In the 1980s and 1990s West European welfare states were exposed to strong pressures to ‘renovate’, to retrench. However, the European social policy landscape today looks as varied as it did at any time during the 20th century. ‘New institutionalism’ seems particularly helpful to account for the divergent outcomes observed, and it explains the resistance of different structures to change through past commitments, the political weight of welfare constituencies and the inertia of institutional arrangements – in short, through ‘path dependency’. Welfare state institutions play a special role in framing the politics of social reform and can explain trajectories and forms of policy change. The institutional shape of the existing social policy landscape poses a significant constraint on the degree and the direction of change. This approach is applied to welfare state developments in the UK and France, comparing reforms of unemployment compensation, old-age pensions and health care. Both countries have developed welfare states, although with extremely different institutional features. Two institutional effects in particular emerge: schemes that mainly redistribute horizontally and protect the middle classes well are likely to be more resistant against cuts. Their support base is larger and more influential compared with schemes that are targeted on the poor or are so parsimonious as to be insignificant for most of the electorate. The contrast between the overall resistance of French social insurance against cuts and the withering away of its British counterpart is telling. In addition, the involvement of the social partners, and particularly of the labour movement in managing the schemes, seems to provide an obstacle for government sponsored retrenchment exercises.

This article is concerned with a closer investigation of the growing tendency for the state to intervene in contemporary party politics. It examines two trends. First, it looks more closely at the increased levels of regulation of party activity and behaviour in European democracies, discussing the empirical practice as well as the underlying normative paradigms of party regulation. Second, it examines the increased availability of public funding to political parties from a comparative perspective, while also exploring the motivations for its introduction in light of particular understandings of party democracy. It is argued that both dimensions constitute part of the way in which parties have strengthened their linkages with the state in recent years, and that parties, as a result of the increased involvement of the state in their internal affairs and external behaviour, have become increasingly defined as public utilities or semi-state agencies.

The expansion of higher education systems, new demands on institutions and growing pressures on resources have become common trends across most developed countries. They bring increased expectations of academic staff and appear to lead to greater differentiation in their work roles and activities. At the same time, the backgrounds of some academics are changing and they are developing new specialisms and interdisciplinary collaborations, becoming more mobile domestically and internationally and, for some, the profession is becoming increasingly insecure. The Changing Academic Profession study has produced a rich set of data on the preparation of academics for their roles and the individual circumstances of their working lives, among other aspects of the profession. Respondents to the survey reported on the degrees they have attained, the countries in which they studied for them, the age at which they qualified and the nature of the doctoral training they received. This paper explores the early career paths of academics, makes initial comparisons between different higher education systems and begins to explore how some of these national systems interrelate with each other through academic mobility. Respondents also reported on the disciplines they studied and now teach, the number of institutions worked in and their contractual conditions and income. These data give an indication of the various degrees of flexibility and mobility required of – or chosen by – academics in the early and later stages of their careers and the stability, or perhaps rigidity, of different higher education systems and national career patterns. The data also supplement other evidence of the employment conditions and remuneration of scholars in an increasingly globalised academic labour market.1,2 The conditions of academic work are explored through analysis of the views of survey respondents on the facilities, resources and personnel needed to support it and the degree of research collaboration undertaken. Academics from the 17 countries in the study seem more content with the physical and technical resources provided by their institutions than the personnel and funds available to support teaching and research. Finally, it is suggested that the propensity for collaborative or individual research may be partially related to national differences in academics’ mobility during their training for the profession.

The science system of Western civilization is facing irreversible transformations. These transformations will affect the relationship between the public image of science and the actual practice within the sciences. In a situation in which scientists are increasingly asked ‘what have you lately done for us’, the alleged purity and objectivity of the sciences have to be reconsidered and we have to rethink the place of people in the knowledge produced by the sciences. Bringing together insights from social and historical studies of science, this article argues for the awareness of a more local, historically and socially contingent knowledge production, which – due to this local embeddedness – can lead to a socially more robust science.

Our intuition assumes that there is a centre in our brain in which all relevant information converges and where all decisions are reached. To neurobiologists, the brain presents itself as a highly distributed system in which a very large number of processes occur simultaneously and in parallel without requiring coordination by a central convergence centre. The specific architecture resembles, in many respects, small world networks and raises the question of how the multiple operations occurring in parallel are bound together in order to give rise to coherent perception and action. Based on data obtained with massive parallel recordings, the hypothesis will be forwarded that temporal coherence serves as an important organizing principle and that this coherence is achieved by the synchronization of oscillatory activity in distinct frequency bands.

An individual's personal sense of well-being (SWB) is an indicator of psychological adjustment and successful ageing. Health and functional capacity are viewed as important sources of life quality in old age but very little is known about their effects on SWB over time. Can older individuals maintain SWB despite declining health? Longitudinal data from the Berlin Aging Study, a locally representative sample of men and women aged 70 to 100+, indicate that cumulative health-related chronic life strains that characterize the Fourth Age set a constraint on the potential of the older individual to experience the positive side of life.

It seems to be well known that life cannot arise in a racemic mixture of molecules (L=D). The various physical mechanisms that could influence the homochirality of the molecules responsible for life are reviewed together with a model where these molecules might be produced in the galaxy prior to the formation of the earth. The focus is on the influence of a powerful supernovae explosion to affect the homochirality of these molecules. Possible tests of this concept with meteorites and future space missions are described.

Human life changes with time. It seems therefore obvious that most of the phenomena that psychology and psychotherapy are concerned with are dynamic in nature. For human development processes, human change and learning processes, the dynamics and prognosis of mental disorders, problems manifesting in social systems such as couples, families, teams, or the question of how psychotherapy works, self-organization is ubiquitous. In the context of self-organization, complexity is a quality of changing patterns and patterns of change, produced by nonlinear coupled systems.

We approach Turkish mobility using a culture of migration perspective with reference to conflict. Conflicts are defined broadly into an array of situations including minor disputes, tensions or latent conflicts on the one hand and major violent events on the other. These situations, defined along a security continuum shape individual perceptions. Increasing perceptions of human insecurity are positively correlated to a rise in migration propensity. Applied to Turkey’s international migration history we note that major conflicts have determined inflows and outflows of populations and created a Turkish culture of migration, which reinforces continuous population flows between countries of destination and origin. Migration flows between Germany and Turkey are exemplary in this regard.

In recent decades, psychologists have become increasingly interested in our ability to speak. This paper sketches the present theoretical perspective on this most complex skill of homo sapiens. The generation of fluent speech is based on the interaction of various processing components. These mechanisms are highly specialized, dedicated to performing specific subroutines, such as retrieving appropriate words, generating morpho-syntactic structure, computing the phonological target shape of syllables, words, phrases and whole utterances, and creating and executing articulatory programmes. As in any complex skill, there is a self-monitoring mechanism that checks the output. These component processes are targets of increasingly sophisticated experimental research, of which this paper presents a few salient examples.

The internationalisation of the academy varies according to individual, institutional and structural characteristics. Among factors influencing it, discipline plays a major role. Relying on data collected by two international comparative studies – the Changing Academic Profession Study and the Academic Profession in Europe Study – this article focuses on two aspects of the internationalisation of the academy – namely, international research collaboration and international mobility – asking whether these two aspects are associated with academic disciplines and how. Results from multivariate data analyses – comparing Europe and the Rest of the World or other meaningful macro-regions – show that in some areas, such as international research collaboration and educational circulation, the international behaviours of academics belonging to different disciplines diverge, while in some others, such as research productivity related to international research collaboration and short-term professional circulation, they converge.

The individual characteristics of leaders and voters have assumed great importance in modern political discourse. Pervasive media influence points to leaders' personality as an anchor around which political information is organized in drawing in and/or deterring the electorate's preferences. Voters' traits, values and perceptions of politicians are no less important than traditional socio-demographic characteristics such as gender, age, educational level, occupation and income in explaining political preferences. Recent findings suggest that politics is becoming personalized, as political choices increasingly depend on voters' personality. More specifically, voters' distinctive pattern of habits, attitudes and values, serve as a compass that grants coherence to their own preferences and that helps them make sense of politicians' behaviour.

In many languages, the concept of ‘Civil society’ has had an astonishing career over the last 10 to 15 years, in disciplines such as history and sociology as well as with the public at large. This article presents a short history of the concept, offers a definition and explores the reasons for its popularity by identifying its conceptual ‘opponents’, which have changed over time. It discusses the changing relations between civil society, the market economy, government and the private sphere. It deals with the affinity between civil society and the middle classes in some areas and periods. It finally explores the trends and limits of the emergence of a transnational civil society in Europe. It is an overview that deals with the present problems from a historical perspective.

In contrast to other previous and later disasters the Lisbon earthquake was more than a local disaster that changed the life of the Portuguese population and later became subject to the merciless oblivion of history. This cataclysm left lasting traces in European science, social life, religion and philosophy. The material effects were rapidly felt all over Europe, also affecting the economy and the whole conception of how humans should think and act in a world where such events occurred. This paper follows the change in Immanuel Kant's philosophy after the earthquake based on the thesis that this event contributed fundamentally to the formation of Kant's mature philosophy and its paradigmatic status in European thought until the present day.

‘How did life start on Earth?’ and ‘Why were left-handed amino acids selected for the architecture of proteins?’ A new attempt to answer these questions of high public and interdisciplinary scientific interest will be provided by this review. It will describe most recent experimental data on how the basic and molecular building blocks of life, amino acids, formed in a prebiotic setting. Most amino acids are chiral, that is that they cannot be superimposed with their mirror image molecules (enantiomers). In processes triggering the origin of life on Earth, the equal occurrence, i.e. the parity between left-handed amino acids and their right-handed mirror images, was violated. In the case of amino acids, the balance was tipped to the left – as a result of which life's proteins today exclusively implement the left-handed form of amino acids, called l-amino acid enantiomers. Neither plants, nor animals, including humans, make use of d-amino acids for the molecular architecture of their proteins (enzymes). This review addresses the molecular asymmetry of amino acids in living organisms, namely the preference for left-handedness. What was the cause for the violation of molecular parity of amino acids in the emergence of life on Earth? All the fascinating models proposed by physicists, chemists, and biologists will be vividly presented including the scientific conflicts. Special emphasis will be given to amino acid enantiomers that were subjected to chiral photons. The interaction between racemic molecules and chiral photons was shown to produce an enantiomeric enrichment that will be discussed in the context of absolute asymmetric synthesis. The concluding paragraphs will describe the attempt to verify any of those models with the chirality-module of the Rosetta mission. This European space mission contains probe Philae that was launched on board the Rosetta spacecraft with the aim of landing on the icy surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and analysing whether chiral organic compounds are present that could have been brought to the Earth by comet impacts.

The dark matter problem is almost a century old. Since the 1930s evidence has been growing that our cosmos is dominated by a new form of non-baryonic matter that holds galaxies and clusters together and influences cosmic structures up to the largest observed scales. At the microscopic level, we still do not know the composition of this dark, or invisible, matter, which does not interact directly with light. The simplest assumption is that it is made of new particles that interact with gravity and, at most, weakly with known elementary particles. I will discuss searches for such new particles, both space- and Earth-bound, including those experiments placed in deep underground laboratories. While a dark matter particle has not yet been identified, even after decades of concerted efforts, new technological developments and experiments have reached sensitivities where a discovery might be imminent, albeit certainly not guaranteed.

The ascendancy of proportional representation as the electoral system of choice, and pervasive concerns with the demographic representativeness of parliaments, both testify to the importance that is attached to ‘descriptive’ or ‘microcosmic’ representation in politics, despite persistent doubts about its desirability. This paper makes three points. First, representation as representativeness presupposes the existence of stable and meaningful social or political collectivities, which can be reflected in the composition of parliament, and this condition is undermined by the general trend towards individualization, which can be observed throughout Western Europe. Second, this trend necessitates a conceptualization of political representation not as a state, but as a dynamic relationship between the citizen and the representative. This relationship can be characterized both by its direction (from below or from above), and by the moment at which popular control is exercised (before or after the representative's period in office). Third, it is argued that both growing uncertainty about citizen preferences and the transformation of political parties into para-statal agencies push towards representation from above; and that both growing unpredictability of the political agenda and European integration push towards ex-post popular control. These developments call for greater attention to mechanisms of accountability in representative democracies.

Between 1854 and 1881, the Ottoman Empire went through one of the most critical phases of the history of its relations with European powers. Beginning with the first foreign loan contracted in 1854, this process was initially dominated by a modest level of indebtedness, coupled with sporadic and inconsequential attempts by western powers to impose some control over the viability of the operation. From 1863 on, a second and much more intense phase began, which eventually led to a snowballing effect of accumulated debts. The formal bankruptcy of the Empire in 1875 resulted in the collapse of the entire system in one of the most spectacular financial crashes of the period. It was only six years later, in 1881, that a solution was found in the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration that would control a large portion of state revenues. The new system restored the financial stability of the Empire, but profoundly modified its rapports de force with Europe by imposing on it a form of foreign control that would have been unthinkable only ten or twenty years earlier. While bringing a much-needed stability to the flailing Ottoman financial situation and thus opening the way to economic development, the new system also radically changed the very nature of the process of integration, by introducing an imperialist dimension that had been lacking in the previous decades.

Two broad frameworks are used to describe and analyse the mobility of academic staff. The first, and dominant, framework focuses on flows from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘core’, although that ‘core’ is also evolving (and is no longer dominated by North America and Western Europe but is increasingly likely to embrace dynamic East Asia systems). This first approach is labelled ‘hegemonic internationalisation’. The second framework focuses instead on issues of development, the emergence of global communities and social movements. This is labelled ‘fluid globalisation’. The article argues that the latter may be more useful for understanding trends in academic mobility.

On 1 May 2004, Europe changed. This date marks both a beginning and an end. The enlargement of the European Union signals the beginning of a new phase in the history of Western Europe, and, for the new members from Eastern Europe, the end of a long period of exclusion and separation. Commentaries on this epochal event usually focus on ‘hard’ institutional factors such as political rearrangements, legal coordination and economic readjustments, etc. I will focus more on the ‘soft’ cultural and human factors; what I consider to be the intangibles and imponderables of a new, emerging Europe. I am convinced that culture really matters in social life.