Bøger udgivet af Agenda Publishing

This collection of essays offers a fresh perspective on infrastructure, inviting readers to (re)consider the ways that culture is produced and expressed within cities by examining the geographies of its spaces, venues, performances and embodiments.

This collection of essays offers a fresh perspective on infrastructure, inviting readers to (re)consider the ways that culture is produced and expressed within cities by examining the geographies of its spaces, venues, performances and embodiments.

In this wide-ranging review, Michael Lloyd explores the potential opportunities and threats that the advent of CBDCs will have for commercial banking, business, individuals and the central banks themselves, as well as the world's monetary system.

UK workers are stuck in a low-pay, low-productivity rut, with far too many people working in poor quality, insecure jobs, with little training or chance of getting on. Katy Jones and Ashwin Kumar question the mantra that "e;work is the best way out of poverty"e; and examine the in-work poverty that now defines employment for many.The state's engagement with people out of work is shown to ignore the needs of lone parents and disabled people, and has little concern for skills and career progression. When coupled with the degradation of social infrastructure, such as child care and transport, the barriers to quality work can become insurmountable. Jones and Kumar's insightful analysis reveals the need to move away from positioning unemployment as a "e;behavioural problem"e; to be corrected by coercive labour market policies to one that considers the wider obstacles to better paid, quality jobs.

Banks have been at the heart of economic activity for centuries, but since the 2008 financial crisis scrutiny of their activities and regulation of their actions has become the focus of fervent academic, policy and political activity. This focus takes for granted the existence and nature of banks. In Regulating Banks, Andrew Whitworth looks one stage deeper to question what a bank really is, and what the implications of that are. He argues that the institutional form of a bank represents the political compromise of a specific time and place - and can therefore change. This has implications for financial stability. Far from creating stability, he argues, the regulatory impulse of policy-makers inevitably leads to greater financial instability.Whitworth examines the postwar period of UK banking to show how regulation influences the nature of banks as much as their behaviour. Regulation, by changing the nature of what is regulated, encourages banks and other actors over time to alter their behaviour, which leads to future boom and bust cycles. These cycles then require further regulation to rein in the disruption their new pattern of behaviour inevitably instigates.Regulating Banks reveals the cyclical nature of banking regulation, the inherent mismatch between political impulses and market reactions, and the price banks, banking and society pay for such instability.

Poverty in modern-day Britain looks different to the form it took in Beveridge's day but it has not disappeared. For 14 million people across the UK the lack of access to the goods and services necessary to live a decent life and to participate fully in society remains a grim reality. Despite rising standards of living, social and economic structures continue to trap those at the bottom in constant job insecurity, ill-health, overcrowded housing and educational disadvantage. Helen Barnard considers what it might take to finally slay the giant of poverty in Britain. She examines how we might build a fairer, more equal society, and what a modern welfare state should aim to achieve, including an honest appraisal of the trade-offs and choices involved in creating it.

As a universal experience school provokes strongly-held opinions. The views of teachers, parents, pupils compete with those of educational theorists, social engineers and ideologues. Although undoubtedly much improved since the time of Beveridge, the provision of education remains beset with challenges. Sally Tomlinson's engaging, and at times personal, journey through Britain's postwar experience of schooling and education reform draws on her many years of working in the sector. She explains how legacies of different systems and countless policy initiatives have led to the persistence of social inequalities, entrenching them in society and perpetuated by the power dynamics that they create between class, race and gender. Furthermore, she shows how the increasing mania for testing, targets, choice and competition, which has made schools into a marketplace and young people into consumers, threatens to undermine schools as a place where citizens can share learning and the democratic values that are needed as much today as they were in Beveridge's time.

In 1942 life expectancy at birth was 66 for women and 60 for men. Death was usually due to degenerative and infectious diseases. The greatest postwar success in the fight against disease was the establishment of the NHS and care that was free at the point of delivery. Life expectancy rose dramatically, but since 2011 incremental improvements have stalled and even, in some regions, begun to reverse. Infant mortality rates have crept up and the postcode lottery of health provision underscores the level of social inequality in the UK. Good health is not simply the absence of disease. It is the collective of physical, social and mental well-being. It is the product of nutrition and genetics, of healthy lifestyles and preventative health interventions. It is the interaction between the conditions in which we live, work, play and age. Yet access to many of the things that make and keep us healthy are not evenly distributed in the population. Achieving good health is then deeply entwined with all aspects of society and cannot simply be solved by policies in one area alone.In our rediscovery of Beveridge, the shadow of the pandemic looms large. It is has never been more urgent to address the underlying causes of Disease. And it has never been clearer that these determinants are not only social or physiological, but also political.

British society is increasingly divided into the haves and the have-nots. Housing epitomizes this division with spiralling rents, exorbitant prices, lack of council provision, poorly maintained stock, and polluted cities with ever decreasing green space. Daniel Renwick and Robbie Shilliam provide a recent history of squalor culminating in the Grenfell Tower fire. In doing so they reveal a profound political failure to provide fair and just solutions to shelter - the most basic of human needs. Renwick and Shilliam argue that agents of change exist within those populations presently damned by a racist and class-riven system of housing provision.

Our world is characterized by scarcity and surfeit: too much carbon, pollution and concentrated wealth; a shortage of livelihoods, safe water and security. In response, the authors develop the idea of a 'modest imaginary', showing how it differs from modern and anti-modern approaches to sustainability and offers alternative ways forward.

This book is a comprehensive analysis of the unprecedented rise in large-scale, state-led transnational investment from countries as diverse as China, Russia and Norway, and the rise of the state in the global economy.

This volume contributes a Latin American perspective to the global debate on populism. It argues that Latin America in its rich and early experience of populism is a valuable laboratory to take our understanding forward and to address the question of whether populism goes beyond the dichotomy of left and right and is a new political phenomenon.

This frank and uncompromising account gives the inside view from the EU side of what it was really like to negotiate the Brexit agreement with the UK.

This book examines the failures of mainstream politics, and in particular the inability of the centre-left - the UK Labour Party and France's Parti Socialiste - to respond to the Great Recession more effectively.

An authoritative desk-top reference work for students of geography, the environment and sustainability, which through a series of 101 interconnected questions and answers spanning ten thematic sections, provides a comprehensive survey of humankind's impact on the global environment from the Late Stone Age to the present day.

The question of free will has preoccupied philosophers for millennia. In recent years the debate has been reinvigorated by the findings of neuroscience and, for some, the notion that we have free will has finally been laid to rest. Not so, says Raymond Tallis. In his quest to reconcile our practical belief in our own agency with our theoretical doubts, Tallis advances powerful arguments for the reality of freedom.Tallis challenges the idea that we are imprisoned by laws of nature that wire us into a causally closed world. He shows that our capacity to discover and exploit these laws is central to understanding the nature of voluntary action and to reconciling free will with our status as material beings.Bringing his familiar verve and insight to this deep and most intriguing philosophical question, one that impacts most directly on our lives and touches on nearly every other philosophical problem - of consciousness, of time, of the nature of the natural world, and of our unique place in the cosmos - Tallis takes us to the heart of what we are. By understanding our freedom he reveals our extraordinary nature more clearly.

Suitable for students of business and finance, the book offers readers a balanced and considered guide to the economics of the fund management industry and a critical appraisal of the sector's future.

A clear and rigorous survey of terrorist financing and the international efforts to combat it suitable for a range of courses in international relations, politics and global political economy.

Privately-held property (land and buildings) and the growth of the propertied middle class presents an anomaly in authoritarian states. This book unravels the puzzle that is the growth of private property in tandem with political support for authoritarian regimes.

Mexico City is the second largest city on the American continent, the most populous Spanish-speaking city in the world and the richest city, in terms of GFP, in Latin America. The authors explore the political structures, demography, economy, social issues and public administration that make this megacity distinctive.