Luk van Langenhove Knihy

Textbook on regionalism and its role in a global marketplace, ideal for students of IR and globalisation.

This is a book about the necessities and possibilities of innovations in the social sciences in order to realize societal changes. The natural sciences became the dominant model for the social sciences, resulting in positivism as ideology and in the organizational structuring of the social sciences into disciplines. In order to overcome the problems of scientism, a shift to a radical new ontological framework is necessary. In parallel, it is necessary to introduce participative research designs, move concepts and theories from one discipline to another and focus upon developing worldviews. Innovations in the social sciences are possible and necessary. But for these to happen, new societal pressures and demands will have to be present. Changing the social sciences is not a voluntary process that can be undertaken by social scientists alone.

In this title Luk Van Langenhove advances the concept of region building as an alternative to the construction of regions. He brings together, under one conceptual framework, different processes and concepts such as regional integration, federalism, and separatism and refines the social constructionist view on regions.