Agricultural Technology & Environmental Technology

This series of publications explores issues arising at the point where the media and education overlap. Its individual volumes examine the forms the media can take and what it offers with a view to reflecting their relevance to socialisation, education and upbringing. The series welcomes contributions from a variety of fields written in different languages.

Philosophy thrives on debate, namely justified differences of opinion on assertions, views and theories. The argumentative nature of philosophy also characterises the idea behind this series of publications: it presents critical appraisals of important new studies from the field of philosophy and those related to it by renowned experts in direct discussion with their authors. A short introduction by the author opens each debate, which is then followed by the critics’ essays. Subsequently, the author responds in detail to the arguments put forward in the essays. The series is interdisciplinary and is not dedicated to any particular school of thought; the works published in it are chosen according to their originality and the relevance of their subjects.

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.