Tamara Besednjak Valič – författare

The accelerating convergence of digital transformation and sustainability represents one of the most profound structural changes in contemporary Europe. This scientific monograph examines how Industry 4.0 technologies—artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, advanced data systems, and smart manufacturing—can be strategically embedded within the European Union’s sustainability framework.Bringing together perspectives from political economy, circular economy theory, innovation studies, and socio-economic analysis, the book explores important themes such as the European Green Deal and climate-neutrality targets, the role of Industry 4.0 in enabling sustainable industrial transformation, the circular economy approaches and best practices in Slovenia, the socio-economic implications of the green transition and the transformative potential of Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs).Through an interdisciplinary approach, the authors demonstrate that technological innovation alone is insufficient. Sustainable Industry 4.0 requires coordinated governance, social investment mechanisms, and regionally differentiated strategies to ensure that the green transition is both environmentally effective and socially inclusive.This monograph contributes to ongoing academic and policy debates on digitalisation, sustainability, and Europe’s strategic future.

The volume offers a unique and comprehensive reflection on the role of sociology and sociologists in the transformation of post-socialist Eastern European societies. It provides detailed insight on the status of sociology in Eastern Europe, its institutional development, specifics of national sociological traditions, the controversial and ambiguous relationship with the political system and, importantly, state-of-the-art knowledge about the role of sociology as a discipline and sociologists as academics, educators, public intellectuals, experts, politicians, or civil society activists in three decades of transformation. The volume follows a cultural political economy approach and provides a series of national case studies that analyse the role of sociology in re-imagining Eastern European societies. This topical volume is of interest to a wide, interdisciplinary readership in the social sciences, especially students and researchers working on Eastern Europe and on post-socialist societies.

The volume offers a unique and comprehensive reflection on the role of sociology and sociologists in the transformation of post-socialist Eastern European societies. It provides detailed insight on the status of sociology in Eastern Europe, its institutional development, specifics of national sociological traditions, the controversial and ambiguous relationship with the political system and, importantly, state-of-the-art knowledge about the role of sociology as a discipline and sociologists as academics, educators, public intellectuals, experts, politicians, or civil society activists in three decades of transformation. The volume follows a cultural political economy approach and provides a series of national case studies that analyse the role of sociology in re-imagining Eastern European societies. This topical volume is of interest to a wide, interdisciplinary readership in the social sciences, especially students and researchers working on Eastern Europe and on post-socialist societies.

The book discusses the complex and issues of the implementation of the EU’s grandstrategies. The European Union implementation deficit has become proverbial failure.While the impact of Europe 2020 has yet to be researched in greater detail, existingwork reveals substantial differences in implementation among the Member States,especially along the divisions between North and West on one hand and East andSouth on the other. Using the Cultural Political Economy as the theoretical background,the central focus of our interest is the study of possibilities and limitationsof strategic steering of the economic development in the context of a comprehensivesocietal development, such as the Europe 2020 intention of achieving ‘smart, inclusiveand sustainable growth’.