Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Publications
  3. Cambridge Elements
  4. Published Elements

Refine listing

Refine listing

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

2019 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 9 of 101

Monotheism and Peacebuilding

Monotheism and Peacebuilding
  • John D Brewer
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • This Element addresses the opportunities and constraints operating on monotheistic peacebuilding, focusing on the three Abrahamic faiths, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which share a common origin. These opportunities and constraints are approached through what the volume calls 'the paradox of monotheism'. Monotheism is defined by belief in one omnipotent, benign, and loving God, but this God does not or cannot prevent violence, war, and conflict. Moreover, monotheism can actually promote conflict between the Abrahamic faiths, and with other world religions, giving us the puzzle of holy wars fought in God's name. The first section of the Element outlines the paradox of monotheism and its implications for monotheistic peacebuilding; the second section addresses the peacebuilding efforts of three Abrahamic monotheistic religions and the constraints that operate as a result of the paradox of monotheism. This paradox tends to limit monotheistic peacebuilding to inter-faith dialogue, which often does not go far enough.
Low-Cost Fashion

Low-Cost Fashion
  • The Political Economy of Garment Production and Distribution in Latin America
  • Matías Dewey, André Vereta Nahoum
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025
  • This Element analyses a fundamentally new regional configuration of the garment sector, covering much of South America. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with a wide range of actors, it examines two major circuits of informal production and distribution of affordable garments, both of which have emerged around the urban marketplaces of La Salada (Buenos Aires) and Feira da Madrugada (São Paulo). This Element examines a configuration characterized by (1) manufacturers who interact with customer preferences to produce low-cost fashion, (2) marketplaces that function as large garment distribution hubs, and (3) extensive distribution routes with regional reach. This Element discusses the role of creativity in informal production processes, reflects on the implications of both cases for our understanding of global value chains and informality, and provides empirical evidence on forbearance as an explanatory element for the emergence of this phenomenon.
State-Owned Enterprises as Institutional Actors in Contemporary Capitalism and Beyond

State-Owned Enterprises as Institutional Actors in Contemporary Capitalism and Beyond
  • Olivier Butzbach, Douglas B. Fuller, Gerhard Schnyder, Luda Svystunova
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • This Element qualifies the common understanding of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) as mere instruments of the state and instead conceive of them as economic actors in their own right. Specifically, SOE top management teams have leeway to diverge from goals that the state they are owned by pursues. Through 'institutional work' they can even actively shape the institutional framework in which they are embedded. However, the extent of SOE top management teams' leeway for agency is determined by macro- (country), meso- (State–SOE governance system), and industry-level factors. These factors, in turn, vary from country to country and over time. In other words, SOE agency is 'embedded agency.' Combining institutional work and historical institutionalism analytic lenses, this Element presents a multilevel model to understand embedded agency of top management teams of SOEs in contemporary capitalism. The model adds an important element to our understanding of the 'new state capitalism.'
Transnational Korean Englishes

Transnational Korean Englishes
  • Sofia Rüdiger, Alex Baratta
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • Transnational Korean Englishes presents the many faces of English in South Korea (henceforth also Korea) – from Korean English forms and functions to English loanwords in Korean, and from the influences of Korean on the English language to Korean cultural exports. Drawing on specialized and purpose-built spoken and written corpora and other empirical data as well as previous studies, the Element illuminates the Korean-English language contact setting from a range of perspectives, shining light on various transnational Korean English phenomena. Guided by questions of legitimization and codification, this Element shows Koreans as productive and creative users of localized English forms, with hallyu (the Korean Wave) promoting not only Korean pop cultural products around the world but also contributing to influences of Korean on English worldwide.
Shocks and Politics

Shocks and Politics
  • Understanding Disaster Preparedness
  • Jennifer Bussell
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • When will government elites prepare for natural hazards? Existing research posits that governments will respond to disasters, but rarely have incentives to prepare for them. This Element argues that disaster preparedness can, and does, occur in the context of both motivated ruling elites and a capable state. Ruling elites can be mobilized to lead preparedness efforts when there is a risk that past exposure to hazards will lead to political instability in the face of a future hazard. Where elites anticipate a threat to their rule in the face of a future hazard, due to substantial past exposure and significant opposition strength, they will be motivated to engage in disaster preparedness. The quality and character of these efforts subsequently depend on the government's capacity to coordinate the design and implementation of preparedness plans. The Element tests this argument using a medium-N, country case study approach, drawing on evidence from ten countries in Africa and three in South Asia, as well as subnational analysis in India.
The Problem of God in Thomas Reid

The Problem of God in Thomas Reid
  • James Foster
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • Thomas Reid was a theist and a philosopher; yet the exact relationship between philosophy and theology in his works is unclear and disputed. The aim of this book is to clarify this relationship along three lines by exploring the status, function, and detachability of theism with respect to Reid's philosophy. Regarding the first I argue that belief in the existence of God is, for Reid, a non-inferential first principle. Regarding the second I argue that theism plays at least six different roles in Reid's philosophy. And, regarding the third, I argue that, despite this, theism is largely detachable from Reid's concept of human rationality and philosophy. What emerges is a picture of the relationship between philosophy and theology in which both inquiries are motivated by natural human curiosity, and both are founded on principles of common sense.
Dialectology and the Linguistic Atlas Project

Dialectology and the Linguistic Atlas Project
  • Allison Burkette
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • People from different places use different words for things, even everyday things such as carbonated beverages (e.g. soda, coke, pop) or bread roll-based sandwiches (e.g. hoagie, grinder, sub). Regional variation in vocabulary is one of the foci of dialectology, a subfield of linguistics that examines the geographic distribution of specific words, along with distributions of different pronunciations and grammatical constructions. This Element will provide readers with a basic understanding of traditional dialectological study and will demonstrate through examples (audio, text, maps) how Linguistic Atlas Project research has changed and expanded over time. Readers will be introduced to the key concepts of dialectology with a focus on the North American Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) and its materials. This Element will also discuss today's LAP with reference to third-wave sociolinguistics, outlining the ways in which the LAP has changed over time to meet the needs and goals of contemporary sociolinguistic study.
Retrospective and Prospective for Scientific Provenance Studies in Archaeology

Retrospective and Prospective for Scientific Provenance Studies in Archaeology
  • A. M. Pollard
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • Provenance has been one of the major scientific applications in archaeology for a hundred years. The 'Golden Age' began in the 1950s, when large programmes were initiated focussing on bronzes, ceramics, and lithics. However, these had varying impact, ranging from wide acceptance to outright rejection. This Element reviews some of these programmes, mainly in Eurasia and North America, focussing on how the complexity of the material, and the effects of human behaviour, can impact on such studies. The conclusion is that provenance studies of lithic materials and obsidian are likely to be reliable, but those on ceramics and metals are increasingly complicated, especially in the light of mixing and recycling. An alternative is suggested, which focusses more on using scientific studies to understand the relationship between human selectivity and processing and the wider resources available, rather than on the simple question of 'where does this object come from'.
Social Group Representation in a Diachronic News Corpus

Social Group Representation in a Diachronic News Corpus
  • Irene Elmerot
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
    • Element
      • You have access
      • Open access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation
  • Equality is a global factor of prosperity in democratic societies. In this Element, thirty years of newspapers and magazines form the basis of an intersectional study on how different social actors are described in Czechia. A bird's eye perspective points to the news being very white male-oriented, but when scrutinising further, some results differ from previous studies, giving insights on linguistic othering and stratification that may be a threat to equality. The methodology can be used for most languages with a sufficient amount of digitised, annotated and available texts. Since more and more text is being gathered to form datasets large enough to answer any question we might have, this Element helps uncover why we should be careful about which conclusions to draw if the words put into the data are not adapted to the relevant register and context. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Metaphysics of Gender

The Metaphysics of Gender
  • E. Díaz León
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • What is the metaphysics of gender about? Metaphysics is the study of what there is and what it is like. On this conception, questions in the metaphysics of gender would be about the existence and nature of gender. That is, the metaphysics of gender would be about whether alleged gender categories such as being a man, a woman or an agender person are real features or kinds, and if so, what their nature is. In recent years, the metaphysics of gender has received a lot of attention and has shifted from being a rather marginal part of metaphysics to being a growing area of interest. Moreover, growing attention to the metaphysics of gender and the social domain have given rise to fruitful methodological questions about what metaphysics is about and what are the best methods to pursue metaphysical inquiries. This Element offers a survey of recent discussions of these questions.
Dignity and Rights

Dignity and Rights
  • Ariel Zylberman
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • Dignity and rights are pervasive ideas. But how exactly should we understand them? Although philosophical theories of dignity and of rights typically proceed independently of each other, this Element treats them together. One advantage of doing so is that we can see a deeper unity underlying the familiar difficulties of standard accounts of dignity and rights (Sections 1 and 2). A second advantage is that understanding how many of the difficulties stem from the reductivist structure of the standard accounts lets us envisage a non-reductivist alternative. Drawing from the metaphysics of kinds and dispositions and from social ontology shows that dignity and rights are fundamental and interdependent normative properties. As pre-conventional properties (Section 3), dignity and rights mark a distinct type of value and function dispositionally, directed to actualization through recognition by others. As social properties (Section 4), they specify the normative status and entitlements constitutive of social kinds.
Risk Management in Translation

Risk Management in Translation
  • Anthony Pym
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • Once fidelity and equivalence are abandoned, how can successful translation be understood? Risk management offers an alternative way of looking at the work of translators and their social function. It posits that the greater the cultural differences, the greater the risks of failed communication. What can be done to manage those risks? Drawing on the ways translators and interpreters handle intercultural encounters by adjusting what is said, this essay outlines a series of strategies that can be applied to all kinds of cross-cultural communication. Practical examples are drawn from a wide range of contexts, from Australian bushfires to court interpreting in Barcelona, with special regard for the new kinds of risks presented by machine translation and generative AI. The result is a critical view of the professionalization of translation, and a fresh account of democratized translation as a rich human activity in the service of cross-cultural cooperation.
Infrared Spectroscopy of Archaeological Sediments

Infrared Spectroscopy of Archaeological Sediments
  • Michael B. Toffolo
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
    • Element
      • You have access
      • Open access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation
  • Infrared spectroscopy is the study of the interaction between infrared radiation and matter. Its application to the characterization of archaeological sedimentary contexts has produced invaluable insights into the archaeological record and past human activities. This Element aims at providing a practical guide to infrared spectroscopy of archaeological sediments and their contents taken as a dynamic system, in which the different components observed today are the result of multiple formation processes that took place over long timescales. After laying out the history and fundamentals of the discipline, the author proposes a step-by-step methodological framework, both in the field and the laboratory, and guides the reader in the interpretation of infrared spectra of the main components of archaeological sediments with the aid of selected case studies. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Monotheism and Miracle

Monotheism and Miracle
  • Eric Eve
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025
  • Monotheism implies a God who is active in creation. An author writing a novel provides a better analogy for God's creative activity than an artificer constructing a mechanism. A miracle is then not an interruption of the ordinary course of nature so much as a divine decision to do something out of the ordinary, and miracle is primarily a narrative category. We perceive as miracles events that are extraordinary while also fitting our understanding of divine purpose. Many miracle accounts may remain problematic, however, since recognizing that a given story purports to narrate a miracle does not determine whether the miracle occurred. This Elementweighs competing narratives. In doing so the understanding of the normal workings of nature will carry considerable weight. Nevertheless, there can be instances where believers may, from their own faith perspective, be justified in concluding that a miracle has occurred.
A Prolegomenon to Differential Equations and Variational Methods on Graphs

A Prolegomenon to Differential Equations and Variational Methods on Graphs
  • Yves van Gennip, Jeremy Budd
  • Published online:
    05 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 February 2025
    • Element
      • You have access
      • Open access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation
  • The use of differential equations on graphs as a framework for the mathematical analysis of images emerged about fifteen years ago and since then it has burgeoned, and with applications also to machine learning. The authors have written a bird's eye view of theoretical developments that will enable newcomers to quickly get a flavour of key results and ideas. Additionally, they provide an substantial bibliography which will point readers to where fuller details and other directions can be explored. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Entrepreneurship and Evolutionary Economics

Entrepreneurship and Evolutionary Economics
  • Per L. Bylund
  • Published online:
    04 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 February 2025
  • Entrepreneurship has been expunged from contemporary mainstream economics despite being an important driver and cause of economic development and growth. However, whereas Evolutionary Economics recognizes value-creative entrepreneurship, its role and impact tend to still be understated and the vast implications not fully understood. This Element attempts to remedy this by theorizing on how entrepreneurship impacts and drives market economies, the implications for economic change and renewal, and how the pursuit of new value creation determines the evolution of an economy. We find that allowing for entrepreneurial new value creation – innovative entrepreneurship – produces a different and more dynamic understanding of the market as a process, the role of knowledge and uncertainty, economic evolution and progress, as well as has important implications for political economy.
Asexuality in Young Adult Fiction

Asexuality in Young Adult Fiction
  • Noah O'Connor
  • Published online:
    03 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025
  • The Asexual Exile trope positions asexual characters outside of society by portraying them as loners, inhuman, or adjacent to death. This research identifies trends in these portrayals by considering a corpus of 42 traditionally published novels of Young Adult fiction featuring asexual protagonists. A distant reading of this corpus finds that the Asexual Exile trope is employed in approximately two-thirds of cases. The author analyses how this trope permutates across genres, and the frequency of its endorsement and subversion by these narratives. Presenting the first extensive investigation into the Asexual Exile trope in YA fiction, this research investigates how asexual characters are Othered as not truly alive, and how these messages then rebound into necropolitical cultural understandings of asexual people as expendable. The results prompt the questions: how does the Asexual Exile trope influence Young Adult readers in the formation of their ideologies? How can publishers do better?
Authoritarian Survival and Leadership Succession in North Korea and Beyond

Authoritarian Survival and Leadership Succession in North Korea and Beyond
  • Edward Goldring, Peter Ward
  • Published online:
    03 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 February 2025
  • Authoritarian Survival and Leadership Succession in North Korea and Beyond examines how dictators manage elites to facilitate succession. Theoretically, it argues that personalistic incumbents facilitate the construction of a power base of elites from outside of their inner circle to help the successor govern once he comes to power. Then, once in office, successors consolidate power by initially relying on this power base to govern while marginalizing elites from their predecessor's inner circle before later targeting members of their own power base to further consolidate power. The Element presents evidence for these arguments from North Korea's two leadership transitions, leveraging original qualitative and quantitative evidence from inside North Korea. Comparative vignettes of succession in party-based China, Egypt's military regime, and monarchical Saudi Arabia demonstrate the theory's broader applicability. The Element contributes to research on comparative authoritarianism by highlighting how dictators use the non-institutional tool of elite management to facilitate succession.
What is the Middle East?

What is the Middle East?
  • The Theory and Practice of Regions
  • Marc Lynch
  • Published online:
    03 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
  • The Middle East has traditionally been understood as a world region by policy, political science, and the public. Its borders are highly ambiguous, however, and rarely explicitly justified or theorized. This Element examines how the current conception of the Middle East emerged from colonialism and the Cold War, placing it within both global politics and trends within American higher education. It demonstrates the strategic stakes of different possible definitions of the Middle East, as well as the internal political struggles to define and shape the identity of the region. It shows how unexamined assumptions about the region as a coherent and unified entity have distorted political science research by arbitrarily limiting the comparative universe of cases and foreclosing underlying politics. It argues for expanding our concept of the Middle East to better incorporate transregional connections within a broader appeal for comparative area studies.
The Rise of Mass Parties, Liberal Italy, and the Fascist Dawn (1919–1924)

The Rise of Mass Parties, Liberal Italy, and the Fascist Dawn (1919–1924)
  • Goffredo Adinolfi
  • Published online:
    03 February 2025
    Print publication:
    22 May 2025
    • Element
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation
  • Through an in-depth study of the electoral process, the aim of this Element is to analyse the political transformations that occurred in Italy from 1919 to 1924. After the takeover of the low chamber by the mass integration parties in 1919 - Popular and Socialist - concerns grew within the liberal camp. The argument of this Element is that the conservatives failed to adapt and remain competitive in a system characterised by universal suffrage, thereby paving the way for the rise of the fascists. The electoral path to power begins with the political elections of 1921, continues through the renewal of the municipal councils in 1922–23, and concludes with the elections of 1924 when Mussolini managed to take control of the low chamber. The Duce assumed the role of head of the nation, presenting a list of candidates-the Listone-that included members of the Fascist Party and the former politica elite.

Page 9 of 101