Remote working – strongly widespread during the covid-19 pandemic –is today one of the main forms of innovation in the world of work. As always, within innovation phenomena we have static elements, from the past, and dynamic elements, looking to change the status quo. Consequently, the evaluation of remote work may be either conservative or innovative. Remote work can be considered as a simple re-proposition of the Fordist-Taylorist Enterprise that does not actually change the characteristics of employment as a not democratic relationship involving the worker submission to the employer managerial, control and disciplinary power. On the other hand, remote work can be recognized as the symptom of a broader cultural, organizational and process change in the firm, allowing the worker to conquer new spaces of freedom and autonomy, which not only allow for a new balance in the relationship between work and life, but also redefine both the factual and juridical connotations of subordination. This chapter analyzes this second perspective and, on the basis of legislation and collective bargaining, tries to define the elements of change in the concept and morphology of subordination within the employment relationship.

This chapter considers reductionism, a major aspect of neuroscience research. I consider reductionist claims that we can only understand nervous systems from knowledge of their component parts. I then consider reductionist approaches and what we have learnt by following them, highlighting that a complete reductionist account of any nervous system region hasn’t been and is probably impossible to achieve. I then discuss decomposable hierarchical and non-decomposable heterarchical systems, and how relational aspects suggest we cannot understand the latter systems from cataloguing their individual components. I then discuss two effects that have received little attention despite being known for decades – volume transmission and ephaptic signalling – that highlight the need to consider component parts in relation to the whole system. I finish by discussing non-reductionist views, equipotentiality, cybernetics, the holonomic brain and embodied cognition, highlighting, as many have in the past, that debating between reductionist and non-reductionist approaches is a false dichotomy.

Why have regional organizations become authorities over human rights and international intervention, and what explains the differences in regional authority across different regions? Why did leaders in some parts of the Global South go from rejecting any interference to arguing for the central role of regional organizations in international interference? This chapter introduces the central questions addressed by this book and provides an overview of its core argument, focusing on the creation of new regional authority at one important moment: the emergence of regional organizations as authorities over human rights. This was the first time when leaders in the Global South changed from arguing for complete non-interference to arguing that legitimate interference should be carried out by or with the involvement of regional organizations. They did so as a strategy of subtle resistance to new challenges to self-determination, in the form of economic enforcement of human rights by Western governments. In regions targeted by this enforcement, leaders responded by establishing their regional organizations as authorities over human rights, accepting regional interference for the first time.

We use recent theories of the politics of economic development and of economic interdependence and war to construct an analytic narrative of the events covered in this volume.  We trace the end of China’s hegemony, and the instability that attended it, to the different policies the region’s states chose toward commerce, development, and reform.  States that pursued modernization gained wealth and power relative to those that did not.  These choices had fateful consequences for the regional balance of power and encouraged modernized upstarts to overthrow the traditional order.  A more dynamic order arose as great powers competed to impose a new hegemony or at least a new stability, forming coalitions with the region’s other states and offering new ideologies to legitimize their rule.  While existing theories shed light on the evolution of East Asian order, our consideration also reveals important gaps in explanation that merit further investigation.

The early development of the indulgence system reinforced the papacy’s hierarchical position without significantly bringing it money or power over others.

This chapter revisits Charles Tilly’s bellicist theory of state-building, arguing that while war is a focal point, a broader array of external factors plays a crucial role in shaping developmental paths. It emphasizes the importance of hierarchical relationships within the international system in understanding state-building processes. The chapter examines foreign-imposed state-building and argues that the effectiveness of external state-building efforts depends on the goals and authority of external actors. It concludes that incorporating hierarchy is essential for a comprehensive explanation of state-building.

This chapter introduces the book’s main argument that American economic hierarchy has enhanced property rights and state capacity in partner states over the past forty years, challenging the conventional view that United States’ involvement undermines state-building. It outlines the conceptual framework, focusing on extractive capacity and hierarchy as key concepts. The chapter previews the argument, highlights the book’s contributions to system-level theories, state-building research, and international development literature, and outlines the plan for the book.

Chapter 13 addresses a second myth regarding tenure’s effects on individual faculty incentives, namely, that tenure facilitates predatory behavior. The chapter focuses on sexual misconduct and draws on available research regarding its prevalence inside and outside academia – as well as inside and outside the United States – to show that severe power disparities, rather than tenure itself, are most likely responsible for high misconduct rates in academia.

The introductory chapter details what is gained by using the concept of social role when studying power relations in Late Antiquity and how it ties in well with ancient ideas about why people act in the way they do. It shows how Late Antique thought and practice conceptualized social hierarchies in moral terms and argues that precisely the expectation that social and moral hierarchies coincide injects the dynamism in social interactions that this book chronicles. It also underscores that society was conceived of as held together by justice and shows how this was intertwined with hierarchical conceptions of society and the cosmos.

Chapter 2 frames the book, drawing on structuration theory and ontological security studies to provide its theoretical underpinnings. This chapter begins by exploring the claims of positive influences of different tools found in the transitional justice project on ensuring non-recurrence of conflict. It proposes that while both scholars and practitioners remain unsure of what ‘works’ for a meaningful ‘Never Again’, they remain faithful that something does and that some transitional justice is better than none. The chapter then delineates some common threads based on these multiple promises of non-recurrence to reflect on the characteristics of transitional justice as a structure. Finally, the chapter theoretically complicates the existing position of non-recurrence in transitional justice scholarship by asking questions about temporality, security, and the purpose of transitional justice as a global project. In doing so, it provides a new outlook on the ontological security/transitional justice nexus and discusses where non-recurrence fits within it.

Chapter 4 is the first of the three chapters that draw on interviews, observations, and life stories from Bosnia and Herzegovina to narrate a story about what ‘Never Again’ means for the people in this country and formulate a claim about transitional justice’s complicity in the construction of conflict recurrence anxieties. This chapter proposes that the lack of state-sponsored, state-wide truth recovery and a national dialogue about the characteristics, dynamics, and consequences of the war creates anxieties about potential conflict repetition. It then demonstrates how the global project of transitional justice is complicit in creating and sustaining these anxieties. In particular, the chapter shows how the normative hierarchy of transitional justice and the positioning of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a key source of the historical status quo helped enhance the building of multiple, competing, and often parallel biographical narratives about the war that prolong anxieties about potential conflict recurrence.

International legitimacy established by international law is related to the fundamental principles of international law. Through these principles and their relations, international law expresses and projects legitimacy internationally. In the process, it establishes a hierarchy of rights holding and rights holders. This chapter focuses on three aspects of this situation. First, it examines the key principles or values of international law and indicates how each of them represents a form and part of legitimacy and how, as a whole, they outline an overall conception of legitimacy at the international level. Second, it analyzes the relations of compatibility, competition, and hierarchy that exist among them. Third, it shows that the fundamental principles and their relations translate into a ranking and hierarchy of rights holding and rights holders—and argues that the international top rights holder, the state, plays a central role in the changes that can affect this ranking/hierarchy.

Even as a romantic conception of innovation – emphasizing its uncertain and serendipitous nature, for instance – might suggest that it is inherently hard to manage, the brute fact of the matter is that most innovation, in most organizations, is managed. In this chapter, we look into what happens to innovation when it is subjected to management, paying particular attention to the unintended and second-order consequences of those efforts to manage. Management can surely “get things under control,” but the interesting questions relate to what happens next, to what also happens when things do get under control. The first three readings provide three different angles on that. In the first, we read about a pretty neutral-looking management technique and think through why it might not be so neutral. In the second, we are shown how innocuous things like accounting numbers can drive innovation strategies. In the third, we are introduced to the dynamics of hidden innovation projects and think about what formal management actually gets to manage and the limits of managerial influence. The final reading zooms out and asks what happens when organizations actually lean into the unmanageability of innovation and attempt to be less organized and to manage innovation less.

The book has shown that, like any other concept, fiṭra has a complex history. And like any concept with a lively history, fiṭra needs to be interpreted. The philosophers’ ethics and politics, and particularly their commitment to intellectual, social, and political hierarchies, do not map onto our ethics or politics. However, that does not mean that their engagement with fiṭra is not crucial in the current moment. Working through fiṭra among the philosophers creates tensions – among them, and between them and other Islamic interpreters such as the scriptural commentators. In these tensions the ethical work lies, opening space for both a more robust conception of Islamic intellectual history and more informed debates in the present. The possibilities of what it means to be human in Islamic thought are so much more diverse and contextual and signal that if one of our most foundational concepts, human nature, is under contestation, then so is our moral life. In fact, this contestation is necessary, deeply human, and traditional.