In engineering design, constraints can stimulate creativity but are also often cited as obstacles to innovation. So do constraints hinder or foster creativity? Despite a number of studies, the reason why constraints can have a positive or a negative impact on creativity is still unknown. In this paper, we will propose, theoretically and empirically, that the link between creativity and constraints is not determined by the type of constraints, but by the type of ‘design model’ used. Using C-K theory, a well-documented, general, and formalized theory of design, we first prove that the dual impact of constraints on creativity is predictable. Then we use C-K operators to distinguish two different design models: rule-based design and innovative design. We show that the first model organizes a negative link between constraints and creativity while the second model enables a positive effect. We illustrate these mechanisms through the analysis of several product developments based on both secondary and primary sources.

Globalization is placing European societies under pressure to change. In the 1990s, researchers identified particular national models of capitalism. These were argued to consist of integrated and reinforcing institutions that created specific rules of the game for economic actors. These rules favoured the development of globally competitive firms in particular sectors where the institutional characteristics of the home society facilitated the building of distinctive types of capabilities. In this view, a global division of labour was developing based on institutional differences. Thus, national policy makers needed to reinforce institutional advantage and institutional specialisation by incremental adaptations to globalization. Reforms needed to be consistent with the underlying model of capitalism. This paper challenges such a view. It argues that firms are highly innovative and use institutions not as constraints but as resources that enable them to build new capabilities. It further argues that institutions are more diverse, malleable and multi-levelled than the national models perspective recognizes. Thus, options for change are much broader than predicted by the path-dependent national models framework. Indeed, the main issue for European societies in response to globalization is to ensure diversity and experimentation rather than simply seeking to reproduce a dominant logic.

This paper discusses the change of the leading paradigms in the field of contemporary history in the Federal Republic of Germany. While, during the early post-Second World War period, the study of the interwar period was dominated by the theory of totalitarian dictatorship and the discussion of the deficiencies of the Paris peace treaty system, thereby focusing on the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler, the post-war generation of German historians analysed the emerging political system of the Third Reich from a more systematic perspective, depicting behind the Hitlerian façade the antagonistic political structure that resulted in an accelerating cumulative radicalisation of the Nazi regime. This functionalist approach, however, has recently been attacked for indirectly exculpating the Nazi crimes by underlining the systemic factors leading to the accumulation of terror and violence and is about to be replaced by a rather moralist interpretation of Nazi politics, accentuating the function of the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ and the impact of Hitler’s charismatic leadership.

Brain Computer Interface (BCI) systems provide control of external devices by using only brain activity. In recent years, there has been a great interest in developing BCI systems for different applications. These systems are capable of solving daily life problems for both healthy and disabled people. One of the most important applications of BCI is to provide communication for disabled people that are totally paralysed. In this paper, different parts of a BCI system and different methods used in each part are reviewed. Neuroimaging devices, with an emphasis on EEG (electroencephalography), are presented and brain activities as well as signal processing methods used in EEG-based BCIs are explained in detail. Current methods and paradigms in BCI based speech communication are considered.

This article reviews research on early linguistic precursors and enabling skills of reading acquisition among young children. Language development starts early in infancy when the child learns to categorize the speech sounds according to the pattern typical of the mother tongue. Equipped with these sound categories the child is ready to learn to segment words from the sound stream and to understand and to use words. The precise phonological representation of words will facilitate the important development of phonological awareness. Some longitudinal research and training studies indicate the causal direction of the relation between phonological awareness and reading. Preventive and remedial implications are pointed out. Preventive effects are related to vocabulary exposure in different social environments and to informal early literacy socialization. In particular, the benefits of reading aloud to children are discussed. The complexity of the causal relationships between different aspects of early language development, including genetic influences and later reading is emphasized.

Although the relationship between military expenditures and economic growth is well documented for the old members of the European Union, empirically little is known for the new members. Thus, the goal of this paper is to investigate the economic impact of military expenditures in Central and Eastern European countries employing panel cointegration and causality methods for the period 1993–2013. Findings indicate that the variables in question do not move together in the long run and the direction of causality in the short run is from economic growth to military expenditures. The implications of the results for international relations are discussed.

This essay explores how the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 has affected the stability of what Stephen Gill has termed the ‘new constitutionalism of disciplinary neo-liberalism’,1 more precisely, in the realm of international tax policy. Rather than providing an in-depth and complete empirical study of the matter, this essay will highlight certain interesting developments and touch upon a series of possibly relevant questions that could form the basis for a future research agenda. In the first section, we will examine the remarkable strength and resilience of the new constitutionalism as the institutional component of neo-liberal hegemony. Then we will proceed to an exploration of the impact of the crisis on this hegemony, also paying attention to deepening geopolitical multipolarity as an additional variable. The final, more empirical section will investigate the case of international taxation in this context, and demonstrate that new constitutionalism remains a crucial supporting pillar of neo-liberal globalisation.

The health status of populations of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union underwent major changes after the fall of communism. While mortality started declining in Central Europe, mortality in Russia and most other countries of the former Soviet Union rose dramatically and has yet to improve. In terms of the socioeconomic changes, some countries (mainly Central Europe) were able to contain the fall in income and rise in income inequalities, but across the former Soviet Union gross domestic product plummeted and income inequality grew rapidly. This led to two types of inequality: first, the widening gap in mortality between countries, and second, the increasing social gradient in health and disease within countries. The thrust of our argument is that the disadvantages in health in Eastern Europe, and the growing social inequalities in health in the region, are direct results of the social changes, and that psychosocial factors played a pivotal role in the health pattern seen in Central and Eastern Europe.

From the start, the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health built its case for taking action on the social determinants of health, unashamedly, on principles of social justice. Quite simply, the Commission stated that health inequities in the sense of avoidable and preventable differences in health between countries, and between groups within countries according to income, occupation, education, ethnicity or between men and women, are unjust. Taking this position has brought praise and blame: praise for the Commission’s boldness in putting fairness on the global health agenda1 in the face of the dominant global model of economic growth as an end in itself, and blame for the Commission’s unworldliness in apparently not recognising that economic arguments push the political agenda.

As part of their conflict handling repertoire, political systems possess a range of mechanisms to suppress or avoid conflicts. A closer look across Europe would yield a broad tapestry of mechanisms for handling the thorny issue of European integration, with most governments and political systems relying on some version of conflict avoidance. In this picture, one should expect that a country such as Norway, which has rejected EU membership twice, has an active and vocal anti-membership organization, and where polls consistently show a ‘no’ majority, would stand out as the exception, in the sense that there would be no need for the Norwegian political system to take any measures to suppress the issue. But reality is more complex. Since the early 1990s, when Norway entered into the EEA agreement with the EU, Norway’s relationship to the EU has changed dramatically. Norway’s current arrangement with the EU is perhaps best labelled as ‘tight incorporation without formal membership’. This situation is managed through arrangements not to raise the EU membership issue. In this article, I rely on Stephen Holmes’s notion of ‘gag rules’, as a particular means of issue avoidance. This mechanism speaks of how actors seek to remove debate on a controversial issue that does not go away: it is a matter of stymieing debate on the issue but not stopping to deal with it. If anything, the lid on debate on EU membership helps the political system to keep alive an active process of Norwegian adaptation to the EU, with serious implications for Norwegian democracy.

After World War II, the European semi-periphery—southern, Mediterranean and the eastern one—underwent rapid industrialization and urbanization. During this process. East-Central European socialist countries also replicated the forms—but not the social content and mechanism—of earlier Western European urbanization. Post-socialist transition has introduced important changes into urban processes as follows: (a) growing inequalities; (b) development of transboundary relations and the beginning of city competition across the whole of Europe; (c) independent urban governments; (d) transformation of urban society; and (e) privatization of urban land and housing.

This article describes the recent requirement for UK universities to account for the social and economic impact of their research, and asks whether this impact agenda may change the conduct of research itself. Three critical issues are highlighted: the epistemology of impact; the problem of quantifying qualities; and the likelihood of impact growing in significance and changing the landscape of research – so-called ‘impact creep’. Overall, the article identifies some features of the research impact agenda that pose risks to creativity and risk-taking by academics.

A large part of the migration of Europeans overseas was to colonial possessions. With the dissolution of colonial ties, large-scale repatriation of individuals to the home countries has occurred with many dispersed indigenous people, who for political or economic motives, no longer found their circumstances favourable. These secondary migrations have had important economic and sociological effects.

This article considers the increased focus on interdisciplinary research to solve major social problems through game changing solutions. It discusses research in the arts and humanities within the context of interdisciplinary research and within the broader academy. In particular, it distinguishes between research in the arts, and research in the humanities. More specifically, it goes on to consider an element within the arts known as design. In this context, the processes of design thinking across many disciplines are considered essential to the potential of interdisciplinary research to produce radical innovations.

The influence of the state on the trajectory of human lives is more comprehensive and sustained than that of any other organizational construct. We provide a definition of the modern nation-state in four intersecting dimensions – resources, law, legitimacy, and welfare – and review the history and status of each dimension, focusing on the fusion of nation and state in the 19th century, and the development of the ‘national constellation’ of institutions in the 20th. We then assess the fate of the nation-state after the Second World War and, with western OECD countries as our sample, track the rise and decline of its Golden Age through its prime in the 1960s and early 1970s. Finally, we identify the challenges confronting the nation-state of the 21st century, and use the analyses in the following eight essays to produce some working hypotheses about its current and future trajectory – namely, that the changes over the past 40 years are not merely creases in the fabric of the nation-state, but rather an unravelling of the finely woven national constellation of its Golden Age. Nor does there appear to be any standard, interwoven development of its four dimensions on the horizon. However, although an era of structural uncertainty awaits us, it is not uniformly chaotic. Rather, we see structured, but asymmetric change in the make-up of the state, with divergent transformations in each of its four dimensions. In general, nation-states are clinging to tax revenues and monopolies on the use of force, such that the resource dimension may change slowly if at all; the rule of law appears to be moving consistently into the international arena; the welfare dimension is headed in every direction, with privatization, internationalization, supra-nationalization, and defence of the national status quo, occurring at various rates for healthcare, pensions, public utilities, consumer protection, etc. in different countries. How, and whether, the democratic legitimacy of political processes will be ensured in such an incongruent, if not incoherent and paradoxical state is still unclear.

Countries with a low GDP per capita generally have a much lower fiscal quota than OECD countries, but many other factors push up the transaction costs in poor economies. High-tax societies provide more security, predictability and organizational discipline. The absence of such conditions is a powerful breeding-ground for corruption. If fiscal payments and bribes are added up to arrive at a composite measure of the ‘extraction burden’ in different countries, we might find that the costs of doing business do not diverge so much in various parts of the world.

The common cork stopper takes advantage of the peculiar properties of the bark of the cork oak. This has very low permeability to both gases and liquids due to suberin and waxes; the cellular structure makes possible the deformation that gives a secure fit in the bottle neck.

It is doubtful as to whether the countries of the Third World are likely to move to the kind of liberal democracy that is regarded as characteristic of the West. In particular, parties are often remaining ‘parties of the State’ and not organizations truly competing with each other. This is in part a consequence of economic globalization, as the requirements of global economic liberalization do not fit with the requirements of democracy. In such a context, clientelism around the State may be inevitable and it contributes to ensuring that the main party in the country, and indeed all parties become ‘parties of the State’, as is the case in Mexico or Malaysia and perhaps in the Ukraine and South Africa. Thus, globalization does not mean the end of the State, but possibly the end of liberal democracy.

In early 2018, the Polish parliament adopted controversial legislation criminalising assertions regarding the complicity of the ‘Polish Nation’ and the ‘Polish State’ in the Holocaust. The so-called Polish Holocaust Law provoked not only a heated debate in Poland, but also serious international tensions. As a result, it was amended only five months after its adoption. The reason why it is worth taking a closer look at the socio-cultural foundations and political functions of the short-lived legislation is twofold. Empirically, the short history of the Law reveals a great deal about the long-term role of Jews in the Polish collective memory as an unmatched Significant Other. Conceptually, the short life of the Law, along with its afterlife, helps capture poll-driven, manifestly moralistic and anti-pluralist imaginings of the past, which I refer to as ‘mnemonic populism’. By exploring the relationship between popular and political images of the past in contemporary Poland, this article argues for joining memory and populism studies in order to better understand what can happen to history in illiberal surroundings.