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This book focuses on social transformations as one of the central topics in the social sciences. The study of European social transformations is very valuable in the context of universal discussions within social sciences: explaining invariable, universal attributes of societies and examining changing attributes. The book consists of 20 chapters on European social transformations, written from the perspectives of distinguished scholars from such disciplines as economics, political science, educational science, geography, media and communication studies, public management and administration, social psychology and sociology. The temporal and spatial range of the book is wide, including such global changes as time-space compression, focusing particularly on change processes in Europe during the last two decades. The book consists of four main parts, beginning with an overview of the theoretical and methodological approaches, and then focusing separately on post-communist transformations, institutional drivers of social transformations in the European Union, and European transformations in the context of global processes. The book presents current theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches that complement the scientific literature on social transformations. This book is both an invaluable resource for scholars and an indispensable teaching tool for use in the classroom and will be of interest to students, academics, and policy-makers studying how this diverse region has changed over recent years.

ABSTRACTThis article expands the literature on the rationales and governance of state owned enterprises (SOEs). We show that SOEs could be seen as instruments of innovation policies and change agents within broader innovation systems that can overcome many of the conventional challenges of innovation policy and its implementation, from coordination and implementation of policies and innovation system actor networks to financing innovation. We review the existing literature on the rationales of SOEs and extend it to include innovation as a central rationale. Thereafter we provide a taxonomy that reveals the necessary policy and managerial conditions and constraints for using SOEs as instruments of innovation policy. We place some of the better‐known innovation‐oriented SOE successes and failures into this taxonomy and show that this approach will allow in future research to explore different SOE practices and potential for using SOEs as innovation policy instruments across countries.

Rainer Kattel is Estonian academy research professor, Wolfgang Drechsler is professor of governance, and Erkki Karo is director and senior research fellow at the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance at Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia. The public sector's role in innovation is explored in cogent detail in an important study that reveals the complexities, benefits, and pitfalls of the innovative state in action. The authors, all noted experts in the field, examine the different approaches that have been taken by governments in Europe, the United States, and Asia to demonstrate how innovative bureaucracies-organizations designing and implementing a wide range of policies conducive to innovation-function, succeed, or fail. Kattel, Drechsler, and Karo advance the argument that the methods by which policy choices are made and implemented are as important as the policies themselves, and they offer strategies for overcoming financial and political impediments to change. An essential roadmap for designing, evaluating, and implementing governmental policies of innovation, this unique volume illuminates the key challenges facing innovation bureaucracies in the future