The concept of ‘symbolic interactionism’ has been particularly compelling since its inception as a method for studying human group life and human behaviour. Symbolic interactionism represents one of the most sociological reserach projects in social psychology, and the founders of communication, such as Lazarsfeld, Lewin, and Hovland, are all related to social psychology. Therefore, this article will attempt to answer the following questions through a historical review of the development of social psychology in the United States: symbolic interactionism is so closely related to communication studies, but why is it gradually missing in the establishment of communication studies? Can symbolic interactionism have a new academic resonance with contemporary communication research?

The earliest archaeological evidence of wine making in Southern France is dated 425 bce. Viticulture was present along the Mediterranean coast of France when the Romans arrived (second century bce) and flourished everywhere by the time they left (fifth century ce). For several centuries, long-distance trade virtually disappeared and the infrastructure fell apart. Profitable viticulture remained mostly local and was concentrated in the hands of the wealthy nobility and the Church. After the turn of the first Millennium, towns became cities and a middle-class emerged. In the twelfth century, the wine trade with England gained importance. Wines were shipped from Rouen, Nantes, La Rochelle, and later Bordeaux. Monastic orders controlled the most fertile land, especially in Champagne and Burgundy. In the thirteenth century, the Languedoc became a part of France. During the Avignon papacy, new vineyards were planted, in particular Châteauneuf-du-Pape. After the Renaissance, scientific studies gradually improved viticulture and wine-making. Ultimately, fermentation was understood. The Dutch greatly expanded the wine trade. Then, the first intentionally bubbly wines, distilled wines, and noble-rot wines were made. Informal rankings of Bordeaux wines led to the famous 1855 classification. In the late nineteenth century, nature-made catastrophes, especially phylloxera, transformed France into the largest wine-importing country in the world. Sub-standard and blended wines became common, hurting the reputation of all French wines. The two world wars, the Great Depression and Prohibition shrunk the market for wines. The way out involved strict quality-control measures and hard work. The next problem could well be global warming.

Digital transformation has become a prevalent feature of the twenty-first century, extending from business to all aspects of social life. Public administration has also been affected by this trend. However, no country undergoing a transition economy has been capable of matching the level of digitalization reached by developed nations. The study aims to evaluate the digital transformations of public administration in transition economies and assess their impact on indicators of population well-being, standard of living, and governance efficacy. The research methodology utilizes various methods, including comparison, grouping, correlation, regression, and cluster analysis, to evaluate the efficacy of digital transformations in public administration within transitioning economies. This article evaluates the extent of digital transformations in public administration and uncovers their favourable progress in countries with transitional economies from 2010 to 2020. An insignificant direct relationship (determination coefficient R2 ≍ 0.15) has been demonstrated between E-Government Development and Index GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita. However, a positive, strong connection between E-Government Development and the Government Effectiveness Index has been found. Countries with transitional economies were categorized into four clusters based on the degree of digitalization in their public administration. Results showed that there were no noteworthy gaps between the clusters, as most of the examined countries had comparable levels of development, experience and abilities in the digitalization of public administration.

There are profound expressions of remembrance of science and scientists, innovators and educators in Washington, DC. In this article, we survey the outdoor memorials and also include a few indoor memorials, if they are accessible to the public. There appears to be some predominance of physics and physicists, especially related to electricity among the memorials, but other areas of science are also represented. British and European scientists predominate, reflecting the time gap between memorials and contemporary science. Our coverage extends to a few concepts, such as education, with an emphasis on African American participation, energy, and the protection and conservation of the environment.

Most discussions on mediality and intermediality take their point of departure as contemporary digital media, social media included. Hence, earlier periods in cultural history are often regarded as simple forerunners for the highly complex situation in today’s globalized media culture based on digital technologies. It is true that electronic media technology and its social effects now have reached an unprecedented and accelerated technological complexity. However, this perspective tends to ignore the fact that from ancient times up to the late nineteenth century, a wealth of media innovations exercised an impact in their contemporary cultures and societies; innovations that equal the influence of digital media today: the introduction of writing, book printing, the printed press and its technologies, visual reproduction technologies, the telegraph, photography, film, the telephone and other innovations in the media world. The focus of this article is a few specific media innovations and the radical changes they generated over the last few hundred years in literature and art as well as in their cultural and societal contexts. Such innovations are steps in the long process that leads to recent media developments and their influence on experiences, knowledge, ideologies and human self-understanding.

This article highlights the problems faced by teachers, students, parents and authorities in Romania during the Coronavirus pandemic, as well as their management in the general context of the health crisis unfolding in this country. The documentation regarding Romania was compiled mainly on the basis of official reports and information taken from the media, due to the novelty of the subject for the case study presented. They were joined by theoretical-methodological works on the general epidemiological context and by studies on the particularities of the Romanian education system, which helped us to outline the theoretical-methodological background of the research. The authors have tried to highlight good practices, but also the errors that led to an increase in the number of cases and the imposition of restrictions, during the first four waves of the pandemic, with a major impact on educational activities in Romania. The main restrictions and advantages of online education, a first for the Romanian education system, are also highlighted.

Nineteenth-century European narrative literature repeatedly refers to the deliberate destruction (or intentions, attempts to destroy) of artificial images. The old artist in Honoré de Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece burns his collection of art; the hero of Alexander Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman threatens the monument to the Emperor Peter the Great in St Petersburg; the inhabitants of a French village in Prosper Mérimée’s novella The Venus of Ille re-melt the ‘evil’ antique statue found in the soil; the painter in Nikolai Gogol’s novel The Portrait compulsively buys and destroys masterpieces of painting; another picture, in Emile Zola’s novel L’Œuvre, is burned after the suicide of its author; the hero of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray attempts to stab his own portrait, which is displaying his sins; in The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, six busts of the French emperor are broken, in turn first by a thief, and finally by a detective. Being destroyed or disappearing seems to be the recurrent destiny of intradiegetic images (material images included into a narrative text as its actors), and the attempts of their obliteration always constitute a highlighted, spectacular moment in the narrative, and not just an outward sign of someone’s inner feelings; they are typically presented as a sacrifice of ‘excessive’ (magical, demonic) objects. In some cases, they are explained by a deviant behaviour of the character (madness, delinquency), but the literary text is organized in order to make the reader sympathize with the experiences of that ‘iconoclast’, and mentally reproduce his acts. An analysis of texts should disclose the mechanism of this self-identification and put the stories about the attempts on the image into the general framework of nineteenth-century visual and literary culture.

In this article we introduce the Schumpeterian growth paradigm, where growth results from innovations that render previous innovations obsolete. We show how this paradigm can be used to elucidate enigmas in recent growth history, such as the growth take-off, secular stagnation, and the middle-income trap. We then illustrate how the Schumpeterian paradigm can be tested using rich micro data, focusing on the relationship between product market competition and innovation-led growth. Finally, we use the paradigm to question some common wisdoms on growth policymaking.

This article presents the results of many years of research on creative life orientations carried out in socially diverse groups – among secondary school students, university students, and teachers – as regards their socio-demographic characteristics. It describes the theoretical assumptions of analyses, being part of the author’s original concept of creative life orientations. It discusses the understanding of this category, its interdisciplinary sources, and the specificity of life orientations in the creative versus conservative dimension. The methodological basis for the field research is explained, including the description of the original research tool, the Creative Life Orientation Preference Scale. The article then presents the generalized results of research on the respondents’ preferences for creative life orientations obtained as part of several research projects. These analyses are the basis for conclusions from research concerning the respondents’ preferences for creative, ambivalent and conservative life orientations, as well as their determinants.

Through comparative study, case and data analysis, this article summarizes the key points of the fourth amendment of Chinese Patent Law, and analyses the expected practical significance. Meanwhile, this article also discusses the shortcomings of the new patent law after the fourth amendment, and puts forward some suggestions for further improvement and refinement. The purpose of the fourth amendment of Chinese Patent Law is mainly to make the Chinese patent system more in line with the current technological and economic development in China as well as international cooperative innovation. The core points of the fourth amendment include: (1) strengthening patent enforcement by adopting punitive damages to intentional patent infringement, and increasing the patent protection duration extension for new pharmaceuticals, etc. (2) Promoting patent implementation by adding ‘Open Licence’ rules and improving employees’ invention regulations; (3) Improving design patent protection by expending protection duration and adopting protection for partial designs. (4) Increasing the provisions about the grace period for patent filings of inventions related to public interests. The new Patent Law 2020 will gradually show its significant practical effects. At the same time, however, there are still some regulations that need to be further clarified and refined for ensuring better implementation of the new law.

This is a modest personal attempt to understand the ideology behind the current antiscientific trends in STEM, and more specifically in mathematics. In simplified terms, these trends can be traced back to a growing imbalance between the old ideal of fairness based on individual merit and the increasingly predominant, unrealistic expectations of equality of outcomes in all areas of human activities. I draw on specific examples and various scientific studies to show how these trends undermine the teaching of science in the US and, increasingly, research in STEM disciplines.

An EU Fiscal Union is being discussed as a way to avoid future euro-crises and guarantee the stability of the euro. So far, however, it has proved politically impossible, as EU countries are unwilling to give up their sovereignty on fiscal policy. This article develops a bargaining model that sheds light on how fiscal pooling could become politically acceptable. The model differentiates between the ‘South’ (net beneficiaries) and the ‘North’ (net payers). We find that fiscal pooling should be done via a combination of the fiscal instruments with the highest fiscal multipliers. Instead of a single Fiscal Union, we therefore propose a combination of fiscal pooling instruments which, together, add up to the sufficient level of fiscal integration.

Iberian cathedrals are some of the most impressive religious buildings in Europe. Mostly erected between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, they are also the outcome of regional phases of growth and development. This article discusses this period favourable to the building of religious structures in the Iberian Peninsula, considering local dynamism, the religiosity of adherents and stimuli from the economic development of the surrounding areas. Using models of spatial autocorrelation, we observed different results for the Portuguese dioceses and for the Spanish ones. Spanish dioceses, in particular, exerted competitive effects on surrounding dioceses, making the erection of new cathedrals close to a diocese with an old or a valued cathedral less probable. It was also observed that the dynamism of cathedral construction in a given diocese tended to be replicated in the closest dioceses between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.

Empires usually operate on the premise that only imperial centres are carriers of the historical progress of humanity, whereas imperial peripheries are far removed from this progress’s blessing. According to John Maxwell Coetzee, the Dutch Empire considered South Africa as its own land, which deprived that country’s indigenous people of their citizen rights. Like the residents of European imperial peripheries who were relegated to similar zones of historical indistinction, they were doomed to the twilight of legal illegality. Unlike the regulated area of historical progress, their state of exception was ruled by the whims of imperial officials. ‘The security police could come in and out and blindfold and handcuff you without explaining why, and take you away to an unspecified site and do what they wanted to you’, he wrote in Diary of a Bad Year (1977: 171). In his novel Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee strategically ‘unmoors’ and ‘deterritorializes’ this peripheral state of exception, spreading its iconoclastic effects all over the ‘sacrosanct’ territory of history.