Cooperative companies form part of the social economy (a third economic sector beyond the private and public spheres that embraces community, voluntary, and nonprofit activities). Commercial companies distribute their surpluses in relation to the capital contributions of shareholders, while cooperatives do so according to the cooperative activity carried out by their members; in short, in a cooperative capital is subordinate to work. The cooperative spirit has been an important feature of Basque society, from the traditional auzo-lan (literally, “neighborhood work”) to the development of major cooperative companies like Alfa, Fagor, and ultimately Mondragon, the largest cooperative in the world and a major supplier of products and services not only to Basques, but also nationally and internationally. Today Basque cooperatives encompass all economic areas from credit unions to agricultural, housing, consumer, and transportation. This work focuses on the changes and challenges faced by the social economy in general and Basque cooperatives in particular in light of the crisis of the welfare state, the growth of neoliberal doctrines and greater privatization, and most recently of all, the global financial crisis. The book is divided into three parts: Part 1 analyzes the origins, values, and culture of Basque cooperativism. Part 2 focuses on innovation in and the management system of Basque cooperatives as a source of competitive advantage vis-à-vis traditional corporations. Finally, part 3 addresses the response of Basque cooperatives to globalization in general and the current global financial crisis in particular.

This book investigates the contexts and terrain of Basque social innovation. It begins with the premise that knowledge is mobile, fluid, unstable, and never static. Human networks are primarily networks of knowledge and information transfer with the ability to sustain interactive processes of learning and innovation.

This is an introduction to the history of languages, from the distant past to a glimpse at what languages may be like in the distant future. It looks at how languages arise, change, and ultimately vanish, and what lies behind their different destinies. What happens to languages, he argues, has to do with what happens to the people who use them, and what happens to people, individually and collectively, is affected by the languages they speak.

The book opens by examining what the languages are the hunter-gatherers might have spoken and the changes to language that took place when agriculture made settled communities possible. It then looks at the effects of the invention of writing, the formation of empires, the spread of religions, and the recent dominance of world powers, and shows how these relate to great changes in the use of languages. Tore Janson discusses the appearance of new languages, the reasons why some languages spread and others die, considers whether similar cyclical processes are found at different times and places, and examines the causes of internal changes in languages and dialects.

The book ranges widely among the world's languages and mixes thematic chapters on general processes of change with accounts of specific languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Greek, and English.
 

This is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the methods researchers use to study child language, written by experienced scholars in the study of language development.
• Presents a comprehensive survey of laboratory and naturalistic techniques used in the study of different domains of language, age ranges, and populations, and explains the questions addressed by each technique
• Presents new research methods, such as the use of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to study the activity of the brain
• Expands on more traditional research methods such as collection, transcription, and coding of speech samples that have been transformed by new hardware and software
 

Research Methods in Second Language Acquisition: A Practical Guideis an informative guide to research design and methodology for graduate students and scholars. Each chapter of this volume offers background, step-by-step guidance, and relevant studies to create comprehensive coverage of each method.
• Includes chapters by expert scholars on an array of topics, including second language writing and reading, meta-analyses, research replication, qualitative data collection and analysis, and more
• Includes feature boxes in each chapter highlighting relevant research studies, discussion questions and suggested further readings
• Utilizes research methods and tools from varied fields of study including education, linguistics, psychology, and sociology
 

This book includes recent and compelling data of successful bi/multilingual education policy, planning and delivery in Africa, South and South-East Asia, Latin and North America, accompanied by surprisingly modest costs and investment. It brings new, long-awaited and system-wide data to the international theory of bi/multilingual education. The richly textured evidence has the potential to influence educational debates for the next decade and beyond. This is particularly because low-cost cum high-return education, with relevance in “developing” and “developed” contexts, is of particular interest during the current downturn in the global economy. The volume shows successful case-studies of bi/multilingual education at work amongst Indigenous and minority linguistic communities in North America, Peru, Nepal, India, South-East Asia, Burkina Faso; and across the entire education system of Ethiopia. The volume also includes contemporary and high cost cum low return challenges to multilingual education in case-studies fromMorocco and Ethiopia. This is the first time that it has been possible to compare student achievement in different system-wide bi/multilingual models of education. Simultaneously, it is also the first time that it has been possible to focus on what research and expertise in low-income countries and contexts can contribute to the international field of bi/multilingual education. The implementation of linguistically diverse education as discussed in this volume, therefore, has significance for both low-income countries and dominant world powers experiencing unprecedented in-migration and socio-cultural diversity.

This volume addresses the burgeoning need for language policy and language planning for the sign languages used by deaf people. Author Timothy Reagan writes for two audiences in his new book, those who know language policy and language planning but not the Deaf World, and those well-versed in the Deaf cultural community but unfamiliar with language planning studies. To begin, Chapter 1 presents an overview of the Deaf World and a brief introduction to sign language in general. The second chapter outlines a broad overview of language policy and language planning studies both as an academic discipline and an applied type of social engineering.
In Chapter 3, Reagan examines the specifics of American Sign Language in terms of the history of language policy and planning from the nineteenth century to the post-Congress of Milan period and its form in recent years. The fourth chapter critically examines the creation of manual codes used in deaf education in the U.S. and elsewhere. Chapter 5 analyzes language policy and planning in settings around the world, and the final chapter recommends steps and methods for future language policy and planning efforts for sign languages. The cohesive rationale offered in Language Policy and Planning for Sign Languages will prove to be invaluable to all administrators and educators working with populations that use sign languages.
 

Monolingualism-the idea that having just one language is the norm is only a recent invention, dating to late-eighteenth-century Europe. Yet it has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this monolingual paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. As a result of this view, writing in anything but one's "mother tongue" has come to be seen as an aberration.

Beyond the Mother Tongue demonstrates the impact of this monolingual paradigm on literature and culture but also charts incipient moves beyond it. Because newer multilingual forms and practices exist in tension with the paradigm, which alternately obscures, pathologizes, or exoticizes them, this book argues that they can best be understood as "postmonolingual" that is, as marked by the continuing force of monolingualism.

Focused on canonical and minority writers working in German in the twentieth century, Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned "mother tongue" about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); writing by literally translating from the "mother tongue" into another language (Emine Sevgi �zdamar); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu). Through these analyses, Beyond the Mother Tongue suggests that the dimensions of gender, kinship, and affect encoded in the "mother tongue" are crucial to the persistence of monolingualism and the challenge of multilingualism
 

Aquest llibre recull diverses propostes dels membres del GELA i d’alguns col•laboradors que en els darrers anys han treballat especialment en l’àmbit de l’acollida i en el paper que hi fa la llengua.