Social Innovations in Post-Soviet Countries

Social Innovations in Post-Soviet Countries PDF Author: Bakhrom Radjabov
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000597830
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book evaluates the evolution of social innovation in post-Soviet Central Asia, Eastern Europe and Caucasus. Following the dissolution of the USSR, organisations such as the UNDP have encouraged local communities and governments to innovate in order to find solutions to existing social problems. This book demonstrates that progress with social innovations has varied, with countries with low government support such as Uzbekistan struggling, whereas countries with better government support and a more active civil society, such as Armenia and Ukraine, have seen more positive results. Covering the period 2012-2020 and a broad range of countries, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Moldova, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, this book provides an impressively broad-ranging critical analysis of post-Soviet social innovation. Including social innovations emerging as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak, this will be an important comparative study for researchers and practitioners working on social innovation, and to those with an interest in post-Soviet development.

Social Innovations in Post-Soviet Countries

Social Innovations in Post-Soviet Countries PDF Author: Bakhrom Radjabov
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000597830
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book evaluates the evolution of social innovation in post-Soviet Central Asia, Eastern Europe and Caucasus. Following the dissolution of the USSR, organisations such as the UNDP have encouraged local communities and governments to innovate in order to find solutions to existing social problems. This book demonstrates that progress with social innovations has varied, with countries with low government support such as Uzbekistan struggling, whereas countries with better government support and a more active civil society, such as Armenia and Ukraine, have seen more positive results. Covering the period 2012-2020 and a broad range of countries, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Moldova, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, this book provides an impressively broad-ranging critical analysis of post-Soviet social innovation. Including social innovations emerging as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak, this will be an important comparative study for researchers and practitioners working on social innovation, and to those with an interest in post-Soviet development.

Red to Green

Red to Green PDF Author: Laura A. Henry
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457505
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Environmental activism in contemporary Russia exemplifies both the promise and the challenge facing grassroots politics in the post-Soviet period. In the late Soviet period, Russia's environmental movement was one of the country's most dynamic and effective forms of social activism, and it appeared well positioned to influence the direction and practice of post-Soviet politics. At present, however, activists scattered across Russia face severe obstacles to promoting green issues that range from wildlife protection and nuclear safety to environmental education. Based on fifteen months of fieldwork in five regions of Russia, from the European west to Siberia and the Far East, Red to Green goes beyond familiar debates about the strength and weakness of civil society in Russia to identify the contradictory trends that determine the political influence of grassroots movements. In an organizational analysis of popular mobilization that addresses the continuing role of the Soviet legacy, the influence of transnational actors, and the relevance of social mobilization theory to the Russian case, Laura Henry details what grassroots organizations in Russia actually do, how they use the limited economic and political opportunities that are available to them, and when they are able to influence policy and political practice. Drawing on her in-depth interviews with activists, Henry illustrates how green organizations have pursued their goals by "recycling" Soviet-era norms, institutions, and networks and using them in combination with transnational ideas, resources, and partnerships. Ultimately, Henry shows that the limited variety of organizations that activists have constructed within post-Soviet Russia's green movement serve as a "fossil record" of the environmentalists' innovations, failures, and compromises. Her research suggests new ways to understand grassroots politics throughout the postcommunist region and in other postauthoritarian contexts.

Gay Life in the Former USSR

Gay Life in the Former USSR PDF Author: Daniel Schluter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317726146
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This work describes and analyzes the individual identities, social-ecological "landscape", and group undertakings among the homosexual population of the Soviet Union during the final years of the communist regime.

Children, Youth, and Participatory Arts for Peacebuilding

Children, Youth, and Participatory Arts for Peacebuilding PDF Author: Ananda Breed
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104003067X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This book demonstrates how participatory arts-based approaches can help children and youth contribute to peacebuilding within post-conflict contexts and to their communities. Cultural forms of storytelling through visual arts, drama, music, and dance can help to enhance post-conflict community well-being, social cohesion, and conflict prevention. However, in the planning and implementation of these arts-based projects, children and youth are often marginalised in decision-making processes. Drawing on cases from Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Indonesia, and Nepal, this book demonstrates the benefits of participatory action research with children and youth to inform education curricula and policies for sustaining peace. Showing how artforms can be adapted to meet the needs of children and youth, the book emphasises the need to scale up arts-based peacebuilding initiatives and leverage for greater policy enactment from the bottom up. It is also an excellent example of South–South learning, advocating for a local approach to engage with arts-based methodologies and peacebuilding. This book will be of interest to researchers across the applied arts, sociology, anthropology, political science, peacebuilding, and international development. Practitioners and policymakers would also benefit from the book’s recommendations for the implementation of successful arts-based research projects and interventions.

25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries

25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries PDF Author: Jeroen Huisman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319529803
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This open access book is a result of the first ever study of the transformations of the higher education institutional landscape in fifteen former USSR countries after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It explores how the single Soviet model that developed across the vast and diverse territory of the Soviet Union over several decades has evolved into fifteen unique national systems, systems that have responded to national and global developments while still bearing some traces of the past. The book is distinctive as it presents a comprehensive analysis of the reforms and transformations in the region in the last 25 years; and it focuses on institutional landscape through the evolution of the institutional types established and developed in Pre-Soviet, Soviet and Post-Soviet time. It also embraces all fifteen countries of the former USSR, and provides a comparative analysis of transformations of institutional landscape across Post-Soviet systems. It will be highly relevant for students and researchers in the fields of higher education and and sociology, particularly those with an interest in historical and comparative studies.

Transforming Post-Communist Political Economies

Transforming Post-Communist Political Economies PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 9780309059299
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
This ground-breaking new volume focuses on the interaction between political, social, and economic change in Central and Eastern Europe and the New Independent States. It includes a wide selection of analytic papers, thought-provoking essays by leading scholars in diverse fields, and an agenda for future research. It integrates work on the micro and macro levels of the economy and provides a broad overview of the transition process. This volume broadens the current intellectual and policy debate concerning the historic transition now taking place from a narrow concern with purely economic factors to the dynamics of political and social change. It questions the assumption that the post-communist economies are all following the same path and that they will inevitably develop into replicas of economies in the advanced industrial West. It challenges accepted thinking and promotes the utilization of new methods and perspectives.

The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes

The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes PDF Author: Bálint Magyar
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633863708
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 840

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Book Description
Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.

The Soviet Past in the Post-Socialist Present

The Soviet Past in the Post-Socialist Present PDF Author: Melanie Ilic
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131739044X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This collection examines practical and ethical issues inherent in the application of oral history and memory studies to research about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Case studies highlight the importance of ethical good practice, including the reflexive interrogation of the interviewer and researcher, and aspects of gender and national identity. Researchers use oral history to analyze present-day recollections of the Soviet past, thereby extending our understanding beyond archival records, official rhetoric and popular mythology. Oral history explores individual life stories, but this has sometimes resulted in rather incomplete, incoherent, inconsistent or illogical narratives. Oral history, therefore, presents the researcher with a number of methodological and ethical dilemmas, including the interpretation of "silence" in biographical accounts. This collection links the discussion of oral history ethics with that of memory studies. Memories are shaped by factors that may be, simultaneously, both consecutive and disrupted. In written accounts and responses to interview questions, respondents sometimes display nostalgia for the Soviet past, or, conversely, may seek to de-mythologize the realities of Soviet rule. Case studies explore what to do when interview subjects and memoirists consciously, sub-consciously or unconsciously "forget" aspects of their own past, or themselves seek to take control of the research process.

Social Innovation

Social Innovation PDF Author: Carmen Ruiz Viñals
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136181806
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
'Social innovation’ can be simply defined as the new ideas and initiatives that make it possible to meet our society’s challenges in areas such as the environment, education, employment, culture, health and economic development. It is currently becoming increasingly important as a central concept for social theories and politics. This edited volume brings together interdisciplinary contributions which examine the complex interrelation between innovation and social problems, a link which has been surprisingly underexplored in academia and practice thus far. Social Innovation: New Forms of Organisation in Knowledge–Based Societies examines the mutual interdependence of innovation processes and social affairs. This interdependent relationship is characterised by a high degree of complexity which stems on the one hand from the true uncertain character of innovation and on the other hand from the different time scales in both domains. The alliance between innovation and social policy is highly relevant to the challenges which we are facing in the 21st century, such as resource scarcity, ageing societies and climate change. All of these issues demand substantial, continuous and sustainable structural change to maintain international competitiveness. Social change can only be understood by improving our knowledge about the impact of innovation processes in their co-evolutionary alliance with social evolution. The purpose of this book is to increase awareness of social participation among civil society organisations, SMEs, governments and research institutions, in order to promote economic, political and social changes that enhance collective welfare. This volume offers a key starting point for those looking to further explore this important realm of social research.

Industry Competitiveness: Digitalization, Management, and Integration

Industry Competitiveness: Digitalization, Management, and Integration PDF Author: Aleksei V. Bogoviz
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030804852
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 1031

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Book Description
This timely book presents a remarkable collection of chapters that provides readers with a coherent framework for understanding the factors driving industry competitiveness in contemporary conditions of economic digitalization and the ongoing transition to industry 4.0. Presenting contributions by scientists, engineers, and field experts, the book focuses on using advanced technologies and applications, building innovative and resilient systems in industrial enterprises, developing competitive management systems, creating competence networks, and enhancing integration to foster and sustain industry competitiveness. Both qualitative and quantitative studies are included, and this collection of diverse perspectives adds to the richness of the volume’s insights. Along with reviewing deep theoretical concepts and innovative approaches, the publication provides practical applications and technological solutions to real-world problems existing in industry. Recent advances in management theory and practice focused on the forces driving competition in industry are also extensively covered by the leading scholars and practitioners.