This transdisciplinary volume puts forward proposals for wiser, socially just and sustainable socio-economic systems in transition. There is growing support for the view that the end of capitalism is around the corner, but on which conceptual and ethical basis can we interpret these times? With...

This book highlights the contribution of language standardization to the economic rise of the West between 1600 and 1860. Previous studies have been unable to explain why during this period almost all industrial innovation was confined to small areas around the main cultural centers of three...

It is not intuitive to accept that there exists a link between quantum physical systems and cognitive systems. However, recent research has shown that cognitive systems and collective (social) systems, including biology, exhibit uncertainty which can be successfully modelled with quantum...

This book is a critical analysis of the impact of the financial system on the economy, society and the natural environment. It cuts through the noise to looks at its purpose, its activities, and what it does in practice. Unlike other books that cover the last financial crisis and the risk of...

This book explores the experience of China's migrant laborers in Shanghai from economic, anthropological, and gendered analyses, offering extraordinary insights into the life-world of the marginalized people. China has hundreds of millions of internal migrants coming from the countryside to the...

This book, based on economics and game theory, analyzes the changes that Japan is now facing as a reflection of changes in Japanese families and society. The author presents a simple framework for the structural relationship among markets, communities including families, and the state; and uses...

The world has still to emerge fully from the housing-triggered Global Financial Crisis, but housing crises are not new. The history of housing shows long-run social progress, littered with major disasters; nevertheless the progress is often forgotten, whilst the difficulties hit the headlines....

This book sheds new light on the role of industrial districts in the industrial development of the past and present. Industrial districts, which refer to the geographical concentration of enterprises producing similar or closely related commodities in a small area, play a significant role in the...

Drawing on an array of archival evidence from court records to the poems of Chaucer, this work explores how medieval thinkers understood economic activity, how their ideas were transmitted and the extent to which they were accepted. Moving beyond the impersonal operations of an economy to its...

This text offers an accessible guide to the ways in which our growing knowledge of development in early-modern and modernising Japan can throw light on the paths that industrialisation was eventually to take across the globe. It has long been taken as read that the industrial revolution was the...