Această lucrare pune față-în-față Europa și Asia, în studii realizate de antropologi, coregrafi, filologi, istorici, lingviști, muzicologi și sociologi. Granițele sociale și culturale dintre cele două lumi atât de depărtate fizic sunt relevate de lucrare a fi extrem de subțiri. Lucrarea abordează atât aspecte teoretice, cât și practice: discută despre legătura dintre postcolonialism și postcomunism despre semnificația culturală a mirodeniilor, despre modernitatea în artele vizuale, despre diseminarea culturii populare sud-coreene în România, despre lumea orientală ca sursă de inspirație pentru compozitorii europeni, despre apariția mișcărilor feministe în vestul Europei cu cele similare din Asia. Articolul despre rolul cultural și stereotipal al monumentelor coloniale este foarte instructiv in contextul mișcărilor sociale recente din SUA și Europa de Vest. Lucrarea se încheie cu o cercetare ce aduce în discuție imaginarul unei călătorii în India, așa cum este ea proiectată de europeni.

This volume brings together some of the most recent scholarship on government and civil society. It examines the axis of the relationship between national governments and civil society organisations (NGOs) by highlighting commonalities as well as differences among four key regions in the world. Using the stability vs. instability framework, the book explores a range of pertinent issues, including human rights, development, foreign policy, state-building, regime change, governance frameworks, wars and civil liberties. It studies diverse situations, from those entailing comprehensive cooperation to those involving politically contentious and revolutionary activities. With case studies from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of political science, global politics, international relations, sociology, development studies, global governance and public policy, as well as to those in the development sector and NGOs.

The first comprehensive and statistically significant analysis of the predictive powers of each cross-cultural model, based on nation-level variables from a range of large-scale database sources such as the World Values Survey, the Pew Research Center, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the UN Statistics Division, UNDP, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, TIMSS, OECD PISA. Tables with scores for all culture-level dimensions in all major cross-cultural analyses (involving 20 countries or more) that have been published so far in academic journals or books. The book will be an invaluable resource to masters and PhD students taking advanced courses in cross-cultural research and analysis in Management, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, and related programs. It will also be a must-have reference for academics studying cross-cultural dimensions and differences across the social and behavioral sciences.

Dreamscapes of Modernity offers the first book-length treatment of sociotechnical imaginaries, a concept originated by Sheila Jasanoff and developed in close collaboration with Sang-Hyun Kim to describe how visions of scientific and technological progress carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective futures, and the common good. The book presents a mix of case studies—including nuclear power in Austria, Chinese rice biotechnology, Korean stem cell research, the Indonesian Internet, US bioethics, global health, and more—to illustrate how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the national and transnational politics of science and technology. A theoretical introduction sets the stage for the contributors’ wide-ranging analyses, and a conclusion gathers and synthesizes their collective findings. The book marks a major theoretical advance for a concept that has been rapidly taken up across the social sciences and promises to become central to scholarship in science and technology studies.