Rafał Wiśniewski - Böcker

This book examines how cross-border mobility across the eastern border of Poland with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, driven by external shocks, influences different territorial units.It offers a new understanding of the determinants, dynamics, spatial distribution and impact on such mobility in times of upheaval and uncertainty. It provides answers to the following questions: how do the different types of flows of people evolve under various external shocks?; to what extent is cross-border mobility resilient to these shocks in terms of the intensity of flows, their volume and the directions of linkages?; how do rapid and unexpected changes in cross-border mobility affect the performance of national, regional and local social and economic systems?; and to what extent and how does cross-border mobility as triggered by external shocks reinforce, deepen or alter existing spatial regularities and differentiations? Referring to current events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the book presents evidence of their implications on cross-border mobility, illuminating policy responses with a view to potential future crises. Further, it draws attention to the territorial aspects of changes in the patterns of cross-border population flows that provide a rationale for the territorialisation of relevant policies.Due to its interdisciplinary character, including issues in the scope of regional economics, human geography and international relations, the book is a timely, valid and unique publication, which will appeal to a broad group of specialists: scholars, researchers and policymakers, as well as decision-makers interested in the socio-economic and political situation in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly on the external border of the European Union.

This book highlights a broad range of modern information technology tools, techniques, investigations and open challenges, mainly with applications in systems research and computational physics. Divided into three major sections, it begins by presenting specialized calculation methods in the framework of data analysis and intelligent computing. In turn, the second section focuses on application aspects, mainly for systems research, while the final section investigates how various tasks in the basic disciplines—mathematics and physics—can be tackled with the aid of contemporary IT methods. The book gathers selected presentations from the 3rd Conference on Information Technology, Systems Research and Computational Physics (ITSRCP'18), which took place on 2–5 July 2018 in Krakow, Poland. The intended readership includes interdisciplinary scientists and practitioners pursuing research at the interfaces of information technology, systems research, and computational physics.

The way sociology frames the relation between formality and informality is not only complex and multifaceted, but has also evolved over time. This volume offers contributions by international authors that illustrate distinct types of theoretical framings and present various sites of inquiry. It proposes a typology comprising: the sociology of informally embedded formality, the sociology of formally embedded informality, the sociology of the interaction between formality and informality and the sociology of the emergence and transformation of formality and informality.

This book illustrates the applicability of the seminal and controversial metaphor of the «invisible hand» in modern sociological theory. It shows that sociologists have long been part of a field mainly associated with economists and political philosophers. Though unlike the framing that builds directly on Adam Smith, sociological theory focuses on undesirable and perverse outcomes. Furthermore, the sociological angle favors the explanation of invisible hand-like mechanisms as contingent upon social structures and broader processes. Thus, it goes beyond its classical formulation in terms of interdependence, interaction and aggregation of individual actions.This book gathers contributions of remarkable authors who are linked directly either with the invisible hand metaphor, with the spontaneous order phenomenon or with the unintended consequences issue and aims to describe the traditional and contemporary applicability of the sociological framing of the invisible hand for social sciences.

Cultural security is a concept that appeared relatively recently, but the issues within its scope – protection of identity and protection of cultural heritage – have accompanied humans almost since the dawn of time. In this monograph, an attempt is made to analyse cultural security taking into account various research perspectives and showing its multifaceted nature. This volume also constitutes a collection of case studies that focuses on the analysis of the state as the basic subject of cultural security. The authors attempted to define cultural security and the approach to it from various, often very different, research perspectives.