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We study the sustainability of the Austrian healthcare system. In the first part of the chapter, we provide background on the state of the Austrian healthcare sector. In the second part, we review major healthcare interventions that recently took place in Austria, discussing their effectiveness and implications for sustainability. In the third part, we address five public health challenges that are particularly interesting in the Austrian context: ageing, risky health behaviours, healthcare access in rural areas, refugees and infectious disease epidemics.

Both the ideals of the European Union (EU) and the EU's recent political difficulties have attracted comparison with the Habsburg empire. In recent years, some of those making comparison have turned to the Austrian Jewish novelists, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, who were crucial to the imaginative emergence of the Habsburg Myth. This paper analyses their writings and those of Robert Musil and Gregor von Rezzori in relation to the Habsburg Myth as a story about European unity, about Austria-Hungary as a supranational polity and about Austria-Hungary's self-proclaimed providential purpose in European affairs. It explores the dissonance between the Habsburg Myth and the EU's territorial composition and argues that the Habsburg Myth is, nonetheless, revealing about the EU's internal hierarchies and its geopolitical difficulties in relation to Russia.

Realizing gender equality and parenthood still seems to be a contradictory endeavour. In consequence, family policies in Europe focus on paternal involvement and increasing women’s participation in the labour market. Nevertheless, consequences of gender pay gap on family arrangements still set limits to these policies.

This chapter reveals results of qualitative research on paternal leave practices and fathers’ involvement in the family in Austria. The empirical data set includes 36 guided interviews with fathers on paternal leave, 12 with female partners, 16 with human resources managers and 14 follow-up questionings with part-time working men and women. The research investigates effects of long-term leave arrangements on the distribution of family work, gainful employment and individual interests.

Mainly best practice models in undoing gender in family and work arrangements are explored. Subsequently, a high proportion of good earning fathers and couples with tertiary education are represented in the sample. Nevertheless, quantitative studies in Austria confirm higher proportions of fathers aged 40 plus on paternal leave. They take this decision mainly as a ‘tribute to the family’, once or twice in a life-time.

However, long-term care data on work-family-life balancing currently do not show significant changes in gendered patterns. By contrast, gender disparities are still reproduced in the labour market. Theoretically, the chapter shows the impact of gender studies, feminist theories and sociology of the family on realizing gender equality in private and public spheres. It outlines recommendations for family policy makers and for readers interested in relations between realizing work–life balance and gender budgeting.

Even though the progress in creating inclusive learning environments varies across different countries, the implementation of inclusive education systems can clearly be considered a European shared policy goal. However, there is still a lack of both a clear definition of inclusive education and indicators on the provision of necessary resources in order to implement a high-quality inclusive school system. In the presented study, we aimed to shed light on how teachers who work at different schools in Austria perceive the resources provided to them in order to realize high-quality inclusive education. Furthermore, the study searched for factors, which influence teachers' subjective perception of resources, like years of work experience or the number of students in a classroom. To assess teachers' perception of resources, a revised version of the Perception of Resources Questionnaire (PRQ) developed by Goldan and Schwab (2018) was used focussing on three dimensions: human resources, material resources and spatial resources. The results generally indicate that teachers feel ambivalent or have a somewhat positive perception of available resources. In line with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) principles of inclusive education ‘each according to his needs’, we argue that it is not possible to clarify what ‘adequate resources’ might be. The creation of an inclusive learning environment requires considerable effort, and the degree of pedagogical support should be decisive for the allocation of resources. This can only be evaluated if the main learning barriers for each student are identified.

Literature on European and national identities displays a tension between occasional observations of an emerging ‘banal Europeanism’ (Cram, 2009) and a dominant strand (e.g. Guibernau, 2007; Toplak & Šumi, 2012) that questions the viability of European identifications vis-à-vis historically entrenched nationalisms, particularly in the context of the debt crisis and the resulting (re)nationalization of European politics. This chapter builds on recent work on Austrian European Union (EU) scepticism and its contestation (Karner, 2013) to examine instances – in diverse media coverage, readers’ letters to the editor of Austria’s most widely read newspaper, internet platforms, political essays and party political positions – of national identity negotiations in relation to the EU and as articulated in the context of successive European crises and the most recent elections to the European Parliament. The qualitative, thematic analysis of these wide-ranging materials developed here draws on two key concepts in critical discourse analysis, the notions of deixis (Billig, 1995) or ‘rhetorical pointing’ and of the topos or ‘structure of argument’ (e.g. Reisigl & Wodak, 2001), which are complemented by a third theoretical tool, namely the anthropological concept of ‘grammars of identity’ (Baumann & Gingrich, 2004). The resulting discussion reveals the uneasy coexistence of (critical) Europeanisms and various national reassertions in Austria’s public sphere and their respective discursive features. Further, the theoretical approaches synthesized cast light on internal diversities within political positions that are often too monolithicly classified as being ‘simply’ pro- or anti-European respectively. Instead, the analysis presented here reveals a spectrum of (at least five) competing positions.

The local government auditing (LGA) landscape in Austria can be characterised as fragmented terrain, due to different regulations in the nine regions and a plethora of involved actors. The contours of the landscape have changed significantly during the past decades, with three major interrelated developments taking place: (1) administrative decentralisation led to an increase in the number of auditee organisations; (2) with the establishment of regional audit institutions (RAIs), new auditor organisations appeared as actors; and (3) auditing practices evolved, for example, with respect to an expansion of performance audits and the use of technology. In this chapter, the authors put a focus on RAIs that play a major role in LGA. The authors portray the historical roots of the LGA landscape and give a descriptive overview of the current structures and practices.

The predicted doctors’ shortage in Austria and the increasing feminisation of the medical profession are aspects of a passionate debate on gender inequality in medical careers and particularly on sufficient medical care in Austria. Therefore, this review summarises main findings on gender inequality in medical careers in Austria using an intersectional lens.

The intersections derived from literature elucidate that gender inequality is not predominantly dependent on having a family including children, but that various combinations of these intersections influence women’s careers.

There is a need to further investigate intersections influencing medical careers in women and to relate these to affirmative action measures. Affirmative action measures need quotas and consideration of various areas besides work–family balance. There is a need to evaluate and adapt interventions to promote women in medicine according to the intersections derived from the literature.

Austria has not yet established a single national organisation for research management and administration (RMA). Various research related institutions are organised in individual professional networks within their categories of organisational structure – public, private, and industry. Hence, the creation of a joint RMA association is a good aim to target in the near future. The obvious need of a strong networked community of RMAs across disciplines and organisational structures, especially in a setting of a growing global research arena, shall exemplify the development of such an Association of Research Managers and Administrators-Austria (ARMA-T). Furthermore, external factors play an increasingly important role in research development and RMAs. It depends on how their home organisations – universities, industry, and intermediaries – will understand the need for cooperation, platform building, and continuous development and professionalisation. Vision and foresight from several constituents and stakeholders will have to play a starring role as well as supporting the whole community. On top of it, international knowledge exchange helps to create those necessary conversations and networks for such a development.

Civil society organisations (CSOs) contribute essentially to welfare states and society. In Europe they play a key role in the provision of social services, but also fulfil a large variety of other functions, such as giving voice to unaddressed issues, offering alternative ways of occupational socialisation or facilitating social inclusion (cf. Kramer, 1981; Rose-Ackerman & James, 1986; Kendall, 2003). Current research suggests that the third sectors’ societal roles considerably vary between countries, depending on the welfare state they are embedded in: Starting with a revision of Esping-Andersen's welfare regime typology (1990) and also based on the earlier work of Moore (1966), Salamon and his colleagues developed a typology of four different ‘non-profit regimes’ (Salamon & Anheier, 1998; Salamon, Hems, & Chinnock, 2000a). As key dimensions for this classification, they applied the extent of governmental welfare spending and the size of the third sector (cf. Johnson, 1999). According to this typology of nonprofit regimes, in countries with a large third-sector CSOs mainly fulfil the service function. Countries with a relatively small third sector, so the implicit conclusion, would tend to engage in ‘the expression of political, social, or even recreational interests’ (Salamon & Anheier, 1998, p. 229).