Universities and Welfare States Coping with Permanent Financial Austerity: Pressures on (Competing) Public Institutions

A chapter linking universities and welfare states to permanent financial austerity can take a shorter or a longer historical perspective. This chapter looks further back (to the postwar expansion of European welfare states) to better understand future transformations of both public institutions. Their long-term sustainability problems did not start with the financial crisis of 2008 but have been growing since the 1970s (Schäfer and Streeck 2013; Bonoli and Natali 2012; Hay and Wincott 2012). Financial austerity is not a post-crisis phenomenon. As a concept, it was used in welfare state research at least a decade earlier, although it does not seem to have been used in higher education studies until recently. Two quotations bring us to the heart of the matter: welfare states and universities are currently changing under adverse financial conditions caused by an array of interrelating and mutually reinforcing forces and their long-term financial sustainability is at stake across Europe. The welfare state is a “particular trademark of the European social model” (Svallfors 2012: 1), “the jewel in the crown” and a “fundamental part of what Europe stands for” (Giddens 2006: 14), as are tuition-free universities, the cornerstone of intergenerational social mobility in Continental Europe. The past trajectories of major types of welfare states and of universities in Europe tend to go hand in hand: first vastly expanding following the Second World War, and especially in the 1960s and 1970s, and then being in the state of permanent resource-driven and legitimacy-based “crisis” in the last two decades. Welfare states and universities, two critically important public institutions, seem to be under heavy attacks from the public, the media and politicians. Their long-term sustainability is being questioned, and solutions to their (real and perceived) problems are being sought at global, European, and national levels.

Factors that drive Female Entrepreneurship in Armenia

Entrepreneurs play a key role in any economy. Entrepreneurship includes creativity, innovation, risk taking, planning and management and is described as transferring ideas into action. Female entrepreneurship, in particular, is considered an important tool in enabling female empowerment and emancipation. In the light of recent world events, this has become a crucial area to study and understand, especially with respect to motivations, obstacles, constraints and consequences of female entrepreneurship. Having the previous framework in attention, this thesis focuses on female entrepreneurship in a developing country - Armenia – and proposes a conceptual framework of the phenomenon. A joint cooperation between the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development allowed to conduct an enterprise survey in the country and from that survey a microeconomic dataset was released and applied in this research study. A logistic regression econometric method is applied to the dataset to identify and measure the relationship between female entrepreneurship and several factors such as the location, size, legal status, market and obstacles faced by Armenian firms. The study concludes that women entrepreneurs in Armenia share many common features and obstacles with their male counterparts. Moreover, gender of the top managers, the firm’s location, size, main market type, the number of competitors and full-time employees, the adoption of new marketing methods, the access to land, the tax administration system and an inadequately educated workforce are found to be statistical significant factors in the explanation of female entrepreneurship in Armenia.

Un nuevo testimonio de la circulación de obras orientales de apologética cristiana en al-Andalus

Además del “texto mozárabe de historia universal” dado a conocer por G. Levi Della Vida, el manuscrito de origen andalusí Raqqāda 2003/2 (olim Gran Mezquita de Qayrawān 120/829) contiene tres textos cristianos de naturaleza polémico-apologética: una versión árabe del diálogo entre el patriarca nestoriano Timoteo I y el califa abasí al-Mahdī, un debate entre dos interlocutores a los que se menciona como al-kaṯūliqī y al-a‘rābī, y una colección de testimonia. En este artículo se examina la influencia que sobre estos tres textos ejercieron las obras teológicas elaboradas por los cristianos orientales, influencia que se observa en los argumentos utilizados, en las citas bíblicas aducidas y en el léxico teológico empleado.

Principios de la cosmovisión andina relacionados con el uso de plantas medicinales en la parroquia de Sayausí, cantón Cuenca

Antecedentes: Sayausí, pese a su urbanización en los últimos 20 años aún mantiene costumbres ancestrales andinas, como el uso de plantas medicinales: recurso preventivo y terapéutico en salud. Objetivo: Conocer el manejo de las plantas medicinales en Sayausí, según los principios de la cosmovisión andina. Materiales y Métodos: Investigación con enfoque cualitativo e intercultural. Estudia el uso de plantas medicinales bajo los postulados de la cosmovisión andina, con los sabios de la comunidad. Fundamento teórico para el análisis de los datos: el diseño narrativo, generando conceptos e interpretaciones a partir de la información obtenida de los sabios. Técnicas utilizadas: entrevistas. Instrumentos: formularios con preguntas abiertas, grabaciones y fotografías. Las entrevistas se redactaron utilizando citas, códigos y memos, procesadas con el programa Atlas ti; las categorías principales agrupadas según taxonomías; la información complementada con tablas y figuras. Resultados: los Yachak explicaron con sus propias palabras y vivencias los cinco principios: relacionalidad, reciprocidad, correspondencia, complementariedad y paridad. En su racionalidad todo funciona como proceso holístico, involucra a todos los componentes del universo. El sanar con montes constituye un verdadero ritual: incluye los principios, las plantas, el cuerpo y el espíritu. En el proceso formativo de los sabios intervienen: aprendizaje, don y necesidad. Las plantas tienen tres funciones principales: sanación, alimentación y elemento sagrado. Las formas para clasificar las plantas fueron: género, forma, color, y estado térmico. La recolección del monte, su preparación y la administración son los tres momentos del proceso de curación

Athos : the Holy Mountain /

Includes index.

El Libro del Governador o Suma de collaciones o de ayuntamientos: versión castellana del "Communiloquium" de Juan de Gales

The intellectual production of Johannes Gallensis (also known as John of Wales, c. 1210/30 – 1285), regent-master of the Friars Minor at Oxford and later a lecturer and Doctor of Theology at Paris, was oriented towards furnishing Catholic preachers with a variety of compilations of moral philosophy aimed to serve them in their pastoral ministry. One of these compilations is the Communiloquium, a manual of a kind, which displays its author's attempt to provide adequate and specific argumentation for admonishing all sorts and types of devotees. Its most prominent characteristic is a highly accurate use of classical auctoritates and exempla, which turned this work into a kind of anthology of quotations and references, for it offered its readers the possibility of citing sources and texts that they themselves had never actually consulted. The impressive number of manuscript copies of the Communiloquium that reached our times bears witness to its great popularity (some one hundred and sixty dispersed in different European libraries, according to Jenny Swanson’s John of Wales. A Study of the Work and Ideas of a Thirteenth-Century Friar). The Communiloquium must have reached the Iberian soil by means of Franciscan friars and soon spread through courtly circles, as much as in the religious milieu, due to the political taint of its first part, rooted in the organological metaphor and containing extensive reflections on the virtues and the due behaviour of a monarch. In the Crown of Aragon, the Communiloquium used to be read out loud even among the artisans. In Castile, on the other hand, particularly between the XIIIth and the XVth centuries, its main audience happened to be the lettered nobility and those intellectuals who, dedicated to composing glosas and specula principum, required its resources...

Estudio de empresas de sectores hegemónicos en Colombia para los años 2013 y 2014

Este documento evidencia las posiciones hegemónicas que han llegado a ocupar las empresas más poderosas del país, basándose en el estudio de datos cuantitativos del conteo de las cien empresas con mejores ventas para los años 2013 y 2014, según la revista Gerente. Se usan cinco variables: ventas totales, activos, pasivos, patrimonio y utilidades netas. En la primera sección, se hace una revisión bibliográfica que conecta el origen de la hegemonía en un panorama económico con la influencia del neoliberalismo y la globalización en el actual tejido industrial colombiano. Posteriormente, se realiza una explicación sobre la metodología aplicada para el estudio de la base de datos; la cual es seguida por una exposición de los resultados obtenidos a partir de herramientas estadísticas como el análisis de correlación lineal, quintiles y variaciones porcentuales. Finalmente, se aborda el Programa de Transformación Productiva, esto con el objetivo de mostrar los puntos focales que necesitan especial atención para lograr catalizar el desarrollo económico de Colombia.