1 Introduction and Brief History

2 Usage Patterns – Types of Interaction in Social Media

 2.1 Citizens to Citizens (C2C) – Self-Coordination and Help

 2.2 Authorities to Citizens (A2C) – Crisis Communication and Public Alerting

 2.3 Citizens to Authorities (C2A) – Integration of Citizen-Generated Content

 2.4 Authorities to Authorities (A2A) – Inter- and Intra-Organizational Crisis Management

3 Role Patterns – Types of Users in Social Media

 3.1 Public Perspective – Emerging, Expanding, and Extending Groups and Virtual and Technical Communities

 3.2 Authority Perspective – Incident Management and Virtual Operations Support Teams

4 Information Patterns – Gathering and Analysis of Big Crisis Data

 4.1 Channels, Access, and Content in Social Media

 4.2 Analysis, Filtering, and Evaluation of Social Data

5 Perception Patterns – Views on Social Media

 5.1 Authorities’ Perception of Social Media

 5.2 Citizens’ Perception of Social Media

6 Future Directions

This chapter aims to offer certain concluding thoughts and remarks, based on the conceptual framework used and the case-studies presented throughout the book. More specifically, it critically reviews whether organisational resilience is an adequate conceptual tool to describe the modes of evolution of transnational private regulation: its birth, development, consolidation and dissolution. After reviewing certain definitional issues relating to transnational private regulation, the chapter explores the interaction between public and private authority as well as certain conceptual issues that arose from previous chapters when discussing the resilience of private rulemakers. The chapter concludes with certain directions for future research

The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) has evolved into a leading private rule-maker in the field of global food safety. To showcase the evolution of GFSI, we discuss the transitions in its governance structure, its activities and its framing as perceived through the lens of legitimacy. Building and maintaining legitimacy is of vital importance to GFSI. As a transnational private rule-maker, it cannot do without cooperation with other parties. GFSI’s evolution, we argue, has unfolded via processes of pluralisation of its constituents, increased transparency, ratcheting up of food standards’ quality, and globalisation of its benchmarking activities. Despite its growth and the inclusion of other participants in its governance, GFSI has not changed its roots: it remains an industry-led organisation relying on the participation of food safety experts of large food corporations. We will show that many of the changes the organisation has gone through can be interpreted as a response to crises, defined as fundamental objections and doubts voiced by external actors against GFSI or the practice of food certification more generally.

This introductory chapter outlines how children are active agents with motives and intentions, and what practitioners can do to support children’s learning, development and well-being in different age periods. It is therefore relevant for adults who work with children from birth to late adolescence, both within and beyond formal institutions. We also intend it to be useful to researchers and other professionals concerned with children and young people.

Our aim is to look forward toward children’s futures and how they can be supported to benefit from and contribute to what society has to offer. We argue that, by taking children’s intentions and emotions seriously, we can create an education that benefits children across the age periods. When children move through the institutional practices that society creates for them, they will learn, acquire new motives and develop. Therefore, the tools that we offer will allow carers and practitioners to tailor their support to children in different age periods. These ideas underpin a caring relational form of pedagogy, which is particularly but not only, important when children are dealing with changes in society’s expectations for them. These changes occur as they move, for example, between family, day-care or school, and when new challenges arise in familiar situations.

This chapter focuses on how children’s everyday knowledge when entering school is different from subject matter knowledge and argues that children’s emotional imagination and motive orientation is a foundation for their acquisition of subject matter knowledge. We discuss how imagination supports children’s generalizations of experience, so that it becomes possible for them to move between the general and the concrete in analyzing and using knowledge about the world. We also argue for a dialectical relationship between the culturally developed content the children’s encounters in their interactions in the world and the formation of mind. Within the cultural-historical approach to learning and development Davydov was the first to clarify how concepts, within a subject matter system, that are related through the historical development of its content may become the foundation for children learning in school. Supporting the development of theoretical thinking among school pupils serves both to develop thinking with subject matter knowledge, and support children’s person formation.

This chapter reflects upon the functioning of the EU and the way it can be evaluated by using the comparative politics approach. Recent crises have increased the EU’s involvement in many policy areas, begging questions as to where the EU now stands as a political organization. Moreover, the greater involvement of the EU in policymaking also brings to the fore important questions about the democratic quality of the EU. The chapter first highlights the hybrid nature of the EU, combining features of an international organization with those of a state. It next discusses the debate about the democratic deficit, concerning the extent to which citizens can determine the EU’s policies and keep the EU accountable. The chapter subsequently discusses the rule of law crisis and the commitment of all EU member states to safeguard fundamental rights and values common to all the EU member states and enumerated in the Treaties. Concerns about democratic backsliding in some EU member states have resulted in procedures against member states to address the risk of breaching these values. As these procedures are highly political, tackling such breaches in this way is fraught with difficulties.

The period 1919–1935 was a difficult one for Armstrongs and Vickers. With the end of the war domestic and international demand collapsed, and the firms were left with significant excess armament capacity and mounting financial problems. Armstrongs and Vickers responded by diversifying into other businesses, but with limited success. The contraction of the market led the two armaments firms to merge. The Great Depression further eroded military spending and dashed hopes of expanding exports. In the early to mid-1930s three things happened simultaneously: the international situation deteriorated, arms control proceeded but did not solve international insecurity, and there was growing public ire about the past behavior of armament firms. The subsequent Royal Commission into the armament firms cast Vickers in a very negative light and the firms were threatened with nationalization, something neither the firms nor the government wanted. The intervention of Sir Maurice Hankey in defense of the firms proved vital in heading off nationalization. The interwar period was therefore an extended existential crisis for Armstrongs and Vickers.

This chapter summarises the argument of the book. It has examined the EU’s competition regime and its application in times of crises. In each of these cases, the relaxation of the rules has been shown not to have assisted in solving the crises, and has exacerbated the effects of some crises. Further, as has been shown, the rules themselves do not provide an insurmountable barrier to the solution of ongoing crises (e.g. those associated with environmental and sustainability concerns). Rather, the problem is the need for competition authorities to provide additional guidance and to work with stakeholders in designing and implementing solutions. The work shows that its main lesson – that the introduction of further monopolisation into markets does not solve crises – has been established.

This chapter introduces the argument of the book. It sets out the problem, namely that in almost every crisis there are calls to relax the competition laws so that business can aid in the resolution of the crisis. This chapter challenges this claim. It does so by arguing that the aim of the competition regime is to increase social wealth, so that it can later be used or redistributed. The Introduction outlines the structure of the work, indicating what will be found in subsequent chapters.

Held’s contribution is a precise summary of the crisis of democracy that he and his co-authors have described at length in Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (2013) and Beyond Gridlock (2017). His argument is that the global system of representative democratic states is now locked into a vicious cycle (“gridlock”). While it was initially a virtuous system after World War II, it produced a set of processes that transformed democratic globalization into a vicious system. He gives four reasons for this. The system now undermines democratic cooperation and freezes problem-solving capacity. He describes this gridlocked system in terms of four self-reinforcing stages of non-cooperation. This is a “crisis of democracy, as the politics of compromise and accommodation gives way to populism and authoritarianism.” In the conclusion, he cautions that we are heading down a path that is similar in several respects to the 1930s. He does not discuss ways forward in this brief paper, but he does so in Beyond Gridlock.