Epistemic Communities, Constructivism and International Environmental Politics brings together 25 years of publications by Peter M. Haas. The book examines how the world has changed significantly over the last 100 years, discusses the need for new, constructivist scholarship to understand the dynamics of world politics, and highlights the role played by transnational networks of professional experts in global governance. Combining an intellectual history of epistemic communities with theoretical arguments and empirical studies of global environmental conferences, as well as international organizations and comparative studies of international environmental regimes, this book presents a broad picture of social learning on the global scale. In addition to detailing the changes in the international system since the Industrial Revolution, Haas discusses the technical nature of global environmental threats. Providing a critical reading of discourses about environmental security, this book explores governance efforts to deal with global climate change, international pollution control, stratospheric ozone, and European acid rain. With a new general introduction and the addition of introductory pieces for each section, this collection offers a retrospective overview of the author’s work and is essential reading for students and scholars of environmental politics, international relations and global politics.

Martin Kusch puts forth two controversial ideas: that knowledge is a social status (like money or marriage) and that knowledge is primarily the possession of groups rather than individuals. He defends the radical implications of his views: that knowledge is political, and that it varies with communities. This bold approach to epistemology is a challenge to philosophy and the wider academic world.

'This is a landmark study that tackles an important black box in innovation studies — i.e. communities of innovation. While conventional work focuses on formal organizations, a select group of academic leaders highlights the various communities that cut across firms and form the vital 'underground' for processes of creativity and ideation. While targeted toward business and management, this volume is a must-read for all social scientists interested in the dynamics underlying the current knowledge economy.'Journal of Economic GeographyThis book describes the important role played by communities in innovation processes and how organizations can benefit from it. A community brings together individuals who share a common passion for a given area of knowledge and can contribute to innovation at different levels: capitalization of good practices, problem solving, sharing of expertise, or development of new and creative ideas. The literature has progressively identified many variants of communities such as communities of practice, epistemic communities, communities of interest, virtual communities, etc. These forms of communities differ regarding the type of the specialized activities of knowledge on which they focus. As practitioners and academics increasingly emphasized the needs of collaborative approaches in innovation, they progressively challenged the traditional idea that innovation is mainly generated by hierarchical corporate departments and highlighted the active role that communities play in innovation processes. The aim of this book is to shed light, using multiple examples, on the proactive and fundamental role of communities in the new innovation practices of organizations.

Emanuel Adler is one of the leading IR theorists of his generation. This volume brings together a collection of his articles, including four new and previously unpublished chapters.

Networks powered by algorithms are pervasive. Major contemporary technology trends - Internet of Things, Big Data, Digital Platform Power, Blockchain, and the Algorithmic Society - are manifestations of this phenomenon. The internet, which once seemed an unambiguous benefit to society, is now the basis for invasions of privacy, massive concentrations of power, and wide-scale manipulation. The algorithmic networked world poses deep questions about power, freedom, fairness, and human agency. The influential 1997 Federal Communications Commission whitepaper “Digital Tornado” hailed the “endless spiral of connectivity” that would transform society, and today, little remains untouched by digital connectivity. Yet fundamental questions remain unresolved, and even more serious challenges have emerged. This important collection, which offers a reckoning and a foretelling, features leading technology scholars who explain the legal, business, ethical, technical, and public policy challenges of building pervasive networks and algorithms for the benefit of humanity. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book analyses situations in which individual agents, who might be different from each other, interact and produce behaviour on the aggregate level which does not correspond to that of the average actor. This leads to aggregate outcomes which would be impossible to explain in a more standard approach. Aggregation generates structure and, as a result, interaction and heterogeneity can be handled and we no longer have to rely on the over-simplified reduction of the behaviour of the economy to that of a "rational" individual.

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) has been enduringly influential in philosophy of science, challenging many common presuppositions about the nature of science and the growth of scientific knowledge. However, philosophers have misunderstood Kuhn's view, treating him as a relativist or social constructionist. In this book, Brad Wray argues that Kuhn provides a useful framework for developing an epistemology of science that takes account of the constructive role that social factors play in scientific inquiry. He examines the core concepts of Structure and explains the main characteristics of both Kuhn's evolutionary epistemology and his social epistemology, relating Structure to Kuhn's developed view presented in his later writings. The discussion includes analyses of the Copernican revolution in astronomy and the plate tectonics revolution in geology. The book will be useful for scholars working in science studies, sociologists and historians of science as well as philosophers of science.