Symmetry is a relevant concept in sociological theories of exchange. It is rooted in the evolutionary old norm of social reciprocity and is particularly important in social contracts. Symmetry breaking through violation of the norm of reciprocity generates strain in micro-social systems and, above all, in victims of non-symmetric exchange. In this contribution, adverse healthconsequences of symmetry breaking in contractual social exchange are analysed, with a main focus on the employment contract. Scientific evidence is derived from prospective epidemiological studies testing the model of effort-reward imbalance at work. Overall, a twofold elevated risk of incident disease is observed in employed men and women who are exposed to non-symmetric exchange. Health risks include coronary heart disease, depression and alcohol dependence, among others. Preliminary results suggest similar effects on health produced by symmetry breaking in other types of social relationships (e.g. partnership, parental roles). These findings underline the importance of symmetry in contractual social exchange for health and well-being.

The memory of classical empires has been prominent in both Chinese and European history but it has had a different imprint in each culture. The Han territories were periodically reunified in part and were more consistently ruled as unified empires from the 13th century onwards. In medieval Western Europe the Carolingian and the Holy Roman empires boasted of being renewals of the glorious ancient models but they developed in a different environment, were no longer built on the Roman scale, and only borrowed selectively from the Roman repertoire. In this essay we examine how differences in power relationships, fiscal regimes, and territoriality help explain both the peripheral impact of the classical model in the European context and the enhanced prospects for it in Chinese history from the 12th century onwards.

This paper will examine one of the most characteristic syntactic properties of languages, namely the case system for the following three Sinitic languages spoken in Northwestern China: Línxià (or Hézhōu), Tāngwāng, Gāngōu, which have been sometimes viewed as ‘mixed languages’. An answer to the following main questions will be tentatively suggested in the conclusion: do we really have case suffixes in these languages (cases are a morphological notion) or simply thematic roles expressed by postpositions (thematic roles are a semantic notion)? Do we really have a Qinghai-Gansu linguistic area (Sprachbund), as has been suggested? Can these Sinitic languages be characterized as being mixed languages?

The main resource for a country’s endogenous growth is its human and cultural capital. Universities play a very important, but not the only, role in maintaining and building this resource. Universities are institutions situated amongst strong and changing forces. They are caught between government, market and academia. In many institutions, this has led to a strengthening of the executive leadership at the expense of the influence of collegial bodies, and external (to the institution) members have been introduced into the governing bodies. This development has resulted in diminished state control, and more flexible and autonomous systems, but also to expanded reporting and accounting, which often in reality limit freedom and are perceived as control. Will academic creativity thrive within this reality? How would research universities evolve? This article claims that today’s university development starts out from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s universe but will play out in that of his brother Alexander’s.

Massive government-financed rescue operations for banking and insurance industries in the United States and in Europe, seeking to contain the financial crisis that culminated in 2008, amounted to ‘the biggest, broadest and fastest government response in history.’1 This ‘great stabilisation,’ as The Economist called it, resulting in ‘quasi’ or ‘shadow nationalization,’2 cast doubt on the notion, fashionable at the height of the neoliberal wave, that the state was essentially on its way out, as many of its tasks and responsibilities were oozing steadily and irreversibly toward the market. The state and, by the same token, the political seemed back – with a vengeance, triggering solemn announcements of ‘the return of the state’ and ‘the end of the ideology of public powerlessness.’3 Observers concurred. ‘Free-market capitalism, globalization, and deregulation’ had been ‘rising across the globe for 30 years,’ yet that era now had ended: ‘Global economic and financial integration are reversing. The role of the state, together with financial and trade protectionism, is ascending.’4 Triggering a perceived ‘paradigm shift towards a more European, a more social state,’ even in the United States and in China, the crisis was seen to herald a move ‘back towards a mixed economy.’5 The question, meanwhile, remained: had the state indeed withdrawn as much during the neoliberal era as is often assumed?

Along the West-Scandinavian coast, agrarian settlements, which are found along fjords and in valleys, are separated from each other and from the lands to the east by high mountains. Thus, seafaring was the main mode of communication from the Stone Age onwards. Unlike the coasts of Britain, Ireland and continental Europe, this 1000 km long coastline is littered with thousands of islands, islets and reefs, which create a protected coastal sailing route – the Norðvegr – from which the kingdom took its name. The author discusses this sailing-route's significance for the creation of the kingdom as well as for the Viking incursions in Britain, Ireland and the Continent c. 790–1050.

Interdisciplinarity is often quoted as a means to solve the complex social challenges faced by humanity, and the future of research is thus seen as increasingly interdisciplinary. However, there are risks and challenges to embarking on interdisciplinary research, particularly for early-career researchers. Encounters – bringing together early-career researchers to cultivate their interdisciplinary skills or to develop new projects – have been proposed and trialled as a means to boost interdisciplinarity amongst early-career researchers and equip them with the necessary skills for successful project delivery. However, little follow-up evaluation has been undertaken, especially considering career impacts several years after encounter participation. This article focuses on two encounter types and evaluates the level of interdisciplinary interactions obtained and the benefits experienced by participants. In conclusion, encounters are found to be highly successful, resulting in many projects and skills/career development. As such, further funding should be allocated to this type of event.

The paper briefly outlines the history of Chinese educational migration to the West and discusses some of the policies and socioeconomic trends that have made China the largest source of international students today. It then presents findings from studies of Chinese students’ experiences in Europe, which indicate that personal development and time for reflection is becoming part of what some middle class students and their parents expect from the study abroad experience. This opens new possibilities for European universities in the fields of humanities and social sciences. At the same time we will probably see a growing demand for study abroad programmes that offer training for social service sector professionals, a field where China has a perceived need for developing new attitudes and skills.

The study of language acquisition during the first year of life is reviewed. We identified three areas that have contributed to our understanding of how the infant copes with linguistic signals to attain the most basic properties of its native language. Distributional properties present in the incoming utterances may allow infants to extract word candidates in the speech stream as shown in the impoverished conditions of artificial grammar studies. This procedure is important because it would work well for most natural languages. We also highlight another important mechanism that allows infants to induce structure from very scarce data. In fact, humans tend to project structural conjectures after being presented with only a few utterances. Finally, we illustrate constraints on processing that derive from perceptual and memory functions that arose much earlier during the evolutionary history of the species. We conclude that all of these machanisms are important for the infants to gain access to its native language.

Equality of opportunity is a central aim in the political agenda of many nations, and political leaders consequently speak about the importance of reducing differences in educational attainment between young persons from differing social origins. Such differences are apparent at two educational steps – the transition from compulsory school to upper secondary and at the transition from upper secondary school to tertiary institutions. Both steps have to be considered if the interest lies in attainment of university degrees, since the outcome at the first transition affects that at the second. Differences in educational attainment by parental origin appear through two separate mechanisms. Children from higher origins tend to perform better at school than other children, and consequently they more than others continue to higher educational levels. However, also among children who did perform equally well, children from more advantaged origins more often than other children choose to continue to higher and more academically oriented tracks. Children of immigrants tend to perform less well at school than native-born children, but given performance, they tend more than the native-born to choose to continue in academically oriented school tracks.

Science has undergone remarkable changes both in scale, organization and influence over the last half century. It has changed the way we live and is more essential than ever before. Although the scientific effort today is more international than it was 50 years ago, only a small part of the world is fully engaged in this process. It is of course impossible in a single article to provide an overall balanced account of these developments and this is not an attempt to do so. Instead, certain trends are illustrated here, based solely on the personal experiences of an individual who – during a long career in the Life Sciences, and through work in many international science organizations – has been a witness and played a role in some of the changes that have occurred, often influenced by major political events.

Translating party pledges into coalition agreements is a crucial goal of after-election coalition negotiations. Full adoption is the best result for the bargaining party, while limited adoption is a kind of compromise forced by coalition partners, and non-adoption can be seen as a defeat. The question of what undermines the compromise and defeat in coalition agreements is, however, rarely answered. This article formulates hypotheses concerning the effect of consensual pledges among coalition parties, and party and voter-issue salience on parties’ ability to adopt their pledges and adopt them fully or partially. The effect of party level characteristics is considered. The analysis is provided on a new dataset of narrow Czech coalition party pledges in three governments established after elections in 2006, 2010 and 2013. Multinomial logit regression is used for the statistical analysis.

The 20th-century has been the century of mass politics, and the mass parties that emerged at the beginning of this century became deeply rooted within wider society. The passing of this golden age of the party has now been marked by two distinct processes of change. On the one hand, parties have become more distant from society and more closely linked to government and the state. On the other hand, there has been a decline in the political identities of the parties, such that voters now find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between them. These changes, and the related transformation of politics into administration, have led to a growth in popular indifference to parties and to politics in general, as well as to a declining sense of engagement. Should this trend continue, it is mass spectacle rather than mass involvement that is likely to characterize the future of mass politics.

This paper focuses on Hungary’s illiberal regimes from the perspective of the opposition – a perspective we believe has been under-scrutinized so far. It argues that in order to understand the regime’s success it is crucial to explain why opposition parties have been unable to offer a credible alternative. The paper argues that the opposition is in a trap with three unfavourable factors mutually strengthening each other and undermining its ability for success. They are (1) the cartel party system; (2) the weak social embeddedness of opposition parties; and (3) lack of their presence in local politics. At the same time, we also point out that the rise of a tiny joke-party’s success (The Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party) highlights that these obstacles can be overcome even with very limited resources. Nevertheless, it is still unclear if the Dog Party’s innovative approach to doing politics could be ‘institutionalized’ – i.e. if it offers a feasible model strategy for opposition parties – or it is only an efficient way of mocking and criticizing how the political system operates.

The purpose of this paper is to raise the question of the relative roles of cognitive and functional factors in the evolution of grammar. The conclusion is that they have both played important roles, although unbalanced ones. Human language originated with the linking of conceptual structures and the vocal output system. In other words, cognitive factors were the first to shape grammar. But with the passage of time, the needs of communication came to play an ever-more important role in grammar. Human language today hence reflects the influence of both types of factors.

One of the most difficult and uncertain areas of research offered the historian of literature today is the attempt to define ‘European literature’ as a corpus and an object of literary and/or historical analysis. The various efforts of the past few years – in the form of anthologies as well as histories of literature – usually remain torn between a unitary presupposition that seems to be the only acceptable political-historical way of justifying the body of European literature and an irreducibly composite – not to say heterogeneous – reality that is not amenable to the representations of Europe as reduced to this superficial unity. If we are to reflect on the modalities and specificities of such a historical undertaking – which has so few equivalents in the world that it is all the harder to model – and shake off political models and representations, it seems to me that we need to work from another hypothesis. One of the few trans-historical features that constitutes Europe, in effect, one of the only forms of both political and cultural unity – one that is paradoxical but genuine – that makes of Europe a coherent whole, is none other than the conflicts3 and competitions that pitted Europe’s national literary spaces against one another in relentless and ongoing rivalry. Starting from this hypothesis, we would then have to postulate that, contrary to commonly accepted political representations, the only possible literary history of Europe would be the story of the rivalries, struggles and power relations between these national literatures. As a consequence, rather than a unity that remains if not problematic at least far from being achieved, it would no doubt be better to speak of an ongoing literary unification of Europe, in other words a process that occurs, occurred and is still occurring – paradoxically – through these struggles. This upside-down history would trace the models and counter-models, the powers and dependences, the impositions and the resistances, the linguistic rivalries, the literary devices and genres regarded as weapons in these specific, perpetual and merciless struggles. It would be the history of literary antagonisms, battles and revolts.

The history of medicine in the Roman world has frequently been viewed from the perspective of the Elder Pliny (ca. AD 70), who described an invasion of incompetent, worthless charlatans from Greece and beyond. This extreme viewpoint was not shared by many of the inhabitants of Italy and the Western provinces, who welcomed these outsiders. This paper looks at the reasons why Greek-speaking doctors migrated westwards, and, through the writings of their most famous representative, Galen of Pergamum (127–216), how they became integrated into a Latin society.

The UN commitment to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 poses a major challenge. It is, first and foremost, a political challenge to wealthy countries, to provide the necessary transfer of resources, and to developing countries, to make effective use of these transfers. But it is also an intellectual challenge, to economists and other scientists, to better understand the processes by which the MDGs can be achieved. This article focuses on two aspects. On the substantive side, it examines how we can achieve increased funding for development, particularly via new methods of finance, such as global taxes. On the intellectual side, it describes how a new branch of economics is developing – global public finance – that can contribute to the analysis of new sources of funding for the MDGs and of the working of the global economy.

The past half-century has been perhaps the European university's greatest age, even compared with the earlier flourishing in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and during the industrial revolution of the 19th century. More universities have been founded; student numbers have increased at an unprecedented rate; and the scholarly and scientific productivity of the universities has been unparalleled. But the university has become for the first time a truly global institution, cut off from its roots in Europe and Europe's colonial empires and open to other, non-European and non-élite, knowledge traditions. At the same time the tight relationship between the university and modernity, or ‘movement’, has been increasingly questioned. For more than a century that relationship has been axiomatic, relegating the university's other role as an agent of continuity and tradition into second place. But the dynamism of socio-economic and technological change in the so-called ‘Knowledge Society’ is now so great that the university's role as a force for stabilization may become more important. As a result the centrality of the university in the European experience could be diminished.

First, this paper sketches the development of labour history as a historical subdiscipline up to the 1970s and 1980s when it became a booming field, an area of great excitement and high productivity. Why this should have been the case is an interesting question to ask in hindsight. Secondly, I discuss certain trends in the last 10–15 years that are related to a decline in this field, not in terms of sophistication, but certainly with regard to the field's popularity among historians, students and the public. Dealing with this rather dramatic change might tell us something about the way my discipline – modern history with a stress on social history – works, where it gets its vitality from, its conjunctures and fashions. Thirdly, I present some personal ideas about how one could, and perhaps should, deal with the present situation, its problems and its opportunities. I am presently working on the third volume of a history of labour in 19th century Germany – a project to which I have returned after many years. Some of the general problems I have encountered in this project will also be dealt with, indirectly, in this paper.