Origins We call this book on theoretical orientations and methodological strategies in family studies a sourcebook because it details the social and personal roots (i.e., sources) from which these orientations and strategies flow. Thus, an appropriate way to preface this book is to talk first of its roots, its beginnings. In the mid 1980s there emerged in some quarters the sense that it was time for family studies to take stock of itself. A goal was thus set to write a book that, like Janus, would face both backward and forward a book that would give readers both a perspec tive on the past and a map for the future. There were precedents for such a project: The Handbook of Marriage and the Family edited by Harold Christensen and published in 1964; the two Contemporary Theories about theFamily volumes edited by Wesley Burr, Reuben Hill, F. Ivan Nye, and Ira Reiss, published in 1979; and the Handbook of Marriage and the Family edited by Marvin Sussman and Suzanne Steinmetz, then in production.

'Here be dragons' was the traditional warning used by ancient mapmakers to indicate dangerous, or simply unknown, lands. These were the dwelling places of fantastical beasts, creatures such as dragons, sea serpents, unicorns, griffins and mermaids. Throughout the ages, such beasts have been viewed in complex and contradictory ways because they embody both our fear and our fascination of the unpredictable natural world around us. They appear in the earliest myths and accompany the heroes of medieval romance and folktales. Whether as the symbolic creatures of myth, or as the marvellous beasts of medieval legend and travellers' tales, fantastic animals have always inspired art and literature. Today they feature among the many marvels that populate the alternative worlds of fantasy and the outer reaches of cyberspace. Drawing on sources as diverse as myth, history and folklore, this book explores the ways in which mythical beasts continue to inhabit our fantasies and to define our constantly changing relationship to both real and imagined worlds.

This book presents high-quality original contributions on the fashion supply chain. A wide spectrum of application domains are covered, processing of big data coming from digital and social media channels, fashion new product development, fashion design, fashion marketing and communication strategy, business models and entrepreneurship, e-commerce and omni-channel management, corporate social responsibility, new materials for fashion product, wearable technologies. The contents are based on presentations delivered at IT4Fashion 2017, the 7th International Conference in Business Models and ICT Technologies for the Fashion Supply Chain, which was held in Florence, Italy, in April 2017, and at IT4Fashion 2018, the 8th edition of the same conference, which was held in Florence, Italy, in April 2018. This conference series represents a targeted response to the growing need for research that reports and debates supply chain business models and technologies applied to the fashion industry, with the aim of increasing knowledge in the area of product lifecycle management and supply chain management in that industry.