Andrew Mangham analyses the importance of narrative for the German embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer, and its influence on George Eliot’s early fiction. This chapter evidences the way in which knowledge from Europe was acquired, debated, and adopted in London soirées. Van Baer’s work was welcomed by the circle of radicals, including Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Marian Evans, who congregated around John Chapman’s Westminster Review. Newly available in a partial translation by Huxley and the botanist Arthur Henfrey, von Baer’s Uber Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere (1828) specifies a theory of growth based on early differentiation of individuals, which seemed to chime with the period’s investment in industry, but also insisted on the importance of narrative. The early work of George Eliot, specifically Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and Adam Bede (1859), bears the imprint of von Baer’s models of individuation in the secularism that we find in her work.

The growth of national sovereignty in the EU political process, due also to new enlargements, requires a multi-tier Europe with a federalist core.

While reaction ruled, Germany was in the midst of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and overall modernization, and the Jews were often considered as prime agents of this development. However, a close look discloses Jewish communities living mainly in small towns, working in local commerce and in traditional branches of industry. Still, it seems that they were moving forward more quickly than others, more easily accepting change, enjoying more favorable demographic trends, and quickly improving their educational level. As a typical example, the chapter presents a sketch of one family history, that of the Liebermanns, who held on to their commercial interests in cotton and silk, but then slowly expanded to become larger-scale industrial entrepreneurs, centered in Berlin and later in Silesia too, gradually moving to more modern and more large-scale production sectors. On the whole, the Jewish way of modernization added one more route to the multiple varieties of such routes in Germany. Through their unique perspective, the various possibilities of moving towards modernity are more easily perceived, enriching the overall picture of this process as a whole, especially in Germany.

Over the last ten years, research on groups of infants and toddlers acquiring more than one language from birth has grown rapidly, though it still trails the research on infants learning just one language. This chapter discusses behavioural and neurophysiological findings about how bilinguals perceive spoken language in the first three years of life. This research demonstrates that bilingual and monolingual infants use similar core mechanisms to learn from differing linguistic input. Crucially, comparing their acquisition trajectories allows us to make inferences about the early linguistic representations of bilingual infants.

Chapter 7 presents an introduction and overview of inclusive teaching within the context of science in the early years. Inclusive teaching is about proactive, intentional and purposeful decisions being made by the EC professional to allow all students to reach their full potential. Inclusive practices, such as differentiation and the Universal Design for Learning framework, are described. Case studies are presented that provide opportunities to identify inclusive practices in science teaching and learning.

The increasing penetration of information and communication technologies in the economy enabled the emergence of digital business practices in a wide range of industries. The digitization of information products, service processes, product information, and pricing altered the functioning of the markets. Once products and processes are digital, communication technologies facilitate the instantaneous exchange of the information. This immediate availability of product and service information and pricing enhances competition: digital networks can accelerate and even automate product and price comparison, making consumers more powerful in the marketplace. This chapter focuses on the economics of digital information products and implications for strategy.

The European Banking Union (EBU) launched in 2012 relies on a complex institutional architecture; that is, a series of EU institutions and bodies as well as national institutions are involved in its functioning. At the EU level, these include the European Central Bank (ECB) – which acts as the authority in charge of monetary and as banking supervisor, two EU agencies (the Single Resolution Board and the European Banking Authority), as well as the European Commission. This chapter examines the existing accountability mechanisms vis-à-vis each of these institutions and bodies with a view to determining whether any accountability gaps exist. To this end, it first maps these mechanisms and analyses how they have been used to date. It finds that the mechanisms have been used indeed, but that some shortcomings exist in the existing institutional framework. It therefore proposes some reforms to improve the existing situation.

As scholars and activists seek to define and promote greater corporate political responsibility (CPR), they will benefit from understanding practitioner perspectives and how executives are responding to rising scrutiny of their political influences, reputational risk and pressure from employees, customers and investors to get involved in civic, political, and societal issues. This chapter draws on firsthand conversations with practitioners, including executives in government affairs; sustainability; senior leadership; and diversity, equity and inclusion, during the launch of a university-based CPR initiative. I summarize practitioner motivations, interests, barriers and challenges related to engaging in conversations about CPR, as well as committing or acting to improve CPR. Following the summary, I present implications for further research and several possible paths forward, including leveraging practitioners’ value on accountability, sustaining external calls for transparency, strengthening awareness of systems, and reframing CPR as part of a larger dialogue around society’s “social contract.”

This chapter begins by looking at Waltz’s other political ordering principle, hierarchy – which, like anarchy, is not in fact an ordering principle. Saying that a system “is hierarchical” merely indicates that it has some unspecified set of relations of stratification and functional differentiation. “Hierarchy,” rather than a structural ordering principle, is a residual category of non-anarchic orders (that, like most residuals, obscures the diversity of the “things” lumped together). And, as the preceding chapters have shown, most international systems, which by definition are anarchic, are also hierarchical. Therefore, even if anarchy and hierarchy are ordering principles, international systems do not have singular ordering principles. The remainder of the chapter looks critically at recent efforts by Ryan Griffiths and by Mathias Albert, Barry Buzan, and Michael Zurn to develop alternative accounts of political ordering principles. I conclude that the problem is not that Waltz has misidentified the ordering principles of international systems but that international systems do not have ordering principles.

This chapter advocates viewing the structures of international political systems through the lens of multiple dimensions of social differentiation; the structured processes by which social actors and positions are produced, populated, related, reproduced, and transformed. Social differentiation involves, at minimum, establishing who has what authority over whom with respect to which activities; that is, differentiating actors, activities, and authorities (which usually are complexly interrelated). And in addition to institutional and normative dimensions, which are notoriously excluded from the Waltzian account of structure, social differentiation has important material or geo-technical dimensions that are also ignored in the Waltzian account (which is not, as is often claimed, materialist). More generally, I argue that rather than seek to identify a small number of structural models composed of a few elements, we should aim for a checklist of dimensions of differentiation that illuminate some recurrently important features of the structures of some social and political systems of interest.

Australian classrooms are becoming increasingly diverse. In addition to a wide range of mathematical abilities, primary teachers of mathematics must meet the needs of children from varied cultural backgrounds, many of whom have had different mathematical experiences. Children who have physical, intellectual, social or emotional difficulties may be included in the mainstream classroom. There may also be children who are classified as gifted and talented in one or more domains. All have the capacity to learn mathematics, and the right to experience mathematics suitable to their learning needs. Although this chapter addresses issues relating to inclusion in primary mathematics classrooms, it does not pretend to provide a special education focus. The needs of children with specific disabilities can be highly technical, and it is well beyond the scope of this chapter to try to deal with all the detailed requirements and concerns that may be encountered. Rather, this chapter aims to help the primary teacher deal with the reality of mathematics teaching in modern classrooms, where there may be children with very diverse learning and mathematical needs. Many students are not categorised as having a disability but have information processing delays. These students will benefit from the same approaches as those with recognised disabilities.

Intimacy, sex, and desire are important elements to personal and relational well-being and are some of the top reasons couples seek therapy. For Black couples, there is a unique challenge that can hamper the development of these elements given the historical backdrop of oppression that contributes to significant stressors on these couples. Helping Black couples to understand how they make meaning of sex, intimacy, and interactions with their partner, while maintaining a clear sense of self in the context of their physical and emotional closeness, has been positively associated with sexual desire, intimacy, and couple satisfaction. This chapter looks at the role of differentiation, the impact it has on a Black couple’s intimate life, and how clinicians can help facilitate the process of increasing the couple’s levels of differentiation, thus breathing life into the relationship.

This chapter shows how the ties between office and household were loosened from the early seventeenth century by a new legal approach to officeholding. The authority of certain officers began to be treated as separable from their personal identity, meaning they no longer had to be ‘independent’ heads of household. MPs passed statutes to protect officers from lawsuits, providing they acted in accordance with the authority granted to them by higher powers. Judges developed a distinction between ‘judicial’ and ‘ministerial’ officers: the first required personal qualities associated with independence, the second did not. ‘Ministerial’ officers wielded an impersonal form of authority which had nothing to do with their individual identities. In interactions with other people, they conjured this authority with an array of special words and props, which granted them legal protection as servants of the state. This was especially clear in homicide law, where the question of whether or not an officer had properly conjured authority could determine the outcome of a trial. The impersonal model of official authority laid the foundations for a new style of masculine officeholding.

Biomaterials are being investigated to produce platform as scaffolds for cell/tissue growth and differentiation/regeneration. Cell-materials, chemical and biological interactions enable the application of more functional materials in the area of bioengineering, providing a pathway to novel treatment of humans suffering from tissue/organ damage and facing limitation of donation organs. Many studies were done on the tissue/organ regeneration. Development of new scaffolds for cell/tissue regeneration is a key R&D field. This chapter focuses on describing R&D on the novel ultrananocrystalline diamond (UNCD) film as a unique biomaterial for scaffolds for developmental biology. Recent research showed that cells grown on the surface of UNCD-coated culture dishes are similar to cell culture dishes with little retardation, indicating UNCD films have no or little inhibition on cell proliferation and are potentially appealing as substrate/scaffold materials. The mechanisms of cell adhesion on UNCD surfaces are proposed based on the experimental results. The comparisons of cell cultures on diamond-powder-seeded culture dishes and on UNCD-coated dishes with matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization - time-of-flight mass spectroscopy (MALDI-TOF MS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analyses provided valuable data to support the mechanisms proposed to explain the adhesion and proliferation of cells on the surface of UNCD scaffolds.