Heir to a noble Scottish house in the mid 18th century, the Master is a charming, clever, and resourceful villain whose daring but ill-advised schemes first alienate his patrimony and at last cost him his life. His younger brother, sweet-tempered and good but dull and unpopular, suffers at the Master's hands until his patience and courage win him limited ascendancy, but he is at last consumed with hatred and driven to madness and death by the strain of his many sufferings. The story is tol...

Nanotechnology has been the subject of extensive ‘assessment hype,’ unlike any previous field of research and development. A multiplicity of stakeholders have started to analyze the implications of nanotechnology: Technology assessment institutions around the world, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, re-insurance companies, and academics from science and technology studies and applied ethics have turned their attention to this growing field’s implications. In the course of these ...

Who owns your genes? What does climate science imply for policy? Do corporations conduct honest research? Should we teach intelligent design? Humans are creating a new world through science. The kind of world we are creating will not simply be decided by expanding scientific knowledge, but will depend on views about good and bad, right and wrong. These visions, in turn, depend on critical thinking, cogent argument and informed judgement. In this book, Adam Briggle and Carl Mitcham help rea...

The entrepreneur has been neglected over the years in formal economic theorizing. Previously there has been only eclectic theories such as human capital theory and network dynamics which discuss certain perspectives of entrepreneurial behaviour. This insightful book closes this gap in entrepreneurship literature. Inspired by modern physics, author Thomas Grebel brings together an evolutionary methodology, along the way implicating quantum, graph, and percolation theory.Here, Grebel...

Re-Thinking Science presents an account of the dynamic relationship between society and science. Despite the mounting evidence of a much closer, interactive relationship between society and science, current debate still seems to turn on the need to maintain a 'line' to demarcate them. The view persists that there is a one-way communication flow from science to society - with scant attention given to the ways in which society communicates with science.The authors argue that...

‘Transgovernance: Advancing Sustainability Governance’ analyses the question what recent and ongoing changes in the relations between politics, science and media – together characterized as the emergence of a knowledge democracy – may imply for governance for sustainable development, on global and other levels of societal decision making, and the other way around: How can the discussion on sustainable development contribute to a knowledge democracy? How can concepts such as second modernit...

Society is complicated. But this book argues that this does not place it beyond the reach of a science that can help to explain and perhaps even to predict social behaviour. As a system made up of many interacting agents – people, groups, institutions and governments, as well as physical and technological structures such as roads and computer networks – society can be regarded as a complex system. In recent years, scientists have made great progress in understanding how such complex system...

Despite the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, a growing number of countries are interested in expanding or introducing nuclear energy. However, nuclear energy production and nuclear waste disposal give rise to pressing ethical questions that society needs to face. This book takes up this challenge with essays by an international team of scholars focusing on the key issues of risk, justice, and democracy. The essays consider a range of ethical issues, including radio...

The world around us is continually being shaped by science, and by society’s relationship to it. In recent years sociologists have been increasingly preoccupied with the latter, and now in this fascinating book, Massimiano Bucchi provides a brief introduction to this topical issue.Bucchi provides clear and unassuming summaries of all the major theoretical positions within the sociology of science, illustrated with many fascinating examples. Theories covered include Thomas Kuhn's th...

Science occupies an ambiguous space in contemporary society. Scientific research is championed in relation to tackling environmental issues and diseases such as cancer and dementia, and science has made important contributions to today’s knowledge economies and knowledge societies. And yet science is considered by many to be remote, and even dangerous. It seems that as we have more science, we have less understanding of what science actually is.The new edition of this popular text ...

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have profoundly changed many aspects of life, including the nature of entertainment, work, communication, education, healthcare, industrial production and business, social relations and conflicts. They have had a radical and widespread impact on our moral lives and hence on contemporary ethical debates. The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics, first published in 2010, provides an ambitious and authoritative introduction to...

Communicating science and technology is a high priority of many research and policy institutions, a concern of many other private and public bodies, and an established subject of training and education. In the past few decades, the field has developed and expanded significantly, both in terms of professional practice, and in terms of research and reflection. At the same time, particularly in recent years, interactions between science and society have become a topic of heated public and pol...