Suchergebnisse

Increasing attention is now being paid to the concept of sustainability as a crucial element of our life at all levels. The awareness that attention must be paid not only to the present, but also and above all to the future of the society in which we live has increased attention to social and environmental issues, such as climate change and the digital revolution. This transformation has also impacted the public sector: in particular, the scientific attention in the university sector has led to the birth of the concept of University Social Responsibility (USR), which suggests that universities sustainably re-transform their work. However, this issue has so far only been the subject of a few studies. The purpose of this article is to promote greater awareness on the part of universities of the importance of addressing sustainability issues. The results of the analysis, obtained thanks to the use of a questionnaire and interviews, depict the state of the art in the adoption of social reporting practices by Italian universities and identify the main reasons and barriers to the adoption of these practices.

Two items with feline images were found in 2019 in the course of works at the Markul settlement: the first was a bas-relief depicting the paws of a leopard on a slab discovered during excavations at the Dalniy Tower of the Markul settlement, and the second was a drawing of a lion's figure on a stone which was found in the area of the Jal-Akuaskia temple. The authors offer for scientific discussion these recent discoveries and highlight the two major tendencies in use of the classical image of the lion in the Christian Art of Abkhazia. The first tendency is the replacement of lion with leopard, which is found on a slab from the excavations of the Markul settlement and on the LashkendarTemple in the Tkvarchal region; the second tendency is a continued tradition of depicting the "Fierce Beast" on the bronze axes of the Kobano-Colchis culture. To validate these tendencies, the analysis involves the available images of felines on stone in archaeological finds in Abkhazia and Sochi, Abkhazian toponymy and linguistic data, a review of features of the fauna and climate of the Abkhaz region.

Historical and literary works and archaeological materials (such as pottery figurines, tomb murals and reliefs, paintings etc.) recorded the spread of foreign dog breeds in the territory of China since the period of the Northern dynasties and their highest popularity among Chinese upper class during Tang epoch. At the present time there is information about two breeds — "Persian" dogs and "Roman" dogs. "Persian" dogs (Bosi gou, Bosi quan) were the hunting dogs with a thin elongated body, long legs, short-haired, probably, related to Saluki. "Roman" dogs (Fulin gou, Fulin quan) were miniature dogs with short body and legs, long-haired, black and white spotted, probably, originated from Maltese dogs. They performed a decorative function and served as companions of women and children. Apparently, originally both "Persian" and "Roman" dogs were imported into China along the Silk Road via Sogdian city-states of Central Asia and the states of Western Regions (Xiyu). Later, the breeding of these dogs started in China in order to meet the demand for the prestigious home pets among the Chinese elite.

This study explores how China seek international cooperation opportunities in higher education. Due to the change of U.S. new immigration policy toward international students, it is more difficult for Chinese students in some STEM fields to have further study in the United States. Besides, the greatly increased tuition fees, as well as the worry about personal safety distract Chinese students' willingness to study in the United States. Chinese colleges and universities take this opportunity to actively explore high-quality overseas higher education resources in Belt and Road countries to meet the great needs of Chinese students' studying abroad. At the same time, China speeds up the process of internationalization of higher education by recruiting scholars all over the world and initiating research and training projects specialized in STEM fields with top universities in the world. Furthermore, Chinese universities strive to contribute intellectual support in global governance and work together with universities from the SCO member States under the framework of SCO University to provide more options for Chinese students to receive high quality international education and training as well.

Abstract This article aims to review and systematize prior works that investigate how the presence of women in top echelon positions of firms affects sustainability and to create an agenda to guide future research in this promising area. In contrast to previous reviews, ours examines how women in top echelon positions affect sustainability by distinguishing both the position women held in the firm (i.e. Board of Directors—BoD, top management team, CEO and relevant committees) and the specific elements of sustainability (i.e. activity, performance, and disclosure). Our structured systematic review resulted in 187 publications retrieved from Web of Science and Scopus and revealed that the presence of women in top echelon positions is associated with greater engagement in social and environmental projects. Their presence also positively influences the environmental and social performance and increases the level, quality, and transparency of sustainability disclosure. Furthermore, the presence of women in top echelon positions and the implementation of sustainable activities improve both the firm financial performance and value. However, conflicting results have also emerged. On the basis of these findings, research gaps and future research agenda are identified and presented.

The paper deals with the Pantheon of Writers and Public Figures at the Mtatsminda rise in Tbilisi. The latter represents a memory site of widely recognized symbolic importance for a long time. Initiated at the end of the nineteenth century and opened in the 1920s, the Pantheon was conceived of as a symbol of collective identity of Georgia. The status of the Pantheon of Writers and Public Figures has largely defined its history in the following decades, both in the Soviet period and afterwards. The paper aims to trace the transformation of the idea of the Mtatsminda Pantheon as a symbol of Georgian identity over a century, to explain how and why the meanings assigned to the Pantheon evolved over time, thus contributing towards the formation of a collective memory – one of the essential elements of national identity. The work draws upon factual evidence and theoretical judgements presented in various pieces of research, as well as the analysis of papers reflecting different subject-specific discussions, information spread by media outlets, including popular newspapers, magazines, and official documents.

This article discusses some issues of labor regulation of medical and pharmaceutical workers, the peculiarities of health systems in some countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a comparative analysis of their experience and Kazakhstan is carried out.
The specificity of the legal status of medical and pharmaceutical workers is also considered, which is explained by the fact that its regulation is based not only on general norms of labor law, but also on special regulations affecting various features of the activities of this category of workers. At the same time, it is noted that the basis of the legislative regulation of the work of medical and pharmaceutical workers is the generally recognized principles and norms of international law, as well as the norms of national legislation.
The article focuses on the fact that among the variety of sources concerning the legal status of various categories of workers, there is no separate comprehensive study devoted to the peculiarities of legal regulation of both medical and pharmaceutical workers, in connection with which the chosen topic of scientific research is updated.

Although an understanding of the lived experience of foster care relationships can provide valuable information to guide social work practice and policy, few such studies have been carried out. This article presents findings from a qualitative investigation exploring experiences of relationships between foster carers and the young people in their care. Eight care-experienced young people and nine foster carers participated in interviews and focus groups. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to explore their experiences. The insider's perspective was further amplified through engaging peer researchers with experience of fostering relationships – one a young person who had been in care, the other a long-term carer. Two overarching themes were identified. Firstly, participants made sense of fostering relationships through comparisons with birth family ones, particularly in relation to the impact of care systems, continuing biological family relationships and foster care language. Secondly, previous experiences created barriers to forming positive fostering relationships, but when these were overcome the experience could be life changing. The implications of these findings for social care policy regarding foster carer support, training and matching guidelines are discussed.

Abstract
During the last decade, Italian community co-operatives have emerged as a new form of community-development organization. The literature on community-based enterprises (CBEs) explains this phenomenon as a community that becomes entrepreneurial and develops locally based businesses for its socio-economic development. Nevertheless, a more critical view of CBEs reveals the partiality of a community's participation in these organizations. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the extent to which the mainstream theoretical framework for analysing these organizations has influenced the general understanding of this phenomenon. This research brings into discussion social–capital theories, particularly Putnam's neo-communitarian approach. It also proposes a diverse perspective on CBEs and community development by offering a critical analysis based on Pierre Bourdieu's works. The present study considers a specific form of CBEs—the community co-operative—with particular reference to the Italian context. Results from an online questionnaire (twenty-nine participants) and a cross-case study analysis (five co-operatives) show that community entrepreneurs have common determined social profiles and these help them to aggregate certain local agents instead of others.

AbstractIn this paper, we study the effect of different types of technological regime changes on the evolution of industry concentration and wage inequality. Using a calibrated agent-based macroeconomic framework, the Eurace@Unibi model, we consider scenarios where the new regime is characterized by a finite time period of more frequent respectively more substantial changes in the frontier technology compared to the old regime. We show that under both scenarios, the regime change leads to an increase in the heterogeneity of productivity in the firm population and to increased market concentration, where effects are much less pronounced if the new regime differs from the old one with respect to the frequency of innovations. If the new regime is characterized by an increase of the size of the frontier jumps along the technological trajectory, the evolution of the wage inequality has an inverted U-shape with a large fraction of workers profiting in the very long run from high wages offered by dominant high-tech firms. Finally, it is shown that (observable) heterogeneity of worker skills plays an important role in generating these dynamic effects of technological regime changes.

AbstractIsabella d'Este (1474–1539), marchioness of the northern Italian city state of Mantua, commissioned portraits of herself from some of the foremost painters of her day, including Titian and Leonardo da Vinci. These works have mostly been analysed through the prism of artistic connoisseurship and Isabella's motivations for commissioning them have been seen in gendered terms as idiosyncratic and trivial. This article explores the ways in which Isabella deployed portraiture as a political tool and investigates how she integrated this avenue of self‐fashioning with other forms of identity branding to underpin her reputation as a woman capable of exercising authority and deserving of respect for her administrative and diplomatic skills. By analysing the trajectory of Isabella's portrait commissions in the context of her changing levels of political influence, and by considering them as a group, I aim to make sense of their iconography and show that the idea that she merely wished to be memorialised for a beauty she never possessed in reality fails to take into account the sophistication of her political image making.

AbstractThis paper contributes a novel way to theorise the power of narratives of nuclear weapons politics through Kenneth Burke's concept of entelechy: the means of stating a things essence through narrating its beginning or end. The paper argues that the Manhattan Project functions narratively in nuclear discourse as an origin myth, so that the repeated telling of atomic creation over time frames the possibilities of nuclear politics today. By linking Burke's work on entelechy with literature on narrative and eschatology, the paper develops a theoretical grounding for understanding the interconnection of the nuclear past, present, and future. The paper supports its argument by conducting a wide-ranging survey of academic and popular accounts of the development of the atomic weapon in the US Manhattan Project. It reveals a dominant narrative across these accounts that contains three core tropes: the nuclear weapon as the inevitable and perfected culmination of humankind's tendency towards violence; the Manhattan Project as a race against time; and the nuclear weapon as a product of a fetishized masculine brilliance.

This article examines the question of solidarity in light of recent refugees' and forced migrants' arrivals on Greek island shores as the first point of entry to the European Union. It focuses on various community solidarity initiatives emerging in 2015 and how they unfolded over time, until replaced by hostility and indifference following the EU–Turkey deal in March 2016. To account for this transformation, the study, carried out between 2016 and 2018, involved ethnographic work, interviews with local populations, activists, teachers and community leaders, and participant observations primarily in Lesbos, as well as Chios, Leros, and Samos. This article also sheds light on how Greece's severe economic crisis has compounded anti-migration politics and securitization in recent migratory movements. Drawing on Judith Butler's ideas of embodied vulnerability and intersubjective relationality, the article theorizes how solidarity evolves when border struggles intersect with deservingness, belonging, and refugees' and forced migrants' precarity. It concludes by proposing a psychosocial embodied notion of solidarity as a political strategy to counteract the neoliberal predicament that threatens all life with extinction.

Languages group verbs in different ways. Because of the ergative feature of Zazaki, it plays a big role whether the verbs are transitive or intransitive. Zaza Language introduces some pronouns to distinguish double-transitive verbs from transitive and intransitive verbs. In some linguistic works, the terms transitive and ergative are used synonymously. This article aims to scrutinize ditransitive constructions in the Zaza language, which has some interesting syntactic elements in these structures. They are mostly pronouns in combination with directions. Several pronouns replace indirect object. On the one hand, the goal of this study is to find out the functions of these pronouns. The semantic content of these pronouns decides which pronouns may appear in a specific position. They can appear with or without directions. Only the pronouns such as cı can alone replace a NP, the other ones need a direction for this replacing. On the other hand, this study discusses the morphosyntactic and semantic realizations in ditransitive constructions. While these pronouns do not syntactically follow the same word order, they can semantically be classified into two groups.

AbstractThis paper discusses the scope for international macroprudential policy coordination in a financially integrated world economy. It begins with a review of the transmission channels associated with, and the empirical evidence on, financial spillovers and spillbacks. Limitations of the existing literature are also identified. The potential gains associated with cross-border macroprudential coordination, dwelling on both recent analytical contributions and quantitative studies based on multi-country models with financial frictions, are then evaluated. The issue of whether coordination of macroprudential policies simultaneously requires some degree of monetary policy coordination is also discussed. The analysis focuses on the potential for policy coordination between major advanced economies and a group identified assystemically-important middle-income countries(SMICs). Next, practical ways to promote international macroprudential policy coordination are considered. Following a discussion of Basel III's Principle of reciprocity and ways to improve it, the paper advocates a further strengthening of the current statistical, empirical and analytical work conducted by international financial institutions to evaluate, and raise awareness of, the gains from international coordination of macroprudential policies.