrounding both the source words and the blend as a whole. This complex blending process reflects and constructs conceptual networks that can be easily masked by the form, which is often viewed as playful and innocuous. This is particularly significant when the portmanteau transmits ideology, as the playful form is at odds with its content. Critical portmanteau decomposition takes into account the pieces of the portmanteau, the cognitive process of blending, the connections forged among elements, and the context of the complete word.

This book presents a new framework for managing complex projects in environments that integrate new technological developments, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, digital twins, and big data analytics, which are reshaping how decisions are made, how risks are predicted, and how performance is monitored in real time. The framework, named INSPIRE PM (Integrated, Sustainable, Predictive, Innovative, Responsive, and Efficient Project Management), enables professionals, executives and change leaders to create resilient and data-driven projects. It specifically addresses the cultural shift toward hybrid work models, cross-cultural virtual teams, and the need for greater organizational adaptability, which demand new skills and leadership mindsets from project managers.

IINSPIRE PM emphasizes systemic integration over siloed processes, making it particularly well-suited for projects characterized by high levels of uncertainty and interdependency among stakeholders. Focusing on dynamic decision-making, integrated governance, and the ability to respond quickly to evolving constraints and opportunities, this book serves as an appropriate guide for novice or advanced project managers working in a range of industries.

This open access book explores the relations between normative mathematical texts, which encode various forms of measurement, calculation and reasoning, and the practices of accountants, craftspeople, artisans and other social actors. Mathematics is often divided into a theoretical, intellectual, and normative component, on the one hand, and, on the other, a practical-applied component, implemented in various labour and other social contexts. However, this division usually assumes that practice reflects the text, whereas, in reality, their relations are much more diverse. This volume explores how text and practice shape each other, complement each other, contradict each other or even ignore each other. In doing so, it opens up the problem of mathematical text and practice as a varied, multi-dimensional, cross-cultural and global-historical problem, where different contexts called for different negotiations between text and practice.

This book provides a critical analysis of the "ambition for truth" in criminal proceedings, highlighting how this perspective continues to shape current practices and may, in some cases, contribute to the objectification of defendants and the infringement of human rights. Furthermore, it contends that evidential inquisitorialism, evidentiary positivism, and evidentiary rationalism are distinct epistemologies united by an underlying authoritarian political agenda: the pursuit of truth.

This study examines the reinvention of inquisitorial procedures by modern epistemology and their subsequent integration into Latin American legal systems, where they significantly contribute to widespread incarceration and selective prosecution, reinforcing established racial and class hierarchies. The analysis advocates for procedural frameworks that preserve the presumption of innocence, while highlighting ongoing concerns about the prevalence of inquisitorial practices within contemporary criminal justice. The book references both contemporary and classical scholarship in criminal procedure?including works by James Goldschmidt, Franco Cordero, Franchesco Carnellutti, and Pedro Aragoneses Alonso?as well as critical socio-legal scholars from Brazil such as Aury Lopes Junior and Jacinto Nelson de Miranda Coutinho, along with prominent voices in Latin American criminology (Eugenio Raul Zaffaroni) and sociology (Roberto Kant de Lima and Michel Misse).

Furthermore, it interrogates the epistemological and ontological dimensions of truth within criminal procedure through the theoretical frameworks of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and many others. The study seeks to develop a concept of truth specifically tailored to criminal procedure, with the objective of constraining punitive authority and safeguarding against judicial practices that may infringe upon human rights.

Perhaps more than ever, we need to invest in the study of the causes and consequences of crises. Since its founding in 1975, the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project has aimed to better equip academics, policymakers, and the next generation of engaged citizens to make sense of why crises arise and how they can be more effectively managed and prevented. The ICB Project's data holdings consist of full-length qualitative case studies, along with an expanding range of quantitative datasets that include information regarding the characteristics of the states in crisis, crisis behavior, attempts at third-party crisis management, the role of nonstate actors, and the system-level context.

A Century of International Crisis Behavior summarizes the evolving patterns of international crisis behavior in the more than 500 cases cataloged since 1918, provides an accounting of the state of the scholarship to make sense of the patterns, and presents new findings that advance our understanding. Chapters are grouped according to their level of analysis: studies of systems, dyads, and states. The authors highlight what we have learned and what we have yet to learn regarding the prevention, escalation, and de-escalation of international crises.

This book provides an indispensable and pioneering expansion of political epistemology beyond its traditional Anglo-American focus. With sixteen chapters from leading and up-and-coming European political epistemologists, the volume focuses on multi-partisan political environments, the legacy of different historical systems, and case studies from frequently underrepresented European countries.

The book's chapters explore how epistemic agents form and revise beliefs about European political actors, institutions, and political phenomena. The European Face of Political Epistemology provides an epistemological analysis of political parochialism, political multi-partisanship, the European Union, European governments, polarisation, corruption, and political coalitions.

A necessary first step in encouraging further research on this topic by philosophers from a wider range of countries, this book is essential reading for all scholars, researchers and advanced students of political epistemology.

This book analyzes the roles of Europe and Japan in the Taiwan Strait, both under the current situation in which China's strategy is to isolate Taiwan as well as during various scenarios of a Chinese military attack against Taiwan. Coupled with this analysis, the book also seeks to explore the expectations on European and Japanese actions regarding the conflict between China and Taiwan. Filled with insights, precise analysis, and forecasts, this book interest scholars, politicians, and journalists.

In an innovative cultural history across the Iron Curtain, this book explores how a divided nation used the cosmos - as both a technological reality and a field of imagination - to navigate the challenges of the Cold War and compete for the future. Smithsonian curator Colleen Anderson transforms the history of the Space Age by demonstrating that Germans were not just observers of the US-Soviet rivalry, but active participants who used spaceflight to redefine their place in the world.

Connecting the technical and political history of space programs with space imaginations in popular culture, Anderson uncovers unexpected commonalities between two states otherwise opposed. Through vivid stories of street astronomers building telescopes from wartime rubble, the West German cult TV hit Space Patrol, and East German youth "training" for missions at the socialist equivalent of Space Camp, this book demonstrates how the unbounded cosmos offered a site for political and cultural maneuvering - and a canvas for imagining alternative futures - that was often impossible on Earth. From the 1978 mission of the first German in orbit to the international laboratory of Spacelab, Anderson reveals that for a divided people, technological dreams were not mere fantasies; they were essential tools for confronting a burdened past and forging a new future. Contributing to spaceflight history, Cold War scholarship, and German studies, this book speaks to the many ways technological dreams become instruments for negotiating memory, ideology, and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

In this new edition, Reading Skills for Success continues to help students develop the reading skills and strategies they need to transition to reading material in mainstream academic settings. Designed for precollege readers and non-native speakers of English alike, the fully revised book focuses on the text-based, linguistic preparedness necessary to quickly spot key information and organizational structure in texts and avoid miscomprehension.

Written by academic experts who are practicing teachers in ESL intensive English, the book is grounded in sound pedagogical methods. Teachers will work through specific reading strategies with students; use the general activities and sample academic chapters in the book to practice the strategies being taught; and then have the students turn to outside readings, like their academic textbooks, to practice the strategies they are learning. Accessible for teachers and students, Reading Skills for Success provides a guide for developing text-based processing skills to improve reading confidence.

In Reading Skills for Success, 2nd Edition, students will:

• Learn to use word-level clues to increase reading comprehension.
• Recognize different types of expository text structures.
• Develop study skills for intensive analytical reading of academic prose.
• Practice reading strategies for in-depth, long-term understanding of complex academic texts.
• Apply skills to excerpts from actual textbooks used in first-year college courses representing a wide variety of fields in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

CEFR level: A1-B1

This second edition of this beloved Russian textbook deepens our understanding of the dramatic history of the Russophone world

Since 2007, Advanced Russian Through History has been a classic textbook helping students develop high levels of proficiency. However, recent world events have compelled a reconsideration of the history of the Russian imperial project.

This second edition of Advanced Russian Through History decenters the history of Russia from the history of ethnic Russians. Scholars from across the Russophone world contributed essays and minilectures, providing new perspectives on the history of peoples in the Russophone world, enriching students' understanding of the diversity of speakers of the Russian language and the cultures and histories of peoples in the Russophone world, from Kyivan Rus' to current times, including the Muscovite State, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, and Russia's war against Ukraine.

This textbook meets the needs of contemporary Russian language students who have at least intermediate reading proficiency: it consists of fifty chapters, each with its own essay and at least one minilecture, as well as learning tasks focused on comprehension, interpretation, and linguistic analysis. The book also features a wealth of supplementary materials available through its website, including scholarly articles and video recordings of lectures, news articles, and broadcasts; films; poems; songs; anecdotes; podcasts; and interviews.

A practical guide to demystifying speech technologies and integrating them into world languages courses

Speech technologies-such as speech recognition and speech synthesis-have become increasingly present in everyday life, yet many language teachers lack guidance on how to meaningfully integrate them into classroom practice. A Practical Guide to Speech Technologies for Second Language Learning addresses this gap by providing accessible explanations of key concepts, with no specialized background or training needed.

Grounded in CALL (computer-assisted language learning) and SLA theory, the book shows how speech technologies can support language learning and teaching in principled and pedagogically sound ways. The book focuses on speech synthesis and speech recognition technologies, providing practical tips and considerations for teaching speaking, listening, and pronunciation. Each section provides clear explanations of how the technologies function, insights from theory and research, and practical classroom examples, helping readers understand both their potential and limitations. The book also provides examples of activities for both English and French as second languages, and it illustrates how these technologies can be readily extended to a variety of languages.

This practical guide shows world language instructors how to integrate speech technologies into their courses. It will be useful for teachers, teacher trainers, and CALL researchers.

This book takes the reader on a philosophical journey into the core of modern finance, bringing to light the ideas, values, and contradictions that shape Wall Street and, through it, the global economy. It shows how markets have moved beyond their original role as instruments of exchange to become autonomous systems of power and meaning-systems that do not merely mirror economic and social realities, but actively participate in producing them.

Bringing together philosophy, economics, and history, A Philosophical Walk Down Wall Street explores how financial markets generate knowledge, how mathematical models come to possess authority, and why crises continue to recur in spite of increasing technological sophistication. Through rich case studies, ranging from the 2008 financial crisis to algorithmic trading, the book argues that concepts such as efficiency, risk, and value are not simply neutral analytical tools, but embody substantive philosophical claims about the nature of the world.