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This chapter is about the theories explaining the transition from foraging to farming. It aims to establish which links exist between the traditional theories – based on push/pull models – and the micro-founded approaches developed since the 1980s. More precisely, it asks how the latter may contribute, as the former did, to defining a macro-narrative of the transition to farming.

While they were providing a global narrative of the Neolithic revolution, the push and pull models have been progressively dismissed. Recent research is diverse, but it is all based upon human behaviour or micro-founded. We critically examine three of these approaches which focus either on foraging behaviour, or on the initial domestication of plants and animals, or on the evolution of social institutions related to ownership.

We demonstrate that these recent micro-founded approaches only provide a partial vision of the transition to farming. Despite this limit, they conciliate push and pull explanations in a single framework. Moreover, they confirm a conclusion held by tenants of pull models: the transition to farming is more likely to have occurred in a resource-rich environment such as the one associated with complex hunter-gatherers. Some archaeological evidence from the Levant is provided to support our claim.

This research chapter provides a useful overview of the differing approaches to the behavioural, environmental and economic factors that led to the shift to farming from foraging. Its value lies in the way it presents and evaluates differing positions derived from differing scales of analysis and types of evidence.

This paper examines the conditions under which ancient peoples might have developed a concept of “sustainability,” and concludes that long-term resource management practices would not have been articulated prior to the development of the first cities starting c. 6,000 years ago.

Using biological concepts of population density and niche-construction theory, cities are identified as the first places where pressures on resources might have triggered concerns for sustainability. Nonetheless, urban centers also provided ample opportunities for individuals and households to continue the same ad hoc foraging strategies that had facilitated human survival in prior eras.

The implementation of a sustainability concept requires two things: individual and institutional motivations to mitigate collective risk over the long term, and accurate measurement devices that can discern subtle changes over time. Neither condition was applicable to the ancient world. Premodern cities provided the first expression of large population sizes in which there were niches of economic and social mutualism, yet individuals and households persisted in age-old approaches to provisioning by opportunistically using urban networks rather than focusing on a collective future.

Archaeological and historical analysis indicates that a focus on “sustainability” is not an innate human behavioral capacity but must be specifically articulated and taught.

This chapter examines the increase in global demand for quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) and considers the impact of such demand on the Peruvian and Bolivian farmers who produce it. Specifically, it analyzes the social media marketing of U.S. based I Heart Keenwah (IHK) and considers the role of “storied food” with respect to corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in a Web 2.0 context. This chapter reports the results of textual, rhetorical, and cultural analyses of the digital marketing materials IHK deploys, and considers IHK’s use of Web 2.0 tools to mobilize discourses of socially responsible marketing, and implications of industrial quinoa production on Andean biodiversity and indigenous culture. This chapter principally concludes that the social media and digital marketing materials that IHK deploys obfuscate the social, economic, and ecological complexities surrounding the quinoa industries in Peru and Bolivia. This chapter provides evidence of new tendencies in capitalist commodification, and demonstrates how the traditional and indigenous protectors of the quinoa plant species are being denied their agricultural and cultural heritages. Further more, it demonstrates how the language of corporate social responsibility is abused in the service of less sustainable, branded, and extractive imaginaries and corporate profit. Given the significant rise in international quinoa demand, IHK’s explosive economic success, and IHK’s reliance on Andean quinoa, this case study provides unique insights into global food capitalism in the age of social media.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the community conservation movement in Oaxaca, a bioculturally diverse state in southern Mexico, with a particular focus on indigenous and community conserved areas (ICCAs) as an emergent designation over the last decade.

A survey of indigenous and mestizo community conserved areas in Oaxaca was conducted in 2009 as part of a broader inventory of the ICCAs of Belize, Guatemala and Mexico.

The survey revealed 126 sites of community conservation in Oaxaca covering 375,457 ha, 14.5 percent more than the 327,977 ha included in nationally decreed Protected Natural Areas in the state. A total of 43 sites are certified community reserves comprising 103,102 ha, or 68.7 percent of the 150,053 ha included in the 137 certified sites recognized nationally. The diversity of Oaxaca's ICCAs, which have emerged creatively in variable cultural, ecological and historical contexts throughout the state, provide an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of community conservation efforts.

Mexico is one of the few countries that have an extensive inventory of ICCAs that could be incorporated into an international registry being formulated by the World Conservation Monitoring Centre.

Drivers, travellers/tourists, pedestrians, paramedical officers, road safety officers, police officers and other security agencies in emergency times in developing countries are often challenged. The purpose of this paper is to explore the intervention of a quick mobile contact called “My Contact Person” (MCP) during such emergencies.

This study used a quantitative research method to collect data. The research tool is a researcher-made questionnaire with items developed using the five innovation dimensions and domestication. The data was analyzed with SmartPLS 3.0 software. The reliability values were above the postulated demarcation of 0.7, while the average variance extracted conforms to the norm of 0.5. The study participants were mobile phone users who own and use a mobile phone. Owing to the study’s nature, a simple random sampling technique was used to appraise 196 respondents across Nigeria’s demography.

The results show that the mobile users in a developing context are willing to observe “MCP’s” efficacy before they try to appropriate it to their daily lifestyle. Further, “MCP’s” compatibility with the telephone user is an antecedent of its relative advantages over the existing telephone lists. The results reveal that the respondents perceived integrating and adapting “MCP” to their daily lives as a complicated process. In this study, most participants did not regard observability and trialability as a means of appropriating MCP to their daily lifestyle.

This paper’s findings’ generalizability is limited because the present study was conducted using two higher education institutions (HEI) with a relatively small sample in Nigeria. Probing MCP domestication in more institutions and other communities, as significant communities’ aside HEI use mobile phones will increase our research findings’ generalizability. A parallel investigation of a range of developed and developing countries should be explored to ascertain mobile phone users’ perceptions across context.

This study has several implications for citizens, especially in the developing world. MCP will provide quick contact opportunities to loved ones of the traumatized, saving lives by significantly avoiding worry, fear, anxiety and depression. MCP also has the potential of increasing input needs to be undertaken to accelerate the appropriate use of digital technology by health-care consumers, including enhancing education and technological literacy and providing access to low-cost digital technology.

“MCP” will be a quick intervention for drivers, travellers/tourists, pedestrians, paramedical officers, road safety officers, police officers and other security agencies in the time of emergency. For the managers, the relative advantage is the preferable factor to create awareness for “MCP”, while observability needs more effort to persuade the mobile phone users to accept and use MCP.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate conceptualizations of Europeanization, the difficulties this creates when assessing the impacts of the European Union (EU) on member states and the influence member states have on the EU policy‐making processes. There are also problems when considering questions regarding the basis of Europeanization in terms of its relationships with globalization, governance, institutionalization, polity, politics and policy.

Different conceptualizations of Europeanization concentrate on distinct methodological positions and whether Europeanization may best be understood as “situation” or “process”. Indeed, difficulties are further exacerbated when identifying the extent that drivers for change at the EU and domestic level involved Europeanization, domestication, globalization and/or European integration. Meso theory identifies “process” and substantive theory “situation” in terms of downloading (En1), up‐loading (En2) and cross‐loading (En3). Each of these conceptualizations allow “situations” where empirical reliability could be made explicit from a particular perspective.

This paper investigates and assesses the Europeanization of UK financial services and provides a conceptualization of Europeanization as both meso (middle range) and substantive theory. By breaking down meso theory into substantive theories (up‐loading, downloading and cross‐loading) the analysis attempts to clarify the interaction between Europeanization, globalization and domestication in relation to impacts on UK financial services regulation. Following an assessment of UK financial services in general, this paper concentrates on the concept of “competent authority” and how the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) displays attributes outlined in the directives. Through an analysis of the Third Life Assurance Directive, Second Banking Directive and FSA this paper identifies a number of issues relating to how the EU responded to sector demands and how Europeanization is actualized through domestic response.

Europeanization indicates a continual interaction or dialectic between the uniformity of the EU and the diversity of the individual member states. The process involves interaction between global, domestic and European variables with the European dimension in relation to domestic interpretation providing a mechanism whereby dominant economic global factors can be diminished or enabled.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the social adoption of the mobile phone by Irish teenagers in city, town and rural settings. It aims to investigate two key areas that have influenced the teenagers' social adoption of the mobile phone: first, the influence of locational and socio‐economic factors on mobile phone usage; second, how the teenagers' adoption of recently emergent Web 2.0 applications (social‐networking web sites and instant messaging services) tends to bring about a re‐positioning of the mobile phone's role as a communications channel.

The paper draws on a social shaping and domestication of media technologies approach, using original empirical data from a survey of teenage respondents and six focus groups.

The findings suggest that the teenagers' relationship to the mobile phone is evolving as newer communications applications emerge. In particular, the technical competencies and media literacies necessary for multi‐model communication are evolving fastest where locational and socio‐economic conditions are most favourable.

Although access to the mobile phone cuts across the strata of society, people's capacity to benefit from it – and from other forms of multi‐modal communication – is not evenly distributed. The paper argues that, despite universal ownership of the technological device among the sample of teenagers, the mobile phone is caught up in wider digital and socio‐economic divides.

This paper investigates the integration of the home computer into the domestic sphere through a gender perspective on the notions of domesticity and domestication. The study is based on a series of interviews with seven British families in the late 1990s. The analysis is used to identify some of the characteristics that contribute to make the home computer domestic or undomestic, and to explore the processes of domestication. A focus on fears and anxieties around the computer as well as the emergence of myths and magical notions allows for deeper insights into the gender‐domestication “problématique”.

This paper aims to investigate the role of a particular energy calculator in enhancing the energy efficiency of existing homes by asking how this calculator was developed and how it is domesticated by craftspeople working as energy consultants.

The study is based on qualitative interviews with users and producers of the energy calculator (n = 22), as well as participation in energy consultation training.

The paper finds that, in the energy calculator, there is a striking lack of connection between the domestication and script because of lack of energy consultants’ involvement in the design and implementation process.

The enrolment of energy consultants as energy calculator users earlier in and throughout the design process could be valuable in making the transition to an energy-efficient and environmentally friendly building sector.

The paper argues for recognition of the role of energy consultants, especially craftspeople, as participants in the design process for tools of governance. This is a call to acknowledge the value of particular skills and experiences possessed by craftspeople doing home consultation.

By understanding the intricate developer–user synchronicity in tools developed for upgrading the building sector, energy mitigation can be made more effective.