An ethnographic study on Design Thinking, this book offers profound insights into the popular innovation method, centrally exploring how design thinking’s practice relates to the vast promises surrounding it. Through a close study of a Berlin-based innovation agency, Tim Seitz finds both mundane knowledge practices and promises of transformation. He unpacks the relationships between these discourses and practices and undertakes an exploratory movement that leads him from practice theory to pragmatism. In the course of this movement, Seitz makes design thinking understandable as a phenomenon of what Boltanski and Chiapello described as the “new spirit of capitalism”—that is, an ideological structure that incorporates criticism and therefore strengthens capitalism.

A century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism , a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.

Digital archives are transforming the Humanities and the Sciences. Digitized collections of newspapers and books have pushed scholars to develop new, data-rich methods. Born-digital archives are now better preserved and managed thanks to the development of open-access and commercial software. Digital Humanities have moved from the fringe to the center of academia. Yet, the path from the appraisal of records to their analysis is far from smooth. This book explores crossovers between various disciplines to improve the discoverability, accessibility, and use of born-digital archives and other cultural assets.

This multi-authored book aims to illustrate the social, economic, and ecological factors that should determine and be determined by design in the implementation of a sustainable circular economy and society. We take design to refer to a continuum of perspectives and applications from industrial design to policy design, and this broad perspective invites theoretical and methodological contributions from a range of fields. In addition to bringing scholarly diversity to circularity, we expand and challenge the mainstream circular economy narrative of material efficiencies and green growth to include the demands of inclusive growth and ecological boundaries consistent with sustainable development. Readers from within and beyond design, conscious of the limitations of circular green growth will find new inspiration in this book regarding the nature of a sustainable circular economy and society and the broad design agenda that must be implemented to enable a just and informed circular transition.

Globally, Smart Cities initiatives are pursued which reproduce the interests of capital and neoliberal government, rather than wider public good. This book explores smart urbanism and 'the right to the city', examining citizenship, social justice, commoning, civic participation, and co-creation to imagine a different kind of Smart City.

Ideas are the basic building blocks that construct the world we live in. Yet despite the abundance of literature on creativity and innovation, there has been little reflection on ideas as such, their nature and their working mechanisms. This book provides foundations for a reflection focused specifically on ideas - what they are, how they emerge, develop, interact, gain acceptance and become translated into actions. In doing so the book moves beyond the mainstream approaches, offering new, promising theoretical angles, presenting original findings and initiating a research agenda for a science of ideas. This book provides a fresh perspective on how to conceptualize and study ideas and their working mechanisms by treating ideas as the main object of the study and by bringing together a group of original thinkers, scholars, and philosophers to move beyond the mainstream academic discourse on creativity and innovation.

This book gathers the best papers presented at the International Congress on Project Management and Engineering, in its 2017 and 2018 editions, which were held in Cádiz and Madrid, Spain. It covers a range of topic areas, including civil engineering and urban planning, product and process engineering, environmental engineering, energy efficiency and renewable energies, rural development, information and communication technologies, and risk management and safety.