This paper aims to examine the critical success and failure factors for the new generation of ethnic (or migrant) entrepreneurs in high-tech and creative industries in Dutch cities. The present study investigates their entrepreneurial behaviour with a particular focus on their personal and business characteristics as well as their motivations and driving forces, which all determine their entrepreneurship and their business performance. An empirical application is presented, in which the results from an in-depth interview study on second-generation Moroccan entrepreneurs are discussed. The findings of our study show that, in general, these entrepreneurs are more open and are looking for new opportunities beyond the traditional markets by using modern break-out strategies. This research helps to map out key factors that influence their entrepreneurial behaviour and activity, business entry decisions, and creative business strategies. It also identifies conditions for success and other factors that impact on the performance of ethnic entrepreneurs in the Netherlands, within the broader context of entrepreneurship. These findings are informative for various stakeholders such as other ethnic entrepreneurs, policy makers and business investors in this dynamic and promising urban business environment.

It seems appropriate to distinguish at least two aspects of academic freedom: (a) freedom from external constraints in choosing topics, concepts, methods and sources, which in western democracies generally enjoys a certain level of protection by law; (b) freedom to act in the pursuit of goals and values, with academic staff being in control of the relevant means to do so, which is generally strictly related to the overall organisation of universities and the higher education system at large. Both these aspects have been understood as necessary conditions for producing and disseminating new knowledge, i.e. the two main functions of higher education institutions. It can be added that academic freedom has been considered as one of the elements defining the academic profession, at least after the Second World War. On the one hand, academic freedom is strictly connected with the idea that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake through research represents the main goal of the academic work. On the other hand, academic freedom and peer review are considered as necessary devices to ensure quality, i.e. quality is ensured by the self-steering capacities of academics or their professional autonomy. In the last few decades, several processes have had an impact on academic freedom: (a) the rise of higher education institutions as more autonomous corporate bodies, which has implied the strengthening of the role of administrative staff at the expense of the academic community, a trend that has been named ‘managerialism’; (b) the drive of governments away from more direct forms of control in favour of a system of distant steering, which has implied stronger accountability of higher education institutions and academics and the use of assessment devices; (c) the increasing demands to and pressures on academics and higher education by both the economy and society to support economic development, innovation, and social progress, a trend to which we refer to as growing expectations of relevance. The impact of the first two processes is quite clear and pertains mostly to relationships within higher education institutions and to the relationship between academics and the state. The impact of the last process is less clear and pertains to the relationships between academics and the external world, mostly the economy, but also society. Building on the results of the Changing Academic Profession survey, this article will address the issue of the growing pressures on academics to be ‘relevant’ to both society and the economy, and of the mechanisms through which the notion of relevance intrudes into the academic profession in selected European countries, especially evaluation, funding, and specific kinds of research activities.

The principle that perpetrators of atrocity should be brought to justice before courts of criminal law enjoys near total acceptance. However, because of the nature of the transgressions adjudicated, the major trials of perpetrators have also served a didactic and moral function in redefining and re-imposing rule-based legality. As a consequence, these trials address history and memory in the course of trying the accused. This essay examines three particular filters that affect the way the memory and history of the events concerned enter the trial process: first, the nature of the evidence admitted; second, the substantive incriminations directed at the accused; and third, the principle of criminal accountability deployed by the prosecution. The essay also considers how the timing and place of the trial influence its didactic value. Ultimately, the didactic and moral effectiveness of such trials is beyond the control of the courts and can only be evaluated over the longer term.

This paper examines two broad dimensions of change in the American academic profession: (1) demographic and generational change, including increasing feminization, changing attitudes toward the career-family balance, migration of faculty positions to the professions (versus the liberal arts) and away from the research university sector; and (2) changes in types of appointments, work and career tracks, including the decline of tenure and the rise of fixed term appointments, which involve more ‘specialized’ and less ‘place-bound’ work roles and alternative career tracks. It considers these changes more broadly in the context of the changing nature of work in a globalized economy and the changing nature of the knowledge industry and in the context of similar developments in Europe and Asia. It concludes with an extrapolation of how these trends are likely to play out in the US context and in a new ‘globalized’ academic marketplace over the next 10–20 years.

Addressing the ‘topographical turn’ in cultural theory which emphasizes spatial constellations and sites, the article discusses concepts of space both in Anglo-American Cultural Theory and in European Culture Studies in order to develop their differences. Within Cultural Studies the program to ‘spatialize’ historical narratives has created a whole language of symbolic topographical figures which function as a counter-discourse for minorities. To argue against the tendency of translating theories in order to transform them into ‘neutral tools’, independent of their historical origin, the article discusses various space-discourses in European cultural theories; it refers to studies from the current cultural reorientation of the humanities but also to those from the early 20th century to illuminate different relationships between philosophy, historiography and cultural techniques.

The European Commission has invested much symbolic capital in sport's potential contribution to European identity, recently stating ‘that sport has a role in forging identity and bringing people together’. Yet such claims must be strongly qualified. Whilst sport is conspicuously present in Europe as an everyday activity, it is elusively variegated in its social and cultural forms and impacts, and historically informed scholarship points to a more sophisticated approach to the understanding of the subject. At the same time, national histories – conceived largely within national frameworks – hold sway in the field of sports history. There is little truly comparative work and this lack allows the European Commission to put out its statements unchallenged. This article proposes a number of ways in which European sports history might be conceived comparatively. It outlines four different models of European sport (British, German, Soviet, Scandinavian), whilst highlighting the problems inherent in such modelling; argues for greater historical depth (e.g. the importance of Italy in the early modern period); warns against the dangers of presentism (e.g. highlighting the proximity of dance and gymnastics in earlier periods); challenges the hegemony of British sport; and champions the cause of a serious consideration of Eastern Europe.

Quantitative genetics, using data from twin and adoptee studies, has shown substantial genetic influences on all forms of psychiatric disorder; however, with just a few exceptions, the evidence indicates that the disorders are multifactorial, with influences that are both genetic and environmental. In recent years, molecular genetics has begun to identify individual susceptibility genes; examples are given for schizophrenia, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and Alzheimer's disease. Both quantitative and molecular genetics have shown the importance of gene-environment interplay with respect to the commoner disorders of emotions and behaviour. In particular, it has been found that genetic influences moderate people's vulnerability to environmental risks. Five main alternative routes by which genes indirectly (via their effects on proteins) lead to multifactorial psychiatric disorders are described. Four main research issues are highlighted: the fuller delineation of the mechanisms involved in nature–nurture interplay and its role in aetiology; determination of how genes play a role in the neural underpinning of psychiatric disorders; identification of the ways in which genes suggest a dissection of disorders; and an understanding of the role of risk dimensions and disorder dimensions.

The beginning of political and economic liberalism is distrust. This claim is clearer for economic liberalism than for political liberalism because it is overtly foundational in economic liberalism, which was directed against the intrusions of the state in economic affairs. Those intrusions typically had the obvious purpose of securing economic advantages for some by restricting opportunities for others, although some of them may have been merely capricious or ignorantly intended. The hostility to such economic intrusions led to the form of the American constitution, with its principal purpose to restrict government and its actions in the economy or, in the lexicon of the time, in commerce. James Madison saw the creation of an open economy or untrammelled commerce as the main achievement of the new constitution.

It is a popular view that international war crimes tribunals are a tool for social transformation and reconciliation after conflicts. According to advocates, one of their strengths in this regard is the individual punishment of criminals, which is said to achieve justice for victims while avoiding the collectivization of guilt. This is also said to have the effect of endorsing the transformation of the nation by freeing it from the burden of collective guilt while detaching those responsible for war crimes from the society concerned and eliminating their political influence. Does individual criminal punishment achieve these? And is the de-collectivization of guilt through international trials desirable for post-conflict social transformation and reconciliation? This article addresses these questions by focusing on the impact of the Tokyo International Military Tribunal, which is analyzed through the ways in which it has been perceived in post-war Japan. It argues that the Tribunal's punishment of wartime leaders produced an ambiguous effect on the Japanese people's sense of war guilt and responsibility, which in turn became an obstacle for the nation to achieve reconciliation not only with its former victims but also with its own past. The article questions the assumption that international criminal justice can promote social transformation and reconciliation.

Scholarly publishing serves the formal communication needs of scholars or researchers and derives from, and is constructed to reflect, their aspirations and behaviour. Specifically, journal publishing was invented by Oldenburg in 1665 to solve some of the competitive jealousies that existed between the experimentalist founding fathers of the Royal Society. The solutions he came up with have endured to the present day and have even survived the transition to electronic delivery. This article surveys the reasons why this should be so and examines the modern world of electronic journal publishing with particular reference to the players in the publishing cycle, the digital transition, economics and the advent of open access.

The concept of cotransmission, including sympathetic nerve release of noradrenaline and ATP, was formalised in 1976, which challenged the accepted view known as ‘Dale's Principle’ that one nerve released only one transmitter. ATP was also shown to be a cotransmitter with acetylcholine in parasympathetic nerves supplying the urinary bladder and as a cotransmitter with nitric oxide in non-adrenergic, non-cholinergic inhibitory nerves supplying the intestine. It is now recognised that ATP is a cotransmitter in most, if not all, nerves in the peripheral and central nervous systems. The physiological significance of cotransmission will be considered. In pathophysiology, the role of ATP as a cotransmitter appears to increase as shown, for example, in the parasympathetic nerves supplying the diseased human bladder and in sympathetic nerves in spontaneously hypertensive rats. ATP is likely to be involved in sympathetic pain, causalgia and reflex sympathetic dystrophy. Purinergic signalling also appears to be enhanced in inflammatory and stress conditions.

Creativity is the generation of novel and useful ideas. Organizations, including universities and other research institutions, need to develop novel and useful products to satisfy constantly evolving customer needs. Furthermore, organizational procedures and processes develop over time, and continuous improvements in processes contribute to organizational efficiency. Thus, the development of novel and useful ideas in relation to products, procedures and services is mandated from many employees in modern organizations, including researchers and scientists. This creativity can take on many different forms, for example unconventional solutions to a wide variety of problems related to research, teaching and administration. Because many of these problems are comparable to that of workers in all kinds of jobs, I believe it is possible to draw on the rich knowledge in the field of organizational creativity to provide some insights into how to foster scientific creativity. The work of researchers and scientists is in many ways comparable to that of knowledge workers in other kinds of organizations: they are high-level employees who apply knowledge to do their work, oftentimes using creative thinking. A rich body of literature has dealt with creativity in these jobs where creativity is a core requirement, and has examined the organizational factors related to creativity. Before I summarize this research and highlight some important research findings concerning the rewards for creativity, the design of jobs, the processes leading to creativity, the organizational climate, and daily work events associated with creativity, I will disentangle different forms of creativity at work and describe a general model of creativity in the context of work.

How does globalization affect taxation? The academic wisdom is split on this question. Some argue that globalization spells the beginning of the end of the national tax state, while others maintain that it hardly constrains tax policy choices at all. This paper comes down in the middle. It finds no indication that globalization will fatally undermine the national tax state, but still maintains that national tax policy is affected in a major way. The effect is not so much to force change upon the tax state as to reduce its freedom for change. Comparing the first three decades of the 20th century to the last three decades, it is remarkable how much change and innovation there was then and how much incrementalism and stasis there is today.

Interdisciplinary research is becoming more frequent because many contemporary issues can only be successfully addressed by integrating different perspectives. One general feature of the various scientific fields is peer review, i.e. the assessment and improvement of submissions to journals, conferences and workshops. Whilst there exist guidelines for the peer review of mono-disciplinary articles and empirical studies of how interdisciplinary research proposals are assessed, there is still a need for a summary of issues specific to the peer review of interdisciplinary research papers. This article provides an overview of relevant questions such as whether reviewers are competent to assess interdisciplinary papers even if unfamiliar with all the involved fields. We discuss the assessment of the interdisciplinarity, soundness, novelty, influence and general interest of interdisciplinary manuscripts. Further issues include the appropriateness of interdisciplinary submissions for journals, keeping the vocabulary of new interdisciplinary fields understandable to the reader and balancing the references across various fields. Constructive interdisciplinary reviewers are likely to be just as open-minded as interdisciplinary scientists and should be rewarded more than they currently are.

Why does it feel that the time passes faster as we get older? What is the physical basis for the impression that some days are slower than others? Why do we tend to focus on the unusual (the surprise), not on the ever present? This article unveils the physics basis for these common observations. The reason is that the measurable ‘clock time’ is not the same as the time perceived by the human mind. The ‘mind time’ is a sequence of images, i.e. reflections of nature that are fed by stimuli from sensory organs. The rate at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases with age, because of several physical features that change with age: saccades frequency, body size, pathways degradation, etc. The misalignment between mental-image time and clock time serves to unite the voluminous observations of this phenomenon in the literature with the constructal law of evolution of flow architecture, as physics.

As Max Weber and many others in his tradition have argued, the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force is the core of the modern state. What counts here is not the frequency of the actual use of force but the fact that only the state has the legitimate right to use such force. The military and the police are the most concrete expressions of this monopoly. In recent decades, the use of the military and the police has been subject to external challenges – ‘globalization’ – and new ideas about police and military intervention. Although at an operational level the state retains full control over the actions of the police and military, the conditions for their use are increasingly shaped by institutionalized legitimating ideas.

Concepts, findings and methodological considerations regarding the influence of social circumstances on psychological functioning are selectively reviewed with respect to five different types of possible effect deriving from: the impact of social connotation or meaning of risk/protective factors; social comparison effects; compositional effects deriving from the make-up of a social group; a social contextual effect reflecting the ethos of a broader social environment; and a social group characteristics effect stemming from the behaviour/values of a peer group.

Retirement behaviour has been the focus of attention of much microeconomic research in recent years. At the same time, most industrialized countries are struggling with reforming their retirement systems to counteract adverse demographic shocks. Early retirement is an important aspect both in explaining retirement behaviour and in forecasting the future of welfare systems. In particular, early retirement is related to an important policy puzzle: it may be optimal to increase the legal retirement age, however we do not know enough of the behavioural response of workers to policy changes and whether these would be effective measures to counteract future fiscal imbalances. Social security systems (and many private pension plans) in Europe have encouraged early exits. This paper reviews the empirical literature on early retirement, with particular reference to OECD countries. The basic message emerging from our work is that much could be learnt by having better quality data, in particular micro-level data that could be used to estimate behavioural responses having under control the many factors affecting retirement decisions, including institutional factors and allowing for full cross country comparability.

Several periods in classical (Greco-Roman) antiquity provide an intriguing mix of being ‘in the grip of the past’ and profoundly innovative in all societal domains at the same time. A new research agenda of the Dutch classicists investigates this combination, under the hypothesis that the two are connected. Successful innovations must somehow be ‘anchored’ for the relevant social group(s). This paper explores the new concept of ‘anchoring’, and some of the ways in which ‘the new’ and ‘the old’ are evaluated and used in classical antiquity and our own times. Its examples range from a piece of ancient theatrical equipment to the history of the revolving door, from an ornamental feature of Greek temples to the design of electric cars, and from the Delphic oracle to the role of the American constitution.

The purpose of this paper is (a) to point out some difficulties in the notion of European values, (b) nevertheless to present some ideas on what might be at least part of specific European traditions in bioethics, and (c) to outline a conceptual framework for further conceptual and empirical studies in this area. In European declarations and conventions, a number of important values are enshrined, including human dignity, integrity, freedoms, autonomy, health, safety and security, justice, prosperity, equity and equality, as well as solidarity. Since almost all of these values are also referred to in many other declarations, the notion of European values is problematic. Moreover, Europe is becoming increasingly multicultural due to immigration. If there is a particular European approach to ethics, based on European values, two possibilities suggest themselves. First, although the same terms referring to basic values also appear in, for instance, various UN declarations, these terms are interpreted in a particular way in Europe. Secondly, the difference lies in the ranking order between the values. In this paper, the second of these possibilities is explored. However, the notion of a ranking order can be interpreted in several ways, which are also discussed in the paper. The paper concludes with some remarks on the necessity of a global dialogue on ethical issues.