Series

Health communication is a field of research which deals with the social conditions, consequences and significance of communication that is related and relevant to health, both intentional and unintentional, interpersonal, media-related and public. The field of health communication, which emerged in Britain and the US several decades ago, has established itself in German-speaking countries in recent years and yielded a vast number of studies on the interplay between health, illness and communication. The series contains up-to-date studies in German or English which are devoted to this subject area and which consider communication and health from a communication studies perspective.

This series of publications deals with all kinds of social anthropological relationships and conflicts in different societies and types of society. For example, this can encompass examining family relationships, social differences and structures, and power relations and conflicts between ethnic groups, big men and the societies they belong to. The studies in the series analyse concepts such as kinship, castes and ‘ethnoclasses’ (socio-cultural groups which in general have a low social status and which display ethnic characteristics that distinguish them as immigrants or descendants of immigrants) in the same critical depth as gender and nation building. It also welcomes studies from a variety of related fields such as ethnology, cultural studies and social geography, along with works written in different languages.

The series of publications entitled “Ethik in den Sozialwissenschaften” (Ethics in Social Science) provides a forum for academic contributions to the debate on the current moral problems affecting social structures and systems. From an ethical point of view, this series focuses on addressing the question of what ef-fects social institutions and regimes have on human dignity and the welfare of communities. It discusses moral dilemmas so as to highlight general acceptable solutions to them. It takes up the challenge of using normative theories to ana-lyse sociological problems in order to develop ethical criteria for developing operable solutions to them. As a result, the series welcomes contributions from the entire range of subjects related to social science and ethics. Its goal is to constructively criticise structural contexts to which no satisfactory solutions have been found so far.

Our healthcare system is being confronted with fundamental moral and political challenges which affect its basic focus and character, such as persistent and controversial discussions on approaches to health and illness, matters of principle related to fairness and solidarity, medical utopias and dystopias, corruption and ethical questions, the debate about professional identity and commercialization, and the relationship between economics and medicine, to name but a few. This interdisciplinary series of publications encourages the reader to consider fundamental issues related to healthcare. It transcends not only basic medical ethics but also legal, political and economic issues.

The series of “Now Media” publications offers igniting insights into innovative media formats. The series specialises on journalism, marketing and merchandising. All “Now Media” products reflect latest trends based on the digital marriage of technology and content: liquid, interactive, prosumer-oriented, cloud-based, in real-time or on demand. The series is designed for a multilingual and global audience and reaches out to entrepreneurs, students and scientists as well as to all interested users.

Analysing economic phenomena from a sociological perspective poses a number of transdisciplinary challenges which are both highly topical and relevant. This means that the complementary research fields of economic sociology and political economics are among the most dynamic areas of the social sciences in both theoretical and empirical terms. Economic sociology offers analytical perspectives on the logic of economic activity and the way it is embedded into social structures, which are arranged in a continuum of market relations, networks, organisational hierarchies and other coordinating bodies. Research papers from this field therefore deal with a vast array of subjects, ranging from entrepreneurship, innovation and organisation in the workplace to monetary economics and financial markets. Political economics complements and supplements economic sociology’s focus on action by taking institutional interaction between economic and political systems into consideration and by treating the state’s involvement in the organisation of economic processes as particularly significant. In this respect, the issue of variations in capitalist market economies in the context of globalisation assumes a central role. The series of publications entitled “Wirtschaftssoziologie und Politische Ökonomie” (Economic Sociology and Political Economics) therefore provides a forum for theoretical and empirical works from these research areas with no thematic restrictions.

During the more recent past much has happened on the African continent regarding democratic reform, good governance, human rights protection and the rule of law. On the way to more societal, political and legal stability various countries in Africa are still entangled in processes of legal and institutional reform, especially in the areas of constitutional law, the law relating to the organisation of the state, electoral law, laws regulating political parties, criminal law, criminal procedure, civil law, civil procedure, administrative law and administrative procedure. In order to accommodate the development in other African countries, the scope of the renowned legal series “Law and Constitution in South Africa” has been geographically expanded. Under the new title “Law and Constitution in Africa” the series offers a platform enhancing the comparative law discourse between Africa and Europe. This not only promotes good international relations but shall also contribute to a better mutual understanding and the intellectual exchange between law faculties on both continents. It is expected to foster and propel on-going and future legal and judicial reform processes. The series’ focus lies on high quality postgraduate, doctoral, postdoctoral dissertations and other scientific work in English and German language relevant to the areas of public, private and economic law.

The series of publications entitled “Freiburger Schriften zur Finanzwissenschaft und Wirtschaftspolitik” (“Freiburg Publications on Finance and Economic Policy”) publishes papers from the pre-eminent fields of economics research, which are also rich in tradition, at the University of Freiburg. The array of subjects which these analyses address ranges from the pension system and employment policy, education policy, demography, European and international governance, fiscal sustainability, federalism, healthcare policy, real estate economics, migration, tax and performance-based competition, the causes and effects of transnational conflicts, violence, crime, terror and corruption to behavioural economics and satisfaction research. These studies approach problems from both a theoretical perspective as well as using a selection of econometric, experimental or qualitative research methods. What links them is that they all address both political and social as well as topical academic issues. Their authors’ common, overarching goal is to provide well-founded recommendations on using their findings in politico-economic consulting and to help implement them.