This book discusses the nature and process of change in human society over the past two million years. The author draws on economic, historical and biological concepts to examine the driving forces of change and looks to likely developments in the future. This analysis produces some very thought-provoking and controversial conclusions.

Sociologists generally study macrolevel institutions and social processes with little reference to the individual. Psychologists, on the other hand, tend to study individual-level processes with little reference to society. This volume, featuring contributions from influential scholars in US social psychology, brings the link between the individual and society into focus. The chapters in the volume are distinguished by their concentration on either cognitive, affective or behavioural processes. These analyses eschew the traditional psychological approach to individual-level processes and instead offer intriguing accounts of how thought, emotion and action are embedded in social context and are central to the dynamic between self and society. Together, the 14 chapters present a synthesis of theory and research that are a major force in stimulating and influencing investigations of the link between the individual and the larger society.

“A superb new understanding of the dynamic economy as a learning society, one that goes well beyond the usual treatment of education, training, and R&D.”—Robert Kuttner, author of The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy Since its publication Creating a Learning Society has served as an effective tool for those who advocate government policies to advance science and technology. It shows persuasively how enormous increases in our standard of living have been the result of learning how to learn, and it explains how advanced and developing countries alike can model a new learning economy on this example. Creating a Learning Society: Reader’s Edition uses accessible language to focus on the work’s central message and policy prescriptions. As the book makes clear, creating a learning society requires good governmental policy in trade, industry, intellectual property, and other important areas. The text’s central thesis—that every policy affects learning—is critical for governments unaware of the innovative ways they can propel their economies forward. “Profound and dazzling. In their new book, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald study the human wish to learn and our ability to learn and so uncover the processes that relate the institutions we devise and the accompanying processes that drive the production, dissemination, and use of knowledge . . . This is social science at its best.”—Partha Dasgupta, University of Cambridge “An impressive tour de force, from the theory of the firm all the way to long-term development, guided by the focus on knowledge and learning . . . This is an ambitious book with far-reaching policy implications.”—Giovanni Dosi, director, Institute of Economics, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna “[A] sweeping work of macroeconomic theory.”—Harvard Business Review

The field of public participation is developing fast, with phenomena such as citizen science and crowdsourcing extending the resource base of research, stimulating innovation and making science more accessible to the general population. Promoting public participation means giving more weight to citizens and civil society actors in the definition of research needs and in the implementation of research and innovation. As yet, there is limited understanding of the implications of widespread use of public participation and as a result, there is a risk that it will become a burden for research and an obstacle to bridging the gap between research and society. This volume presents the findings of a three-year international study on innovative public participation. The resulting work studies the characteristics and trends of innovative public participation through a global sample of 38 case studies. It provides theoretical generalisations on the dynamics of public participation, suggestions for an evaluation framework and clear empirical examples of how public participation works in practice. Illustrated by best practice cases, the authors identify characteristics which contribute to successful public participation. The book is aimed primarily at scholars and practitioners of public participation, as well as research managers, policy makers and business actors interested in related issues. There is also a secondary market for students and scholars of European governance studies, sociology and political sciences.

Interest in the meteorology of the stratosphere and mesophere has been simulated in the past few years by concerns over possible depletion of the ozone layer as a result of reactions involving pollutants introduced by human activities. Concurrently there has been an upsurge in research on various aspects of the meteorology of the stratosphere. This monograph provides an account of the fundamental dynamical processes which control the general circulation of the stratosphere and mesophere and are thus responsible for the transport of trace substances in that region of the atmosphere. Principles necessary for understanding the dynamics of large-scale motions in the stratosphere and mesosphere are systematically developed so that this monograph should prove useful not only as a reference work for research scientists, but as a textbook for courses in dynamic meteorology of the upper atmosphere.

This book discusses the nature and process of change in human society over the past two million years. The author draws on economic, historical and biological concepts to examine the driving forces of change and looks to likely developments in the future. This analysis produces some very thought-provoking and controversial conclusions.

Everyday life is defined and characterised by the rise, transformation and fall of social practices. Using terminology that is both accessible and sophisticated, this essential book guides the reader through a multi-level analysis of this dynamic. In working through core propositions about social practices and how they change the book is clear and accessible; real world examples, including the history of car driving, the emergence of frozen food, and the fate of hula hooping, bring abstract concepts to life and firmly ground them in empirical case-studies and new research. Demonstrating the relevance of social theory for public policy problems, the authors show that the everyday is the basis of social transformation addressing questions such as: how do practices emerge, exist and die? what are the elements from which practices are made? how do practices recruit practitioners? how are elements, practices and the links between them generated, renewed and reproduced? Precise, relevant and persuasive this book will inspire students and researchers from across the social sciences. Elizabeth Shove is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. Mika Pantzar is Research Professor at the National Consumer Research Centre, Helsinki. Matt Watson is Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at University of Sheffield.