The Malleable Politics of Welfare-to-Work Reform: Germany's "Hartz" activation compared with Dutch, British and Irish cases. ACES Cases No. 2009.1

We compare the Hartz reforms in Germany with three other major labor market activation reforms carried out by center-left governments. Britain and Germany developed radically neoliberal “mandatory” activation policies, whereas in the Netherlands and Ireland radical activation change took a very different “enabling” form. The Irish and German cases were path deviant, the British and Dutch path dependent. We explain why Germany underwent “mandatory” and path deviant activation by focusing on two features of the policy discourse. First, the elite level discourse was “ensilaged” sealing policy formation off from dissenting actors. This is what the British and German cases had in common and the result was reform that identified long term unemployment as social delinquency rather than market failure. Second, although the German policy-making system lacked the “authoritative” features that facilitated reform in the British case, and the Irish policy-making system lacked the “reflexive” mechanisms that facilitated reform in the Dutch case, in both Germany and Ireland the wider legitimating discourses were reshaped by novel institutional vehicles (the Hartz Commission and FÁS) that served to fundamentally alter system-constitutive perceptions about policy. The findings suggest that major reform of welfare-to-work policy may be much more malleable than previously thought.

Shell-based chronologies for the Irish Sea

We demonstrate here that the growth increment variability in the shell of the long-lived bivalve mollusc Arctica islandica can be interpreted as an indicator of marine environmental change in the climatically important North Atlantic shelf seas. Multi-centennial (up to 489-year) chronologies were constructed using five detrending techniques and their characteristics compared. The strength of the common environmental signal expressed in the chronologies was found to be fully comparable with equivalent statistics for tree-ring chronologies. The negative exponential function using truncated increment-width series from which the first thirty years have been removed was chosen as the optimal detrending technique. Chronology indices were compared with the Central England Temperature record and with seawater temperature records from stations close to the study site in the Irish Sea. Statistically significant correlations were found between the chronology indices and (a) mean air temperature for the 14-month period beginning in the January preceding the year of growth, (b) mean seawater temperatures for February-October in the year preceding the year of growth (c) late summer and autumn air temperatures and sea surface temperatures for the year of growth and (d) the timing of the autumn decline in SST. Changes through time in the correlations with air and seawater temperatures and changes towards a deeper water origin for the shells in the chronology were interpreted as an indication that shell growth may respond to stratification dynamics.

Legends of the city of Mexico,

Mode of access: Internet.

Italian life and legends /

"The sketches were written ... in the years 1864 and 1865. A few appeared in the periodicals at the time they were written."--Pref.