Think about a relationship you have with somebody in your class or workplace. Your initial relationship might be built upon what you know about that person, your shared values and common beliefs – maybe even their personal appearance. The strength of that relationship will change as soon as you start to interact with them. A friendly smile, cheerful greeting and some positive small talk will probably make you think that you might want to get to know this person a little more. Conversely, if you feel ignored, disliked or realise that you value different things, you will probably avoid them in the future. This is what we refer to in this text as student engagement – the relationship that is formed and reformed between students and education.

This chapter explores the different types of illicit and informal economy in the two migrant communities and examines why and how Sanhe gods get involved in the gray economy. It also discusses state intervention in the communities through surveillance, raids, and compaigns as well as through gentrification projects. It ends with a discussion on Sanhe gods’ friendships in the community.

This chapter addresses some of the scientific, philosophical and theological arguments brought to bear on the debates surrounding human–robot relationships. Noting that we define robots through our relationships with them, it shows how factors such as emotion and agency can indicate things such as a theory of mind that condition users to expect reciprocal relationships that model a sense of partnership. These factors are important in ‘lovotics’, or a trend in social robotics to produce robots that people want to develop relationships with. Such relationships, however, at least given current capabilities in robotics, will always fall short of conditioned expectations because robots, rather than being full partners, are largely reducible to the self or user. The chapter introduces the notions of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism to demonstrate these critiques, and then moves on to consider alternative figurations of relationships – drawing in particular on articulations of relationality – that may enable us to rethink how we image and imagine robots.

This chapter lays further conceptual foundation for the book’s proposed trust-based framework. It applies to the citizen-government relationship what I call the ‘network conception of trust’ from the social science scholarship. In doing so, it makes a claim of how trust functions in the social rights context. According to this conception, trust arises in, and depends on, complex structures or networks of relationships. Applying this conception to the citizen-government relationship, the chapter argues that in contemporary democracies, the citizen-government relationship arises in a network of relationships and that trust in the citizen-government relationship depends on the relationships that constitute the network – including, importantly, the relationship between citizens and the courts that arises out of the adjudication of social rights by courts. This argument adds nuance to our understanding of trust and lays foundation for my contention in Chapter 4 that the courts, via their enforcement of social rights, can foster citizens’ trust in the elected branches.

This chapter lays the necessary conceptual foundation for the book’s proposed trust-based framework. It draws on theoretical and empirical scholarship on trust to offer a conceptualisation of trust in the social rights context. It first envisages trust as relational, meaning that trust may only arise in a relationship that contains three elements: control, discretion/uncertainty and vulnerability (a ‘trust relationship’). Secondly, it defines trust in a trust relationship as a set of three expectations held by a truster about a trustee: an expectation that the trustee will exercise goodwill towards the truster (‘expectation of goodwill’); an expectation that the trustee will exercise competence towards the truster (‘expectation of competence’); and an expectation that the trustee will fulfil her fiduciary responsibility (if any) to the truster (‘expectation of fiduciary responsibility’). The chapter then applies this conceptualisation to the relationship between citizens and the elected branches of government with respect to social rights (the ‘citizen-government relationship’), characterising it as a trust relationship and defining trust in it.

This conclusion summarises the arguments presented in the chapters in Parts I, II and III. It also explores some of the implications of the reappraisal of ECHR Article 9 and the related ECtHR jurisprudence in this book for academics and legal practitioners alike.

Theoretical suppositions of business crisis in the literature are largely drawn from studies conducted in North America and Western Europe. Chapter 6, on the other hand, examines a Chinese approach to crisis. Based on the notion of paradoxical integration, this approach informs not only crisis management in China and East Asia, but potentially has general application. In this conceptualization, crisis is not necessarily treated as a consequence of discord or disruption, but rather is understood as an aspect or phase of an unfolding process, even in the most difficult circumstances. This approach, then, offers a course toward future business success even in the face of significant loss, without suffering desperation or self-destruction. Three strategies which entrepreneurs adopt to crisis are examined in the chapter, namely, the combination of the old with the new, or path dependence; second, seeking facilitating relationships with other members of a business community, or guanxi accommodation; and finally, reordering priorities and available resources, including familial and personal, or self-reflexivity.

Chapter 5 explores key aspects of the gendered dichotomy assumed to underlie entrepreneurial endeavour and achievement. Entrepreneurial success is predominantly understood in gendered terms as a consequence of qualities associated with masculinity while women are assumed to play supportive roles in business and enterprise. Even though successful female entrepreneurs are increasingly acknowledged, their ability to perform as business leaders is typically associated with masculine ideals of success, through an accomplishment of female imitations of masculinity. Chapter 4 challenges such persistent dichotomic approaches to gender in entrepreneurship. It is shown on the basis of data drawn from China’s new generation of entrepreneurs that women and men strategically display gender in the company and in the marketplace, in a manner that will maximize growth and profit for their firms. These women and men are not constrained by stereotyped gender ideals but rather utilize existing imagery and norms, and, when necessary, create new ones in doing business. In addition, the involvement of grandparents in supporting their daughters and daughters-in-law who are in business, wholly overlooked in consideration of female entrepreneurs, constitutes a hidden factor in the interplay of constructions of gender, family, and business experienced by female entrepreneurs in China.

Although the primary aim of Just as Deadly is to present information on female serial killers (FSKs), the author discusses a comparison of FSKs and male serial killers (MSKs) to illustrate the dramatic differences between their crimes. As described in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, the author and her team investigated sex differences in serial murder through an evolutionary psychological lens but also collected data on other background and mental health variables, as empirical comparisons of FSKs and MSKs are virtually nonexistent in the scientific literature. Data collected from 55 MSKs and 55 FSKs revealed sex differences in relationship status, educational attainment, and socioeconomic status. Moreover, nearly 90% of MSKs and 43% of FSKs had reported mental health issues. These results show that MSKs have more than a fourfold chance of having a mental illness compared to the population and are twice as likely as FSKs to have documented issues. The cases of MSKs Ed Gein and John Wayne Gacy describe mental illness issues and are used to demonstrate drastic differences in serial murder modus operandi and victims.

Disability of varying kinds permeates Wallace’s writing, which persistently displayed varying degrees of emotional, cognitive, physical or metaphysical disability. Although having no discernible interest in disabilities studies as an academic discipline, Wallace’s writing evidences a persistent conception that persons are definitionally disabled by the motor, volitional and agentive impediments posed by the simple but universal fact of embodiment, with which, he argues, we all “crave” to be “reconciled.” Employing various approaches from phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl) to disabilities studies (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Lennard J. Davis), this chapter offers illustrative examples of the three primary forms of atypicality in Wallace’s works: anomalous bodies, cognitive disability, and textual malformation. Through these, this chapter provides a context of disability within which Wallace’s works are situated and which enables insights into his wider literary and humanistic concerns.

Researchers have spent decades investigating factors in attraction; biological variables, cultural norms, and social pressures have all had their time in the spotlight. Humans are complicated animals and each of these realms have shown measurable effects. However, evolutionary approaches provide a unifying theory that subsumes and explains each of these factors and how they interact to create intricate yet predictable patterns in human mating behavior. In this chapter, we give a brief summary of major factors influencing attractiveness as perceived by men, including biological factors such as age and ovulatory status but also social factors such as exposure to highly attractive, or simply novel, women. Understanding how attractiveness can vary over time and within relationships can be useful, not only to research but also in applied clinical fields such as couples’ and marital therapy.

Building on the specification of our information-related identity interests in the preceding chapter, this penultimate chapter sets out the source and scope of other parties’ ethical responsibilities to meet these interests. These are obligations accruing chiefly to those who hold personal bioinformation about us or are in a possible to control its disclosure. This chapter argues that disclosure responsibilities are grounded in the strength of our interests in developing and maintaining inhabitable self-narratives, combined with our mutual dependence on and vulnerability to the conduct of others when it comes to fulfilling this interest. These factors ground ethical ‘responsibilities to help’ by offering, providing, or facilitating access to personal bioinformation or, sometimes, refraining from doing so. These are pro tanto responsibilities – they hold in the absence of stronger countervailing reasons to do otherwise. They will also vary depending on the nature of the information and the roles and relationship between potential discloser and recipient. These responsibilities extend not only to those to offer and disclose personal bioinformation but also to ascertain potential recipients’ identity needs and to disclose in discursive, individually responsive, and identity-supporting ways. The chapter explains what this kind of identity support entails.