The tobacco industry’s archives suggest that the global campaign for the plain packaging of tobacco products originated in 1986, when the Canadian Medical Association passed a resolution calling for cigarettes to be sold in packages bearing only a brand name and the health message ‘this...

This paper reflects critically on challenges and opportunities associated with developing a theoretical framework for an interdisciplinary Framework Programme 7 research project funded by the European Commission in the area of digital ecosystems. The paper first provides a description of the...

The explosion in social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Friendster is widely regarded as an exciting opportunity, especially for youth.Yet the public response tends to be one of puzzled dismay regarding a generation that, supposedly, has many friends but little sense of...

Media and cultural research has an important contribution to make to recent debates about declines in democratic engagement: for example, is celebrity culture a route into democratic engagement for those otherwise disengaged? This article contributes to this debate by reviewing qualitative and...

This article deals with the topic of ethics in large-scale online studies on social network sides. ‘Big data’ and large-scale online field studies are a relatively new phenomenon and clear ethical guidelines for social science research are still lacking. In this paper I focus on the ethical...

We investigate the impact of transport innovations on the productivity of urban locations in 1890–1936 Berlin, Germany. We find an increase in land value of up to 2.5% per 100 m decline in distance to urban railway station.

This paper examines recent changes in the politics of risk regulation in Europe and compares them to developments in the United States. From the 1960s through the mid 1980s, the regulation of health, safety and environmental risks was generally stricter in the United States than in Europe. Since...