Suchergebnisse

This article shows that three elements conflated in England from 1650 to 1750: a significant growth of real wages, an increased productivity in agriculture and a check of population increase. No other country before had managed to combine these three elements which played a key role in the take off of English economy before 1750-1800 and the Industrial Revolution. The demographic evolution resulted from marriages at an older age and moreover from a higher celibacy rate than in other countries. These two factors were related with the progress of literacy, including among female population. Also, an increased supply of female labour in cities met an increased demand for such labour. These interactions between education and demography on the one hand, the increase in global agricultural output and the faster increase in agricultural output per worker due to technical progress, on the other hand, explain the important rise in the standard of living between 1650 and 1750 which is documented by many concurring indicators.

Towards the end of Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike undergoes an identity crisis and leaves Sunnydale in search of a solution. 'Neither a monster nor a man', Spike yearns for reconciliation of his divided self. The answer comes in the form of the return of his soul. This article explores how the return of Spike's soul does not deliver a reconciled Spike but rather one which has been exponentially fragmented. In a show that prides itself on complex character development, Spike undergoes the most dramatic character arc of anyone on the series, taking place in one season in an almost schizophrenic fashion. Through close analysis of mise-en-scène and narrative structure this article demonstrates how each of these personas is presented as distinct and explores how identity in this season is not defined by growth and evolution but rather the recognition that we are each made up of a multitude of selves.

If we take a long-range view of competition regimes, we can document in the 20th century a case of major transformation. There has been a double evolution - away from cooperation and cartelization and towards competition on the one hand, from nationally bounded regimes to a globally interconnected regulatory sphere on the other. The antitrust tradition that emerged in the USA at the turn of the 20th century has gained significant and widespread influence after 1945, imposing itself in many parts of the world. The objective of this article is to retrace the process by which antitrust has gone from being a local legal rule to a nearly global structuring frame. We trace the fate of a local set of ideas turning into international politics and globally accepted principles. We also show that those global principles are subject to and interact with local politics - through the process of diffusion but also in their implementation.

The decentralisation of social security in general, and old-age pensions in particular, has been proposed by several nationalist parties in Spain. The purpose of this article is to analyse the rationality of this proposal, taking into account efficiency and equity issues. It is divided into four sections. The first introductory section reviews the most important literature on fiscal federalism, applying it to pensions. The second section analyses the division of competencies in Spanish old-age benefits, focusing specifically on legal aspects. The third describes the degree of decentralisation of public transfers for the elderly in several countries: Belgium, Canada, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom. The final section evaluates the current Spanish system, considers the possibility of decentralisation in the light of economic efficiency, territorial equity and lessons learnt from other federal countries, and examines the evolution of the principal quantitative variables regarding the old-age pensions in the different Autonomous Regions.

Civic service is well established in North America, where the United States and Canada are among the world leaders. The evolution of civic service has not been a story of continuous growth but rather one of episodic and cyclical development. The past decade's events indicate that civic service is in a new cycle of growth and innovation. Among the reasons for the health of civic service in North America are the institutional structures there that define it. Civic service institutions in Mexico, largely because of its status as a developing country, are less accessible and less supportive of the service role than institutions in the rest of North America, where civic service is widely accessible to all types of servers and all social sectors are legitimately perceived as civic service providers. Open access is complemented by incentives and support for servers and organizations providing service opportunities. Several priorities are identified for further research.

The media's contribution to the creation of a healthy public sphere and civil society is the focus of public debate, especially in the light of concerns about the impact on them of the economic and political spheres. The media's ideal contribution to the development of a democratic society has traditionally been framed within the structures of the public service model of broadcasting, where education plays a crucial role. This article traces the evolution of education in Irish broadcasting, exploring the consequences for Irish democracy and civil life. It outlines how education's potential contribution has continually been shaped by the institutional demands of the political and economic systems, including the cultural nationalist ethos of early radio broadcasting, its role in the modernisation of Irish society, and the growth of commercialism and pluralist approaches. These trends had a formative influence on education's role in Irish broadcasting, and consequently on the civic and democratic lives of Irish citizens.

This article addresses the impact of financial incentives on physician behavior, focusing on quality of care. Changing market conditions, evolving social forces, and continuing organizational evolution in health services have raised societal awareness and expectations concerning quality. This article proceeds in four parts. First, the authors place financial incentives in the context of broader forces shaping the quality of physician services. Second, the article reviews the literature on financial incentive effects on physician behavior. Third, a simple net income maximization model of physician choices is presented, from which are derived formal hypotheses regarding the effect of financial incentives on physician choices of quality per unit of physician service and the quantity of services per patient. The model is extended qualitatively to offer further hypotheses and research directions. Finally, gaps and limitations of the model and of the extant empirical research are articulated, and additional researchable questions are posed.

The study suggests that the prominent driving force behind corporate social responsibility (CSR) is companies' long‐term profitability, supported by company leadership and efficiency, competitiveness, and the ability to anticipate the future. The long evolution of Finnish companies since the 18th century has created fertile ground for responsibility. Despite the absence of significant moral or ethical guidance, the thinking of the participating companies was for the most part business‐oriented. The management and organization of CSR appeared to be professional and efficient. CSR was found to be optimal at the highest level of the organizations studied, and the commitment of the top management unquestionable. The present status of CSR seemed to exist more on the theoretical than the practical level. Implementation was seen as a major challenge for the future. The jungle of standards and measurement instruments is a serious problem. Communication was narrowly viewed and technical, and the prevailing paradigm was rather mechanistic.

AbstractThe notion of twins and twinning involves a multiplicity of meanings and contexts that altogether encompass an unexpectedly wide and significant part of human experience, culture, and endeavor. This cultural polysemy is, to some extent, also an attribute of twin research, which has structured itself around a multiplicity of scientific areas of enquiry, and across time, throughout a multiplicity of births and rebirths, periodically declining and resurging as a phoenix from its ashes. What is proposed is a short voyage through this polysemy and phoenixity of twinning and twin research, and through the structuring process that has accompanied its developments, international scope, and organization. No claim to completeness, but an attempt to dig into personal memory and experience, and share some recollections of the main steps of the process, and particularly the evolution of the journal, the society, the international meetings, and their role in supporting the area's persistence and continuous revivals and adaptations until today.

This research presents a content analysis of the major British tabloids over the last decade of the 20th century. Using the conceptual lens of tabloidization and the framework of McLachlan and Golding, this study shows that the coverage of tabloids can be characterized by a dominance of 'soft' and home stories, by a significant presence of headlines and visuals and a personalized angle of coverage. Over time, the coverage has become more 'tabloidized' in its form and style, but has remained constant in its range of contents. Theoretically, the results indicate that the evolution of tabloid coverage has been heterogeneous, which supports the idea that the press can be in a process of homogenization only in the areas of form and style of coverage, but not in terms of range of content. Moreover, these changes suggest that tabloidization (as a feature directly related to tabloids) should not be considered a static concept.

This paper begins with an outline of the current German drug control system. Drug use and drug control are viewed theoretically as complementary components of a complex social and historical process that integrates sociology, the sociology of law, political science, and social psychology. The German drug control system is viewed as a byproduct of these different disciplines. Within this context, the evolution of pertinent drug laws and their implementation are discussed. Recent developments are viewed as taking place in a series of stages based on three paradigms: (1) criminalization, (2) medicalization, and (3) acceptance. Over time there seems to have been a slow transition from the first to the last of these paradigms, implying that elements of all three approaches have been integrated into various policies and strategies that differ between states and regions of Germany, as well as between different levels of drug policy and drug care.

In this article we evaluate two claims made in recent studies of the welfare states of advanced industrial societies: first, that welfare states have remained quite resilient in the face of demands for retrenchment; and second, that partisan politics have ceased to play a decisive role in their evolution. Addressing the first claim, we present analysis from a new data set on unemployment insurance and sickness benefit replacement rates for 18 countries for the years 1975–99. We find considerably more evidence of welfare retrenchment during the last two decades than do recent cross‐national studies. Second, we examine the "end of partisanship" claim by estimating the effects of government partisanship on changes in income replacement rates in sickness and unemployment programs. Our results suggest that, contrary to claims that partisanship has little impact on welfare state commitments, traditional partisanship continues to have a considerable effect on welfare state entitlements in the era of retrenchment.

This article analyses some of the major attributes of Pakistan's contemporary administrative culture. The article uses Hofstede's famous four dimensional model of national cultures as an analytical framework. Hofstede's fourfold typology – power distance, individualism/collectivism, uncertainty avoidance and masculinity/femininity – is used as a point of departure for a more elaborate description and analysis of the traditions, values and norms that characterize Pakistan's governing system. The author uses secondary data from official documents, newspapers, magazines and scholarly literature to support Hofstede's initial findings. A brief account of the colonial antecedents and post-colonial evolution of the administrative institutions is given to provide the context in which the system operates. The main conclusion is that Pakistan's relatively high collectivist orientation, high propensity toward uncertainty avoidance, high power distance and masculinity largely account for many traditions and practices including strict adherence to hierarchy, centralization, corruption, nepotism and gender differentiation in administrative roles.