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Knowledge of accounting before the evolution of academic economic knowledge was practical knowledge. In the context of the studies about the development of accounting techniques, the debates leave out the bookkeeper. The hypothesis here is that, due to the diversification of investments on the behalf of the personal properties in late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, an expert accountant appeared as bookkeeper of the personal account books at the merchant bankers' households. In Florence, future merchants were trained in elementary schools and later on in classes the masters of abacus. In their exercise books, the masters of abacus published, we find a lot of algebraic problems which are illustrated by accounting operations. However, at least in Florence manuals on accounting did not exist. So, the young merchant bankers and bookkeepers learned by doing. A case study about an accountant, Matteo Brandolini, who was the bookkeeper of the papal banker's son Alamanno Salviati, shall exemplify this tendency. When the patricians and merchant bankers invested more extensively in secondary markets, they were in the need of highly qualified staff.

Russlands Krieg gegen die Ukraine, Pandemie, Klimawandel und Extremwetterereignisse: Immer neue Krisen erschüttern die Gesellschaften weltweit. Zugleich steigt die Zahl der Gewaltkonflikte, an denen häufig nichtstaatliche, irreguläre Milizen und Rebellen beteiligt sind. Das Friedensgutachten 2023 zeigt auf, welche Handlungsspielräume die deutsche Politik nach der »Zeitenwende« in der Friedens- und Sicherheitspolitik hat. Zentrale Themen sind die Erhöhung der Widerstandsfähigkeit im Globalen Süden angesichts multipler Krisen sowie die Entwicklung eines Ansatzes, Rüstungskontrolle neu zu denken und gegen Desinformationen zu schützen. Ebenso im Fokus stehen die kluge Gestaltung des Handels mit unbequemen Partnern, die Förderung von kooperativen Beziehungen und der Kampf gegen die Polarisierung demokratischer Gesellschaften. Mit seinen konkreten Handlungsempfehlungen für Bundestag und Bundesregierung ist das Friedensgutachten ein zentrales Medium für den Dialog zwischen Wissenschaft, Gesellschaft und Politik. Die deutschen Friedensforschungsinstitute (BICC/HSFK/IFSH/INEF) geben das Gutachten seit 1987 heraus.

Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory can help to better understand and describe developments of the 21st century. The contributors address the possibilities to reread Wallerstein's theoretical thoughts and ideas that are related to different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The presented interdisciplinary approach of this anthology thereby intends to highlight the broader value of Wallerstein's ideas, even almost five decades after the famous sociologist and economic historian first expressed them.

The book uncovers the versatility and literary skills of oral narrators in a small African island. Relying on the researches of three French ethnographers who interviewed storytellers in the 1970s-80s, Lee Haring shows a once-colonised people using verbal art to preserve ancient values in the postcolonial world, when the island of Mayotte was transforming itself from a neglected colony to an overseas department of France.

The author's innovation is to read ethnographic researches as play scripts—to see printed folktales as accounts of live performances. One storyteller after another comments symbolically on what it is like to be a formerly colonised population. Storytelling women, in particular, combine diverse plots and characters to create traditional-sounding stories, which could not have been predicted from the African, Malagasy, Indian, and European traditions coexisting in Mayotte. Haring's account shows them to be particularly skilled at irony and ambiguity, conveying both submissive and rebellious attitudes in their tales. He makes Mayotte storytelling accessible to a new, English-speaking audience and demonstrates that traditional storytellers in those years were preserving, but also critiquing, their inherited social order in a changing world. Their creative intentions, cultural influences and widely different narrative styles constitute Mayotte's system of the arts of the word.

Literary specialists, folklore enthusiasts, and people who like reading stories will find much to appreciate in this engaging and sophisticated book.

How researchers understood the atomic bomb's effects on the human psyche before the recognition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In 1945, researchers on a mission to Hiroshima with the United States Strategic Bombing Survey canvassed survivors of the nuclear attack. This marked the beginning of global efforts—by psychiatrists, psychologists, and other social scientists—to tackle the complex ways in which human minds were affected by the advent of the nuclear age. A trans-Pacific research network emerged that produced massive amounts of data about the dropping of the bomb and subsequent nuclear tests in and around the Pacific rim.

Ran Zwigenberg traces these efforts and the ways they were interpreted differently across communities of researchers and victims. He explores how the bomb's psychological impact on survivors was understood before we had the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact, psychological and psychiatric research on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rarely referred to trauma or similar categories. Instead, institutional and political constraints—most notably the psychological sciences' entanglement with Cold War science—led researchers to concentrate on short-term damage and somatic reactions or even, in some cases, on denial of victims' suffering. As a result, very few doctors tried to ameliorate suffering.

But, Zwigenberg argues, it was not only that doctors "failed" to issue the right diagnosis; the victims' experiences also did not necessarily conform to our contemporary expectations. As he shows, the category of trauma should not be used uncritically in a non-Western context. Consequently, this book sets out, first, to understand the historical, cultural, and scientific constraints in which researchers and victims were acting and, second, to explore how suffering was understood in different cultural contexts before PTSD was a category of analysis

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Examining countries where religious pluralism is in decline, including Iraq, India, Pakistan and Nigeria, this book brings together reflections, knowledge and learning about the daily experiences of religiously marginalized groups, generated using participatory research methods. It also showcases the participatory methodologies implemented by its international team of contributors and highlights the importance of using non-extractive methods for engaging with participants.

Why do certain parts of the state in Africa work so effectively despite operating in difficult governance contexts? How do 'pockets of bureaucratic effectiveness' emerge and become sustained over time? And what does this tell us about the prospects for state-building and development in Africa?

Repeated economic and social crises have demanded that development thinkers and policy actors have had to engage with the critical role that states play in delivering development. Pockets of Effectiveness and the Politics of State-building and Development in Africa shows that politics is the driving factor that shapes how well state agencies perform their roles. It deploys a new conceptual framework – the power domains approach – to explore the shifting fortunes of key state agencies in five countries – Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia – over the past three decades. Our original research reveals when, how and why political rulers decide to build effective state agencies and enable them to deliver certain forms of economic development – often through forming strategic coalitions with senior bureaucrats and with international support – and also when this support falters and gives way to a politics of survival. Comparative analysis identifies two potential trajectories towards state-building in Africa, each shaped by different configurations of social and political power. The book critiques the role that international development agencies have played in (mis)shaping the state in Africa and suggests a new strategic agenda for building the state capacities required to deliver sustained development at the current juncture. The book closes with critical commentaries from two leading scholars in the field, to help place our work in context and establish the next steps for research and strategy in this increasingly important area of development theory and practice.

In medieval and early modern crafts, useful knowledge was taught in the workshops. There, innovation took place. Craftsmen exchanged knowledge on journeys or through voluntary and forced migration. This system of knowledge transfer does not need writing, although craftsmen used writing both in the workshop and in the administration of the guilds and the towns. However, transmission of knowledge remained oral. This contrasts with countless craftsmen's manuscripts that conveyed technical knowledge about crafts in text and images. This essay argues that these manuals were equally crucial for the transmission of useful knowledge between master craftsmen as well as the sale of products to clients. A book on plate harnesses and one on bell and gun casting are introduced as examples.

Together with introducing a set of key innovations in commercial practices, the merchant-bankers of the commercial revolution of the 13th century were also the first European economic agents to adopt Hindu-Arabic numerals. As practical arithmetic provided the mathematical foundation for commercial innovations, studying its European spread provides a particularly suitable angle to study the diffusion of practical knowledge in the pre-modern period. Italy was the early adopter of these techniques, while in England these practices became widespread at the onset of the little divergence. In this paper, I discuss in comparative perspective the social diffusion of this knowledge in Italy and England, and its wider impact. On the one hand, this analysis makes it possible to show a number of parallels between the trajectories followed by these societies. On the other hand, it allows to observe the complex interactions between practical knowledge and wider economic, institutional, and social changes.

This contribution discusses the evolution of paper thickness of books produced in the Southern Netherlands in the period 1473 until the middle of the sixteenth century. Changing paper thickness is one of the key elements which in all likelihood helped coping with the problem of the rapidly increasing demand for paper by the press. After a description of relevant aspects of the production of hand laid paper and of the resulting morphology of sheets, a methodology is proposed to deal with the problem of establishing paper thickness in bound volumes and further problems dealing with the compression effect and of binding and rebinding are discussed.

This Open access book provides a survey of the economic, health, and somatic progress of Baltic countries during the period 1918–2018, framed by the outline of the historical-sociological theory of modern social restorations, as originally conceived by the Austrian-American comparative historian Robert A. Kann. The author reworks Kann's theory to analyse post-communist transformations in the Baltic region. The book argues that the purpose of modern social restorations is to make restoration societies safe against a recurrence of revolution. There were two waves of modern social restorations: post-Napoleonic and post-communist. Most post-Napoleonic restorations were brief, because they failed to economically and socially outperform the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary systems. It considers Baltic restorations as laboratory cases of second-wave modern social restorations, because they encompass a triple restoration of the nation-state, capitalism, and democracy. The book assesses the performance success of Baltic restorations by comparing economic and social progress of Baltic countries during the periods of original independence (1918–1940), foreign-imposed state socialism (1940–1990), and restored independence (since 1990). It then elaborates the criteria to assess the ultimate performance success of these restorations by 2040, when restored Baltic states may endure longer than their ancestors in 1918–1940 and the complete foreign occupations era (1940–1990). The author, an expert in historical sociology, uses extensive historical-statistical data in cross-time comparisons to develop his analysis and create future projections. This book is of wide interest to sociologists, social demographers, political scientists, and economists studying the Baltic region. This is an open access book.

Für alle, die im Mietverhältnis wohnen, kann es plötzlich sehr schnell gehen: ein Brief der Hausverwaltung, der die Kündigung aufgrund baulicher Verdichtung und Aufwertung enthält. Mieter*innen sind gezwungen, wegen Abrissen oder Sanierungen auszuziehen oder gar das Quartier zu verlassen, um eine bezahlbare Wohnung zu finden. Die Autor*innen geben durch eine qualitative Studie, angelegt im Schweizer Mittelland, vielschichtige Einblicke in diese Lebensrealität. Im Mittelpunkt stehen die Perspektiven Betroffener und deren Umgang mit dem (drohenden) Wohnungsverlust. Das Erleben direkter Verdrängung liefert wichtige Hinweise für wohnungspolitische und sozialarbeiterische Initiativen.

Human capital is central to current debates about the sources of growth and divergence in the premodern economy. Apprenticeship, the key formal arrangement by which occupational skills were transferred in this period, has in the past often been associated with guild monopolies and exclusion, implying a drag on the accumulation of human capital. Several stimulating recent contributions have pointed to apprenticeship as a potentially important explanation for English or European advances in manufacturing and technology in the run up to industrialisation. In this paper, we explore mechanisms that helped improve quality among artisans. We focus on one in particular: the selection of training masters by apprentices.

Interaktionsarbeit im Bereich personenbezogener (sozialer) Dienste ist von hohem Engagement, aber auch vielen Belastungen geprägt. Inkonsistente wohlfahrtsstaatliche Rahmenbedingungen sorgen systematisch für Spannungen, die das Personal strapazieren und vielfach in Zustände der Zerrissenheit führen. In Fallstudien aus der Altenpflege und der geförderten Weiterbildung demonstrieren die Autor*innen, dass Emotionen hierbei eine kritische Rolle spielen. Sie zeigen zudem, wie diese Zustände darauf einwirken, mit wem sich die Beschäftigten in welcher Weise verbunden fühlen und wie es um deren Widerstandsbereitschaft bestellt ist. Wie die bestehenden Verhältnisse sich ändern ließen, wird anhand sozialpolitischer Alternativen und Veränderungspotenziale durch neue Formen kollektiver Interessenvertretung diskutiert.

Die Warnung von Eltern, aufzupassen, was man online teilt, ist allgegenwärtig. Dem schließen sich Datenschützer*innen an und gebieten einen bewussten und sparsamen Umgang mit Diensten und Daten. Eine digitale Desökonomie widersetzt sich diesen Warnungen und sucht den kritischen Umgang mit der digitalen Gegenwartskultur nicht in der Askese, sondern im Exzess. Kunstwerke, Bilder und Daten sind »zu viel«, türmen sich auf und wiederholen sich ständig. Mit Bezug auf Ansätze der Gouvernementalität, der Queer Theory und auf Theorien von Georges Bataille und Roger Caillois analysiert Sebastian Althoff diese unproduktive Produktionsweise des Digitalen und zeigt eine Praxis auf, die Trägheit statt flow schafft.