The book focuses on European Integration in the Field of Higher Education and Research, as well as the Implementation of the Bologna Process in Slovenia. The common policy of higher education and research belongs to the most important fields in the process of European integration and to the constitutive elements of the European Union. The authors analyse the process constituting the framework of higher education and research policy in Poland and Slovenia. The book analyses the political pr...

n the past three decades, numerous high-tech city-regions have emerged with the rise of new high-tech industries across the world. Many of them have been specifically supported by national technology policies—in developed or developing countries—implemented to trigger economic growth and to enhance global competitiveness at the national and/or city-regional level. These policies have involved the development of high-tech spaces—including research science/technology parks, innovation centre...

The aim of this thesis is to provide an outline to address questions with regard to the transformation of planning in China that has occurred after the 1980s. The research is using “planning evolution” as the main research skeleton. The starting point is to investigate to what extent Chinese urban planning has developed after the opening up and other reforms under the state-led and market-driven modes of Chinese reformation, and to investigate how the different modes and various actors hav...

Public administration in Canada needs to change. A handful of scholars across Canada have been sounding the alarm for years but to no avail. Talented young bureaucrats have been joining the public service with fresh ideas capable of creating real change, but the black hole consumes all.In The Black Hole of Public Administration, experienced public servant Ruth Hubbard and public administration iconoclast Gilles Paquet sound a wake-up call to the federal public service. The...

Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has revolutionized popular expression in China, enabling users to organize, protest, and influence public opinion in unprecedented ways. Guobin Yang's pioneering study maps an innovative range of contentious forms and practices linked to Chinese cyberspace, delineating a nuanced and dynamic image of the Chinese Internet as an arena for creativity, community, conflict, and control. Like many other contemporary protest forms in China and the world, Yang argu...

Creative industries in China provides a fresh account of China’s emerging commercial cultural sector. The author shows how developments in Chinese art, design and media industries are reflected in policy, in market activity, and grassroots participation.Never has the attraction of being a media producer, an artist, or a designer in China been so enticing. National and regional governments offer financial incentives; consumption of cultural goods and services have increased...

Moving the academic debate on from its current focus on development to a more nuanced sociological perspective, this fresh research is a collaboration between academics in South Korea and Germany that assesses the factors shaping world-class universities as institutional social systems as well as national cultural treasures. The work explores in detail how WCUs have moved to a central position in policy circles, and how these often ambitious government policies on WCUs have been interprete...

In recent years, China has experienced a revolution in information and communications technology (ICT), in 2003 surpassing the USA as the world’s largest telephone market, and as of February 2008, the number of Chinese Internet users has become the largest in the world. At the same time, China has overtaken the USA as the world’s biggest supplier of information technology goods. However, this transformation has occurred against the backdrop of a resolutely authoritarian political system an...

Canada was one of the first Western countries to sign an agreement to provide development aid to China in 1983, and the Canadian International Development Agency invited universities to cooperate in ways that would facilitate "the multiplication of contacts at the thinking level."In Canadian Universities in China’s Transformation, leading scholars from Canadian and Chinese universities elaborate on the historical experience of collaboration in areas as different as environ...

Universities are fundamental to the contemporary knowledge economy. They directly and indirectly support economic growth in both developing and advanced economies. In addition to their traditional teaching and research functions, they often also have important roles in supporting regional development and urban regeneration, as well as involvement in fostering international relations, in , cultural developments and in enhancing social cohesion.While higher education institutions in ...

Most regions of the world are plagued by conflicts that are made insoluble by a confluence of complex threads from history, geography, politics, and culture. These "frozen conflicts" defy conflict management interventions by both internal and external agents and institutions. Worse, they constantly threaten to extend beyond their local geographies, as in the terrorist bombings in Boston by ethnic Chechens, or to escalate from skirmishes to full-scale war, as in Nagorno-Karabakh. Consequent...

Jean-Louis Rocca's admirably concise A Sociology of Modern China wears its scholarship lightly and paints an intimate and complex portrait of Chinese society, all the while avoiding clichés and simplifications. He delves into China's history and examines the country's many different social strata so as to better understand the enormous challenges and opportunities with which its people are confronted. After discussing the long march toward reform and the crises along the way - amo...