The transition in welfare states from compensatory to service-oriented models also implies a shift of the locus of action from the state to local administrations. Cities in particular seek space within national bounds to devise their own policy solutions targeted to city-specific needs as a more responsive government layer, with the prospect of providing more targeted service provision on the basis of locality and proximity principles. Whether such social innovation potential is met depends on scope conditions, such as the learning environment, the design of the decentralisation and the capacity of cities to scale up smaller projects. In this paper, we trace the policy process around local social investment innovations in Amsterdam across three domains: addressing teacher shortages, combatting energy poverty and integrating the long-term unemployed into the labour market. In each of the domains, Amsterdam emerged as a frontrunner and innovator, instigating broader change. The city is at the frontier of societal change and acts as ‘a stopgap’, filling gaps left by national policy default. Overall, the case of Amsterdam shows the importance in adopting a multi-level perspective in studying new dynamics in welfare state transitions.

Exploring the minimum wage policy discontinuities at county borders, we find that minimum wage hikes induce industrial firms to pollute more and reduce their abatement efforts. State ownership mitigates these negative effects, suggesting its role in addressing externality. The adverse environmental impacts are attenuated by the staggered increase in pollution discharge fees across provinces. These effects are stronger for firms with higher minimum wage sensitivity, lower market power, and greater financial constraints, and for firms that are the subsidiaries of nonlisted companies. Overall, our findings highlight the unintended environmental consequences of labor market policies.

Now mostly derided as a musical vandal, the cellist Friedrich Grützmacher (1832–1903) was seen during his lifetime as a noble and serious artist, highly respected as a performer and sought-after as a teacher. His numerous and heavily annotated performing editions – and in particular his pedagogical editions of older works – represent his attempt to preserve and disseminate a style of playing that was referred to at the time as ‘classical’ (classisch or klassisch). While the concept of classic works, as it developed in the nineteenth century, has been studied in depth by Lydia Goehr, William Weber and others, the related yet distinct concept of classical musicianship is relatively unexplored. This chapter traces the cultural resonances of the term ‘classisch’ as it was used in the German-speaking press over the course of Grützmacher’s lifetime, arguing that it represents a complement or parallel to the idea of classic works, with an independent connection to Romantic Idealism and Hellenism. The chapter then examines the performance practice implications of classical musicianship through the lens of Grützmacher’s editions, with a particular focus on a disciplined sense of tempo, a grand and tranquil physical presence, and a highly nuanced use of the bow in the service of musical character. Viewing classical musicianship in this way clears Grützmacher’s editions of the charge of vandalism by challenging us to reconsider the ideal relationship between composer and performer, as well as the fundamental purpose of an edition.

The dividing line between work and non-work structures all contemporary European societies. Decisions on what work is done, by whom, at what price, and under which conditions, shape individual lives and underpin economic, political and social institutions through the production of wealth and inequality. If the dualism of work and non-work invests activities and interaction with meaning and value, producing cultural and social status along the way, it is historically highly contingent. Neither ‘work’ nor ‘non-work’ means the same thing across time and space. Yet, while dialectically dependent on one another, non-work has received far less attention by contemporary historians, who have by and large followed a pattern of identifying work with labour, whether in capitalist or socialist configurations. In contrast, the present forum suggests an integrative perspective in which both the practices and habits of not-working while at work and forms of wageless life beyond unemployment figure prominently.

We identify strong cross-border property rights as a driver for the globalization of innovation. Using 67 million patents from over 100 patent offices, we construct novel measures of the three stages of innovation diffusion: adoption, sourcing, and collaboration. Exploiting staggered bilateral investment treaties (BITs) as shocks to cross-border property rights, we show that signatory countries increase technology adoption and sourcing from each other; they also increase R&D collaborations. The results are particularly strong for countries with weak domestic institutions and technologies with high imitation risks. Increases in R&D-related foreign investments explain most of the results.

This article discusses the role of affect in diasporic belonging, especially when a community is affected by conflict, tracing the ways it circulates in and through discourses and interactions across different generations. Drawing on a linguistic ethnographic project on Greek-Cypriot diaspora, and following recent calls for paying more attention to affect in sociolinguistic analyses, it analyses the communicative dynamics of diasporic affect. Understanding diasporic affect as the circulation and communication of affects/emotions between individuals within a diasporic space, which is—to an extent—regulated by community norms, we analyze the discursive and communicative mechanisms participants used to navigate emotional norms about collective memory, conflict, and diasporic identifications. At the same time, we show how these mechanisms are productive of subjectivities that could either reinforce, disrupt, or redefine these norms. In doing so, we discuss the political implications of diasporic affect and the rules governing its expression and enactment in discourses and communicative practices. (Affect, conflict, diaspora, emotions, interaction, belonging)*

Swelling soils, particularly those rich in smectite, present significant challenges to civil engineering due to their shrinking–swelling behaviour. Lime stabilization is a commonly used practice to address this, but the reactivity of smectite minerals in an alkaline limestone environment differs widely. This study investigates the reactivity of two Moroccan smectite-rich clays – montmorillonite-dominated bentonite and stevensite/saponite-rich bentonite – when treated with aerial lime. Through mineralogical, microstructural and mechanical analyses, this study highlights the distinct behaviour of montmorillonite, which reacts with lime to form calcium silicate hydrate gels, compared to the inert response of stevensite/saponite. Despite its low pozzolanic activity, stevensite-bentonite demonstrates greater mechanical strength, reaching 2.5 MPa in the S3 mixture (90% stevensite-bentonite and 10% lime). This strength is attributed to the formation of calcite through the de-dolomitization of dolomite. The findings reveal different stabilization mechanisms between dioctahedral and trioctahedral smectites, offering new insights for soil stabilization strategies involving these smectite types.

Designing and developing smart antennas with adaptive radiation characteristics is an integral part for present-day communication systems. The versatile capabilities of Time-modulated fourth-dimensional (4D) antenna arrays can provide that crucial adaptability if properly designed. This work discusses an effective analysis of 4D antenna arrays to achieve less-attenuating radiation patterns with simultaneously suppressed sidelobe and sidebands. The 4D arrays offer an additional benefit over standard arrays in the sense that the requisite amplitude tapering to lower the undesired radiations can be accomplished by controlling only the switch ON times of the radiating elements instead of using attenuators. The idea of splitting pulses by keeping the total switch ON durations constant, is exploited here as an additional degree of freedom for beamforming of all the radiation patterns. The unwanted radiations in terms of sidelobes as well as sideband radiations (SRs) at the fundamental and harmonic frequencies, respectively are simultaneously minimized to improve the radiation efficiencies of the 4D array. To address the conflicting aims for the synthesis of radiation patterns, a wavelet-mutation based heuristic method is also proposed. The multi-objective problem in hand is modulated in to a single objective cost function as minimization problem. The proposed outcomes are reported and compared with other state of the art works related to the same domain. Furthermore, a detailed statistical analysis is also provided to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach.

The history of the laws of war is an increasingly popular research field of international law. Claire Vergerio’s book War, States, and International Order: Alberico Gentili and the Foundational Myth of the Laws of War is a good-read in this regard. It provides a critical analysis of how 19th-century international lawyers misread and reinterpreted the writings of the 16th-century Italian jurist Alberico Gentili to establish the modern sovereign state as the sole legitimate subject of the laws of war. In this review essay, I offer a critical reading of War, States and International Order, positioning its intervention in the context of broader scholarly debates.

Here, we explore variation in a new record of archaeological house-floor sizes from the southwestern United States relative to spatially explicit time series estimates of local precipitation. Our results show that inequality becomes more severe during periods of high precipitation. This supports the theory suggesting that inequality may emerge where resources are dense, predictable, and clumped within heterogenous and circumscribed environments. Our findings indicate that wealth inequality may emerge among populations with similar subsistence adaptations as a result of local socioenvironmental variation.

This study reconstructs the numerological considerations behind a Judeo-Greek innovation in religious terminology, with a focus on its key element—Hellenization of the Hebrew name of God. It demonstrates that the Greek nomen sacrum can also be interpreted as a sacred number, a fact that directly infuses the otherwise broad term κύριος with numinosity. This observation carries multiple implications for understanding the phenomena of nomina sacra and “names-numbers” as well as other related topics, such as the emergence of Greek and Hebrew alphabetic numerals, early Jewish and Christian numeric symbolism, and early binitarian theology.

Polyploidization is known to cause changes in the ploidy levels of plant somatic cells that affect the morphological, physiological and chemical composition. The aim of this research was to investigate the effects of tetraploidization in olive. To do this, several characteristics of 1-year-old shoots of two olive genotypes were compared: the diploid cultivar Leccino (L), and its tetraploid mutant Leccino Compact (LC), considered a slow-growing genotype. LC differed significantly from L in the morphological characteristics, with higher values of diameter, dry mass and volume of the stem (46%, 103%, 102%, respectively), and higher area, mass and volume of the individual leaf (43%, 66%, 73%, respectively). LC also had thicker, longer and wider leaves (30%, 10%, 34%, respectively) and significantly lower leaf density (7%) and lower specific leaf area, leaf mass ratio and leaf area ratio (17%, 4%, 18%, respectively). Internode length and stem density were not significantly different. The results allowed us to thoroughly characterize the effects of tetraploidy on 1-year-old shoots in olive, and also suggest that the slow growth of LC is due to its lower leaf area per unit of total biomass, which reduces leaf area production and, consequently, light interception, resource availability and tree growth. These results will be useful for genetic improvement programmes and for planning further exploitation of tetraploidy in horticulture.

This research reconstructs the business dynamics behind the evolution of the European mutual fund industry, which led Luxembourg to become its main international gateway since the 1960s. We analyze this local industry to understand how political and financial élites influence the economic specialization of small states. We argue that a closely-knit community of local professionals and politicians, well-versed in corporate and European legislation, leveraged the Grand Duchy’s small state status within the nascent European Community to become a financial hub specializing in mutual funds within an emerging network of international financial centers. This position was achieved through bifurcation of sovereignty strategies on the basis of two main premises. First, on the systematic acceptance of conflicts of interest within local financial and political leadership, comprising overlapping roles, revolving-doors, and familial ties in business relationships. Second, on regulatory engineering practices, such as the dynamic interpretation of laws, and the strategic planning of directive assimilation to advance Luxembourg’s interests as opposed to its EU counterparts. The analysis uses archival material from nine archival collections and oral history interviews.