This Handbook, an international endeavor in cultural political psychology, integrates global experts' insights to elucidate the psychological role of sign systems in policy, power, and politics. The focus is on how meaning, derived from action, influences power negotiations, requiring an exploration of the individual and their co-created signs. Addressing the challenge of converting rich theories into practical applications, the Handbook aspires to clarify complex phenomena, promoting a holistic understanding of individuals, communities, and the interplay of symbols, identity, and politics. By democratizing discourse and promoting inclusivity, especially from non-Western and underrepresented contexts, we hope to unravel the world's intricate political tapestries.

The book is a significant contribution to the body of existing migration studies study and is genuinely comprehensive in its covering. In addition to the many people in Bangladesh, the global north, and South Asia whose concern is extremely practical rather than academic because they must coexist with the system in order for it to function. The Rohingya situation is a severe humanitarian disaster that necessitates a thorough comprehension of the media's function in influencing public opinion and foreign policy. The effectiveness of media strategies in the Rohingya repatriation process is investigated in this study, which offers insightful information to help governments, media outlets, and humanitarian organizations enhance their crisis management initiatives.

This book focuses on county governance and development in Zhejiang Province, exploring the theoretical logic, practical context, and typical models of county governance under the guidance of Xi Jinping's important insights on county governance and development. By analyzing seven representative county (city) models-Yiwu, Jiashan, Deqing, Xinchang, Haining, Longgang, and Anji-it dissects how Zhejiang's counties leverage their unique advantages to promote high - quality development through reforms in commerce, integration with national strategies, digital empowerment, technological innovation, market - oriented factors, township - to - city transition, and ecological civilization construction. The book provides valuable references for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners engaged in county governance, regional development, and public administration across the country.

How citizens encounter public services is being fundamentally reshaped. For more than two decades, governments have redirected citizens away from face-to-face contact and towards contact centres, websites, and other forms of self-service. Now, the rise of artificial intelligence marks a decisive moment in that transformation.

This book offers a clear and critical account of what this shift means for public service. It argues that virtual public agents are not simply technical innovations. They raise deeper questions about judgement, authenticity, discretion, and the place of human interaction in public encounters. The book shows how public services have been redesigned around the demands of cost reduction, convenience, and control, often at the expense of direct human contact and the relational qualities of frontline work.

Yet the recent advance of AI might signal a striking reversal. After years of trying to design face-to-face contact out of public services, public organisations are once again confronting the significance of the human capacities that digital systems cannot fully replicate.

Fully revised and updated, this second edition examines the implications of generative AI for frontline work across contemporary public services. Drawing on examples from local government, health, social work, and policing, it will appeal to readers in public administration, public management, digital government, and technology studies.

This is the 39th volume of Springer's Eurasian Studies in Business and Economics series, the official book series of the Eurasia Business and Economics Society (EBES). This volume features selected papers presented at the 52nd EBES Conference, held in Istanbul, Tuerkiye, on July 3-5, 2025. The conference was organized with the support of the Istanbul Economic Research Association, jointly organized with the Gulf Financial Center and the College of Business Administration, Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait, in Collaboration with the Bahcesehir University. At the conference, 215 papers were presented by 471 colleagues from 59 countries. The conference was held in a hybrid format, featuring both in-person and online paper presentations.

This book maps the rise of right-wing parties across three European sub-regions - the Nordic countries, the Visegrad Four, and Western Europe - and examines their growing impact on domestic politics and European integration. Drawing on historical forces such as nationalism, post-war settlements, and the uneven experience of integration, it argues that the right-wing resurgence is not a recent aberration but a recurring feature of European political life. Capitalising on public frustration over immigration, sovereignty, and economic insecurity, these parties have moved from the margins to the mainstream, forcing established parties to shift rightward in response. The book analyses three interconnected questions: how right-wing parties are reshaping the broader political landscape; their impact on the EU through national governments and the European Parliament; and the nature of their support base. It is essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners in European studies, comparative politics, and international relations.

A provocative exploration of the corrosive impact of secrecy on Australian intelligence organizations' effectiveness and operations

Secrecy is central to popular understandings of intelligence and how intelligence services operate. Intelligence agencies generally resist oversight and transparency, arguing that decreases in secrecy come at the cost of intelligence efficacy.

In Blind Trust, Melanie Brand challenges this view. Using archival research examining the role, functions, and public perceptions of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), she shows that operating in secrecy did not ensure intelligence efficacy in Cold War Australia. With little oversight from the government, ASIO's products became increasingly irrelevant to policymakers, and politicians lost sight of ASIO's value. With no external guidance or requirement to be accountable for its actions, secrecy allowed ASIO's staff to break the law and become involved in overtly partisan affairs. Finally, excessive secrecy asks for society's blind trust in an intelligence service, and ASIO lost the public's trust during the Cold War because it was able, for a time, to cover up its mistakes and exceed its authority.

This groundbreaking history of Australia's domestic spy agency is relevant to the security experiences of other democratic nation-states. Blind Trust will inform students, scholars, and professionals in the fields of intelligence studies, international relations, security studies, and history.

This book examines the implementation of responsible robotics through the lens of design thinking, fostering dialogue among scholars across law, philosophy, psychology, engineering, and related disciplines. Bringing together contributions from researchers based in East Asia, North America, and Europe, the volume offers a truly interdisciplinary and international perspective on the ethical challenges posed by emerging robotic technologies.

The book is organized into four interconnected parts. Part I explores the prospects and challenges of a society in which humans and robots coexist. Part II addresses ethical design principles for the governance of robotic systems. Part III investigates innovative
methodologies that can be employed to develop ethically grounded designs, while Part IV analyzes the intersection of design, human-robot interaction (HRI), and governance.

By integrating ethical reflection with practical design approaches, this volume offers valuable insights for policymakers and legislators seeking guidance on responsible robot governance, as well as for engineers aiming to incorporate ethical and legal considerations into system development. At the same time, it will appeal to scholars, students, and members of the wider public concerned with the societal implications and governance of emerging technologies.

Educational inequality has been largely examined through nuclear family-based research, yet the role of extended family members, especially grandparents, remains underexplored (Mare, 2011). This book investigates grandparental effects on grandchildren's educational outcomes in China, where three-generation co-residence prevails and grandparental involvement in childcare remains intensive. Results reveal that grandchildren with better-educated grandparents perform better in school, with household educational investment as a key mediator. Grandchildren also benefit academically from higher educational expectations among low-SES grandmothers, and from consistent authoritative parents and grandparents. This book suggests that educational inequality research should move beyond the parent-child dyad and explore the role of grandparents in the intergenerational reproduction of educational inequality.

Amid North Korea's advancing nuclear capabilities and the declining credibility of U.S. extended deterrence, South Korea has a strong motive to pursue its own nuclear deterrent. With its advanced nuclear energy program, South Korea possesses the means to develop nuclear weapons indigenously. However, its opportunity to do so is constrained by the prohibitive economic, security and reputational costs of nuclear armament. To circumvent these costs, Seoul is engaging in "nuclear hedging," pursuing the capability to develop nuclear weapons rapidly while stopping short of actual weaponization.

Drawing on Korean- and English-language documents, archival materials, and interviews with South Korean security experts, Lami Kim offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of South Korea's pursuit of nuclear hedging as an alternative to both nuclear restraint and outright nuclear armament. South Korea's renunciation of its nuclear weapons program in the 1970s - and its subsequent restraint - should not be mistaken for an absence of nuclear ambition grounded in confidence in U.S. extended deterrence. Instead, under both conservative and progressive governments, Seoul has sought the ability to acquire nuclear weapons rapidly, if necessary, as an insurance policy. A major contribution to the literature on nuclear deterrence, nonproliferation, and Korean studies, this book delivers timely and insightful policy recommendations for both Washington and Seoul.

This book explains the uses of laughter in contemporary China, and demonstrates how humour in China is put to many uses. Through the use of examples from different mediums such as film, sketch comedy, stand-up and sitcoms, this book demonstrates that Chinese comedy is not just about telling jokes or presenting funny scenarios-humour is also used to criticise social trends, to mock people in authority and to allow the public to reflect on China's dramatic economic and cultural changes. The authors bring comedy figures who are well-known in China, such as Zhao Benshan, Feng Xiaogang, and Guo Degang, to the attention of international readers, using translation and explanations to explain why Chinese people find their work both amusing and meaningful. They explore uniquely Chinese forms of comedy, like xiangsheng dialogues, and consider how international genres like stand-up and situation comedy are localised in China. They demonstrate how comedy can be used to sidestep censorship and satirise the humourless restrictiveness of the Chinese government. This book appeals readers who are interested in how humour is used as a form of political communication, how humour can cross national borders, and those interested in contemporary Chinese media and politics.

This book shows the important contribution of Liangzhu civilization to the development of Chinese civilization through discussions on the status of jade in Chinese civilization, the typicality of jade used in Liangzhu, the jade age and the origin of Chinese civilization. Jade culture is an important cultural gene of Chinese civilization. In the Liangzhu Era, more than 5,000 years ago, a jade system was formed to symbolize identity and rank, with jade cong??? symbolizing theocracy, jade yue??? symbolizing militACary power and royal power, as well as jade bi??? and jade headdresses. The ritual system embodied in groups of jade ritual vessels created the tradition of Chinese civilization of "contain the etiquette on the artifacts".

This comprehensive work examines the vital role of dredging equipment in national economic and defense development, highlighting seven decades of remarkable progress in China's shipbuilding industry. Through detailed analysis of technological evolution, the book showcases how Chinese workers and technical personnel demonstrated exceptional self-reliance while advancing from basic dredging equipment to sophisticated world-class machines. The narrative particularly emphasizes the industry's journey of overcoming technical challenges, documenting the transformation that has positioned China as a global leader in dredging technology. As a reference work, it offers invaluable insights and practical knowledge specifically tailored for workers, cadres, and technical personnel in related fields.

City Opaque is a book about how cities are produced-not just with plans, money, concrete and cranes, but through grey spaces that operate through erasure, ambiguity, and the overproduction of contradictory laws and regulations. Set in Ho Chi Minh City, widely known as Saigon, Hun Kim follows developers, state officials, investors, and residents as they navigate one of the fastest-growing urban economies in the world. Through years of close observation and lived encounters - from rooftop bars overlooking glittering construction sites to neighborhoods quietly erased by disappearing planning maps - he reveals a city shaped as much by what is hidden, revised, or forgotten as by what is planned and recorded.

Rather than treating corruption, legal ambiguity, and disorder as failures of development, this book shows how opacity itself is a form of governmental reason and a strategy for producing space in the city. Laws multiply but rarely clarify. Archives disappear. Plans are rewritten after the fact. These practices are born out of rationalities that enable land to be reassigned, capital to move, and futures to be reimagined - often at great cost to some residents, but with enormous payoff for others. Moving beyond familiar stories of "corruption" or "failed governance," City Opaque offers a new way of understanding urban development in Southeast Asia and beyond.

How lens-based art from Southeast Asia offers alternative visions for ecological sustainability

A new paradigm of ecologically minded artistic practices is taking shape in Southeast Asia - one that at once tracks ecological destruction and works specifically to cultivate deeper feelings of empathy toward the environment. Examining a range of photography and video work, The Empathic Lens explores how these lens-based projects respond to increasingly urgent concerns related to climate disaster and capitalist acceleration.

In this analysis of work produced across Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore, Brianne Cohen highlights artists for whom rampant urban development, resource extraction, and environmental toxicity are close at hand. As each artist takes their lens to these realities, Cohen shows, they draw on Indigenous knowledge and local traditions that have long recognized the kinship of humans and nonhumans. Engaging often-censored discourses of Indigenous land relations and environmental justice in a region with a long history of colonial and neocolonial development, Cohen traces genealogies of empathy and animism to demonstrate how these works develop sustainable visions for the future coexistence of planetary life.

The first critical account of marginalized artworks that depict the centrality of the more-than-human in Southeast Asian Indigenous worldviews, The Empathic Lens makes a powerful case for the relevance of Southeast Asian lens-based art in contemporary media practice and the art of the Anthropocene.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

This book illustrates how human resource leaders can harness data and AI to solve workforce challenges from turnover and skill shortages to low engagement and strategic misalignment. Using the commercial airline sector in Portugal as a case study, the book introduces a new job satisfaction scale and a predictive churn model providing a practical roadmap for improving talent retention, strengthening leadership, and building a thriving, future-ready workforce.

Bridging academic insight with real-world applications, this book is useful for researchers, scholars and academics as well as practitioners, leaders, and executives in HRM, organizational psychology, aviation management, and data-driven decision-making.

This book examines the role of civil society in guarding Indonesia's democracy, with a spotlight on the 2024 general elections. The 2024 election was characterized by the incumbent's significant influence in shaping electoral outcomes, even prior to election day, including bureaucratic involvement aimed at favouring specific candidates aligned with the regime, thereby undermining procedural democratic norms. Within this context, this book considers how far civil society plays a role in safeguarding Indonesia's democracy. This book is guided by two main considerations: the general picture of Indonesia's democracy based on the 2024 general elections process, and the role of civil society in guarding the electoral process of the 2024 general elections. It looks at participation in electoral political competition vis-a-vis identity politics, such as affiliations with Islamic figures or leveraging Chinese ethnic identity, and the actions of Indonesian religious organizations such as Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, as well as, the role of women's NGOs in ensuring implementation of the quota for women's representation in the 2024 elections. It also illustrates how young Muslims, utilizing digital platforms and contemporary cultural movements, have rejuvenated Islamism into a dynamic and adaptable force that effectively responds to modern challenges while upholding democratic ideals, which are marked by inclusivity, justice, and civic engagement. The central finding, however, is that this broad civic action is undermined by fragmentation within an increasingly closed and transactional political system. Ultimately, the book concludes that this diversity within civil society, despite its challenges, represents the most distinctive opportunity for safeguarding and revitalizing Indonesian democracy beyond 2024.

This book examines how inequality has become a defining feature of Australian social life, challenging enduring narratives of the 'fair go' and 'mateship'. Using a political economy lens and the capability approach, Alan Morris traces how disparities in income and wealth intersect with housing insecurity, unequal educational opportunity, health inequities, incarceration and gender inequality.

Across eight chapters, the book synthesises evidence from official statistics, policy reports and academic research, showing how advantage and disadvantage accumulate over the life course and are amplified by neoliberal reform, privatisation and the financialisation of housing. Particular attention is paid to Indigenous Australians who experience the most severe disadvantage, including exceptionally high rates of incarceration. The concluding chapter sets out practical policy directions-from tax and transfer settings and income support adequacy to investment in housing, education, health and justice reform-arguing that reducing capability deprivation is central to social cohesion and ensuring a decent life for all.

Written for researchers, students and policy audiences in sociology, social policy, public policy, criminology, housing and urban studies, and Australian studies, this book provides a rich, comprehensive and clear evidence-based account of contemporary inequality and what might be done to address it.

When walking through Istanbul, one almost inevitably encounters informal waste pickers who clean up the city with their large, heavily loaded hand trucks. Many of them are male undocumented recycling workers from Afghanistan and Pakistan. This book analyzes their living and working conditions. Based on the results of ethnographic field studies, it examines how Afghan*Pakistani recycling workers are disenfranchised by the interaction of different border regimes between Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and the EU. It scrutinizes how, in this situation, they negotiate the fine line between exploitation and vulnerability on the one hand and agency and solidarity on the other hand in a highly precarious setting. The study highlights how they (re)produce a specific recycling infrastructure of transit through their everyday practices that ensures their survival in the transit space of Istanbul and facilitates their potential onward movement to the EU. The author understands their migrant waste picking practices as part of urban border struggles and illustrates how the infrastructure of transit that they (re)produce contributes to constituting Turkey as a migration society.

Timely lessons for today's health and climate crises rooted in the origins of a government's provision for the common good

The question of whether a government should take care of its people-preparing and investing in public health, welfare, and resilience policies-is arguably more important today than ever, as the world faces unprecedented climate and health crises.

Commonwealth's exploration of the Venetian Republic, one of the oldest and most enduring republics in history, establishes for the first time that Venice and its constituent republics developed welfare policies not in response to the Plague, as is commonly thought, but two centuries earlier. Alexander More reveals that the lawmakers of Venice took advantage of its historic economic revival not to profit personally but to provide free medical care for their people. The Republic also inspected and guaranteed the quality and availability of food, water, and medicine, even when sudden climatic changes caused harvests to fail and supply chains to shift.

Through original archival research in multiple languages, More shows that the welfare state of the Venetian Republic, from which our modern system is derived, took shape through deliberate efforts to work toward the common good. Readers interested in the history of medicine and public health, food security, welfare, climate science, and law will benefit from new insights into the origin and nature of commonwealth in society.

This book examines how visually impaired social media content creators navigate their evolving digital identities through the lens of dramaturgical theory, as they move through different stages of sight loss. Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman and other sociological theorists, it explores performance, impression management, and identity construction in online spaces, shedding light on the evolving concepts of public and private self throughout the sight loss journey.

Structured around a newly developed five-stage framework (Diagnosis, Denial, Tipping Point, Coming Out, and The New Normal), chapters blend theoretical insights with real-life case studies and autoethnography to offer insights into identity renegotiation, visibility, and digital self-presentation in the digital age. Bridging academic research with practical guidance, this book brings together interviews with leading influencers, analysis of social media content, and findings from sociology, social psychology, and digital culture research. It is an essential read for scholars and students in disability and blind studies, media studies, social and digital marketing, cultural studies, as well as content creators, counselors, and disability advocates.