The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

This book opens a fresh chapter in the debate on local enterprise clusters and their strategies for upgrading in the global economy. The authors employ a novel conceptual framework in their research on industrial clusters in Europe, Latin America and Asia and provide new perspectives and insights for researchers and policymakers alike.

Governance in global value chains

L'article, publie dans Science, sur une des premieres utilisations analytiques de Google Books, fondee sur les n-grammes (Google Ngrams) We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of "culturomics", focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can ...

Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books

George Spencer-Brown developed a unique system of notation that uses distinction as its most basic unit. We may use this system in order to explain the way the world of appearances emerges out of the primordial experience. I advise the reader who is not mathematically oriented to skim through those few sections that may seem too purely mathematical.

Laws of Form

This article aims to consolidate the psychological microfoundations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by taking stock and evaluating the recent surge of person-focused CSR research. With a systematic review, the authors identify, synthesize, and organize three streams of micro-CSR studies—focused on (i) individual drivers of CSR engagement, (ii) individual processes of CSR evaluations, and (iii) individual reactions to CSR initiatives—into a coherent behavioral framework. This review highlights significant gaps, methodological issues, and imbalances in the treatment of the three components in prior micro-CSR research. It uncovers the need to conceptualize how multiple drivers of CSR interact and how the plurality of mechanisms and boundary conditions that can explain individual reactions to CSR might be integrated theoretically. By organizing micro-CSR studies into a coherent framework, this review also reveals the lack of connections within and between substreams of micro-CSR research; to tackle them, this article proposes an agenda for further research, focused on six key challenges

The psychological microfoundations of corporate social responsibility: A person-centric systematic review

In this article, we draw on established views of CSR dysfunctionalities to show how and why CSR is regularly observed to be both shaped by and supportive of capitalism. We proceed to show that these dysfunctionalities are maintained by both the pro- and anticapitalist approaches to CSR, both of which imply an ill-defined separation of the economy and society as well an overly strong problem or solution focus on political and economic issues. Finally, we present a post-capitalist approach to CSR that overcomes (1) the ill-defined separation of the economy and society, (2) the capitalist bias towards economic rationalities, and (3) the overidentification of society with its political system; this approach thus helps to manage the abovementioned CSR dysfunctionalities.

CSR Beyond Economy and Society : A Post-capitalist Approach

Futures of a distributed memory. A global brain wave measurement (1800–2000)

Zusammenfassung Die heuristische Idee, die in diesem Aufsatz verfolgt wird, ist es, das Unschärfe-Phänomen ›Pop‹ als eigentümliches, weltgesellschaftlich operierendes Funktionssystem aufzufassen. Als Sozialsystem reproduziert es eine spezifische (kommunikative) Differenz, die sich dem Medium des ›Songs‹ einschreibt, das Wahrnehmungen auf raffinierte Weise in den Kommunikationszusammenhang des Systems einbettet. Angenommen wird, daß nach preadaptive advances, die bis in die Renaissance zurückreichen, das System in den Fünfziger Jahren startet mit der spezifischen Operation der ›Provokation-im-Medium des Songs‹ und sich strukturell entlang prozessiert an Formen der Provokation und Gegenprovokation: Rock’n’Roll, Beat, Garage, Psychedelic, Heavy Metal, Hip Hop, Rave, Techno... Geprüft wird unter anderem, ob sich eine Funktion des Systems konstruieren läßt, ob das System über einen Leitcode verfügt (These: Hit/Flop), über ein Medium (Songs), über Formen organisatorischer Sicherheit (Labels) etc. Diese Analysen lassen noch keine definitive Entscheidung über den Systemstatus zu, plausibilisieren aber die Annahme, daß eine darauf bezogene systemtheoretisch orientierte Forschung fruchtbar sein könnte.

Music no music music

The present investigation examines the hypothesis that contemporary pop music has caught ‘retromania’: infected by its own past, it will bring about its own downfall. It identifies this observation as retrology: a specific school of thought within pop history. The article first looks at the major premises on which retrology is founded. It then asks why these assumptions have been so widely accepted. Next, it offers a sociological approach to look at pop music’s increasing interest in the past without recourse to moralistic divisions. Pop is seen as a social system, and not as an opaque accumulation of individual activities. Reproducing itself by a specific form of communication—the concatenation of songs—its main goal is simply to continue; it therefore desires neither ‘advancement’ nor ‘retro-gression’. The conclusion is that retro does not indicate a crisis; rather the opposite—it allows pop to carry on.

Markus Heidingsfelder

Papers

CSR Beyond Economy and Society : A Post-capitalist Approach

Futures of a distributed memory. A global brain wave measurement (1800–2000)

Music no music music

Retrology: Addicted to the Future:

Marking the Mark. George Spencer Brown’s Operator Across the Disciplines