The concept of transdisciplinarity has found a foothold in science. It is increasingly taking the place of the concept of interdisciplinarity and is making the concept of disciplinarity look pale. However, the concept of transdisciplinarity is not self-explanatory – as it is often understood – and the concept of disciplinarity is not at all outdated – as it seems. This becomes clear in the conceptual analysis of the concepts of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity.

Research is considered as a major component of innovation and a key to the development of modern societies. However, fundamental research, which essentially aims at improving our understanding of Nature, is often questioned about its specific role. In this paper, arguments of ‘general interests’ in support of fundamental research are presented to contribute to the science-policy debate. Beyond a notable return on investment, now acknowledged by most economists, a number of positive societal impacts of fundamental research can be underlined. Fundamental research helps society as a whole, as well as individual firms, to keep options, possible scenarios and choices open (e.g. in relation with sustainable development), to maintain a good capability for top-level scientific expertise, to develop conditions favourable to scientific and technological breakthroughs, to ensure training at the highest possible level and also to guarantee access to, and free circulation of, the most valuable information. Finally, fundamental research may contribute to a better structural link between science and society.

The 2014 European Parliament (EP) election resulted in the rise of populist right-wing parties (PRPs). This paper aims to answer: why PRPs were able to rise in the 2014 EP election; what messages were delivered by the election results regarding European integration; and whether or not policy-makers addressed the messages correctly with the right policy responses? After examining the competing interpretations, this paper argues that a deep disillusionment and crisis of trust in the political establishment, which derived from the long neglect of deteriorating distributional justice and fairness in European integration, which became acute after the euro crisis mismanagement, explains the 2014 EP election results. This paper, accordingly, argues that policy redirection of EU economic governance and the addressing of a ‘social Europe’ are required to regain political trust. After assessing the policy responses taken by the EU, an economic Europe is expected to revive, but the required social Europe will still remain absent.

Interdisciplinarity has entered the agenda of researchers, teachers and policy makers and will remain there in the future. This does not mean that interdisciplinarity is understood the same way, let alone is appreciated everywhere. Researchers are challenged by increasingly complex problems in culture, nature and society beyond disciplinary boundaries; higher education has to cater to a volatile job market where known disciplines no longer define their own niches in terms of topics or practices for their candidates; and decision makers are confronted with challenges that do not respect ideologies of political parties and reports based on mainstream knowledge. In this context, interdisciplinarity is an ongoing re-consideration of the creation, the communication and the application of knowledge uniting the perspectives of research, teaching and decision making. While most discussions on interdisciplinarity focus on its theoretical and methodological complexity in an exclusively contemporary perspective, this article will discuss interdisciplinarity in a historical perspective as central to European history of knowledge as well as in an intercultural perspective.*

This article reviews the changes in historical writing about slavery and the slave trade over the last 50 years.

According to some hypotheses, from a statistical perspective the origin of life seems to be a highly improbable event. Although there is no rigid definition of life itself, life as it is, is a fact. One of the most recognized hypotheses for the origins of life is the RNA world hypothesis. Laboratory experiments have been conducted to prove some assumptions of the RNA world hypothesis. However, despite some success in the ‘wet-lab’, we are still far from a complete explanation. Bioinformatics, supported by biomathematics, appears to provide the perfect tools to model and test various scenarios of the origins of life where wet-lab experiments cannot reflect the true complexity of the problem. Bioinformatics simulations of early pre-living systems may give us clues to the mechanisms of evolution. Whether or not this approach succeeds is still an open question. However, it seems likely that linking efforts and knowledge from the various fields of science into a holistic bioinformatics perspective offers the opportunity to come one step closer to a solution to the question of the origin of life, which is one of the greatest mysteries of humankind. This paper illustrates some recent advancements in this area and points out possible directions for further research.

This essay considers reactions to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in particular the ways in which the founders of English Methodism, John and Charles Wesley used the event in their sermons and hymns respectively. The Wesleys focused on the vengeful power of the divine in order to urge people to look into their hearts and change their ways to avoid damnation. In contrast, the reaction to the global natural disasters of 2005 has been quite different. The Archbishop of Canterbury's essay that emphasises the privacy of faith that exists because it is engaged in a struggle against doubt is compared with the Wesleyan response, and through these very different religious positions the contrast between eighteenth century and twenty-first century reactions to natural disasters is highlighted.

Most empirical studies of social stratification and inequality remain confined to the micrological level, while their very aim is to construct and to test macrological statements. The first part of this paper discusses the main hypotheses that are implicit in this research tradition and that do not allow the transition from micro to macro. Based on recent findings in this field, the second part outlines a macrosociological theory of stratification, which allows the possibility of deducing micro as well as macro propositions that remain unexplainable by micrological theories.

This article examines the increasing competition in the academic market between conventional terms such as postcolonial and anglophone literature and their cognates, and the newly current term world literature. Even in postcolonial studies circles, world literature is increasingly taken to refer not only to ‘the best ever written’, as before, but to literature produced within and in response to a globalizing world. The paper explores the different valences of this shift, and the tensions and contradictions it has generated within the wider anglophone literary field.

In contrast to other animals, humans are good at mind-reading in the sense that they can represent the contents of the minds of others. In this article, the competence for inter-subjectivity is divided into representing the emotions, the attention, the intentions and the beliefs and knowledge of others. Recent attempts to exploit control theory for modelling various cognitive functions are discussed and it is outlined how this modelling approach can be combined with the analysis of inter-subjectivity.

The understanding of welfare states hitherto suffers from characteristic biases – national, political and disciplinary. This paper proposes a generalized framework for international comparative research, which remains as neutral as possible to such biases. The guarantee of social rights for everybody and the issue of societal reproduction are taken as reference points to define the political criteria for social welfare. However, politics and social policies remain a partial aspect of the production of welfare in a given society. A theory of the welfare state has to take into account the interactions among household production, market production and associative forms of welfare production, on the one side, and of political interventions on the other.

Through a panel analysis conducted in Bavaria, which covers two adjacent elections – the federal elections and the European elections in 2013 and 2014 – we examine the attitudinal factors that drive citizens’ propensity to turn out. We find that abstainers have generally low levels of knowledge, interest and sense of civic duty. National-level voters have relatively high interest, knowledge and sense of duty in national politics, but not in European affairs. In contrast, European- and national-level voters have high interest, knowledge and a sense of duty for both national and European politics. This finding contextualizes the characterization of European elections as second-order national elections. While prior research has established that voters make their vote choice based on national-level politics, we demonstrate that European elections are not national elections when it comes to citizens’ decision to vote. Rather, knowledge, interest and a sense of duty about national politics are not sufficient conditions for somebody to vote in the European elections. The person needs to have the same positive attitudes about European affairs as they have about national politics to participate in European elections.

Unprecedented technological advancements have radically changed the way we communicate and, at the same time, are effectively transforming science into e-science. In turn, this transformation calls for an evolution in scholarly communication. This review describes several innovations, spanning the last decades of scholarly communication in High Energy Physics: the first repositories, their interaction with peer-reviewed journals, a proposed model for Open Access publishing and a next-generation repository for the field. We hope that some of these innovations, which are deeply rooted in the highly-interconnected and worldwide flavour of the High-Energy Physics community, can serve as an inspiration to other communities.

It is widely accepted that internationalization and the increasing loss of parliamentary control over political power challenge the legitimacy of national democratic systems and their core institutions. We first present results from a study of public communication, which, when examined in the context of theories of legitimation, indicate that these processes do not necessarily lead to the erosion or breakdown of popular support for the nation state. The idea that there is a linear cause-and-effect relationship is overly simple, and a more detailed analysis is called for. Legitimation of a political system through public communication is a back-and-forth process which is determined by the system's specific institutional arrangements and by the fortuitous twists and turns of public debate. Nation states have more extensive, diverse and deeply rooted sources of legitimation than is often assumed.

Humans and technology are not in symbiosis. They are one species, not two. Humans, enveloped in artefacts of many kinds and ages (from writing, to airplanes), are evolving as one species, the ‘human & machine species’. This evolution is visible and recorded in our lifetime. Here, I illustrate the evolution of the human & machine species by focusing on commercial aircraft, the cooling of electronics, and modern athletics, which is a special laboratory for witnessing the evolution of animal locomotion. I show that these evolutionary forms of flow organization are in accord with, and can be predicted based on the law of physics that governs evolution in nature, bio and non-bio: the constructal law. Evolution, life and the human & machine species are physics.

Becoming a native listener is the necessary precursor to becoming a native speaker. Babies in the first year of life undertake a remarkable amount of work; by the time they begin to speak, they have perceptually mastered the phonological repertoire and phoneme co-occurrence probabilities of the native language, and they can locate familiar word-forms in novel continuous-speech contexts. The skills acquired at this early stage form a necessary part of adult listening. However, the same native listening skills also underlie problems in listening to a late-acquired non-native language, accounting for why in such a case listening (an innate ability) is sometimes paradoxically more difficult than, for instance, reading (a learned ability).

A major challenge for education and educational research is to build on our present understanding of learning to design environments for education that are conducive to fostering students’ self-regulatory and cooperative learning skills, transferable knowledge, and a disposition toward competent thinking and problem solving. Using the CLIA-model (Competence, Learning, Intervention, Assessment) as a framework for developing learning environments, and taking the growing knowledge base on self-regulated learning as a background, this article discusses an intervention study that aimed at the design and evaluation of a powerful learning environment for fostering self-regulated learning in university freshmen, thereby improving their learning proficiency. More specifically, the intervention in this environment focused on the trainability of four cognitive (orienting, planning, self-testing, and reflecting), and four complementary affective self-regulation skills (respectively self-judging, valuing, coping, and attributing). The effects of the learning environment were investigated using a pre-test – post-test design with a control group. The participants were 141 first-year students of business economics. The positive effects of the intervention on students’ self-regulated learning and on their academic performance is illustrated for two of the eight self-regulation skills, namely orienting (preparing one’s learning process by examining the characteristics of a learning task) and self-judging (evaluating one’s competences in view of an accurate appraisal of the efforts needed to approach and accomplish a learning task).

The varieties of the national innovation systems among European countries are reflected in the large differences, discrepancies and sometimes unexpected results in the innovation processes and their influence on labor productivity growth. The goal of this paper is to find the differences between the drivers of the innovation systems and their influence on growth of productivity between two groups of countries with different institutional settings in the period of the financial and economic crisis in Europe. The first group consists of a selection of CEE (Central and East European) countries. The second group consists of Germany, Norway, Spain and Portugal. In order to measure the role of innovation on productivity growth we use the CDM (Crépon, Duguet and Mairesse) model of simultaneous equations. The model directly links R&D engagement and intensity to innovation outcomes measured either as process or product innovation, and then estimates the effectiveness of the innovative effort leading to productivity gains. The company-level dataset is drawn from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS10). There is one common result for the two groups, that in general the probability for a typical firm to engage in innovation increases with its size. The other factors influencing the decision process differ. A firm’s productivity increases significantly with innovation output, but only with firms operating in Western Europe. The results for firms in Central and Eastern Europe indicate that these countries’ national innovation systems are vulnerable, and in periods of crises higher level of innovation output leads to lower labor productivity. Therefore, systemic faults in the national innovation systems result in their unsustainability, especially visible in periods of crises, as was the case in 2008–2010. When it comes to Western European countries, the financial and economic crisis did not have negative effects on their innovation systems as innovation activity resulted in higher levels of labor productivity. Regarding the CEE group of countries, the crisis influenced both the innovation process and labor productivity as a whole negatively.

This paper describes the evolution of wine in Spain from Phoenician times to the present, within a historical context. Each of the six main sections deserves more careful analysis, but the broad overview given here could be of interest to the curious (and thirsty) reader.