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Increasingly complex societal challenges call for new, innovative solutions that social hybrid business models can provide. Social supermarkets (SSMs) are one example offering access to affordable food to people living in poverty while reducing food waste of nearby retailers. Finding the “right” location is an essential part of this retail marketing strategy. However, limited research has attempted to investigate the specific conditions of locational planning for hybrid and nonprofit retail organizations. This paper illustrates the case of Austria where SSMs are well established.

A GIS-based white space analysis was carried out to identify potential neighborhoods or rural areas for new social supermarkets with sufficient nearby demand, supply and no existing SSMs. The empirical parameters for this spatial analysis can be transferred to European countries with similar ecosystems. The authors collected a unique data set of 79 (2014) and 88 SSMs (2019) and 4,665 (2014) and 4,211 (2019) food retailers as (potential) suppliers to SSMs. To determine demand, the authors relied on small-scale integrated wage and income tax data and unemployment rates (2011) from Statistics Austria.

Overall, Austria has very good spatial access to grocery stores, including to SSMs. SSM access increased especially in the capital of Vienna between 2014 and 2019. The GIS-based white space analysis identified several other regions where residents have a high demand for affordable food with sufficient potential suppliers of surplus food but no SSM yet. Neighborhood-level findings are released as part of a publicly accessible spatial decision support system.

The methodology allowed a specific definition of the key areas of relevance by matching the demand for SSMs, calculated as the number of people with low incomes in the respective regions in Austria, with the supply of SSMs, calculated as the amount of potential food loss prevention by nearby retail stores. These parameters have proven to help in identifying the white spaces and therefore can be used in Austria and other European countries with similar ecosystems.

This article starts with a brief overview of the history of housing for people with intellectual disability in Austria. The system of care and Austrian disability policy are also examined, focusing on implementation of deinstitutionalisation and community living. The following analysis of services provided in the field of housing for people with intellectual disabilities shows that support is provided in undistinguished, generalised service packages based on a competency model. Academic research on community living is quite rare in Austria, and fails to take into account the subjective perspective of people with intellectual disabilities.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, it analyzes demand and supply-side factors that influence patient flows to and from Austria. Second, building on the empirical research and existing conceptualizations, the study offers a general extended framework to guide future comparative analysis.

The paper draws on multiple data sources including a literature review, secondary data, website analysis and semi-structured interviews with patients and health providers. Content analysis was carried out to identify common motives for seeking care abroad and providers' orientation towards medical travel.

Outbound medical travel is largely determined by factors of access, affordability and vicinity, while inbound medical travel is predominately driven by a lack of adequate medical infrastructure in source countries and quality, both in terms of medical and service quality. Providers distinguish themselves according to the extent they take part in medical travel.

The findings emerging from a single country case study approach cannot be generalized across settings and contexts, albeit contributing to a better understanding of current medical travel patterns in Europe.

Unlike most recent contributions, this study focuses both on inbound and outbound medical travel in Austria and investigates patient flows for distinctive treatments and drivers. While analysis of the supply-side of medical travel is often limited to tourism studies, this study provides a critical insight into developments in Europe from a health policy perspective, acknowledging that diverse medical travel patterns in Europe coexist.

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.

Currently, owing to the influence of rapid globalisation, the issue of international and cross-cultural implementation of cross-cultural relationships is being widely discussed. This is also related to the readiness of graduates for international cooperation. The objective of this qualitative study is to identify and compare the requirements of company representatives from the Czech Republic – the Vysocina Region and Austria (Region Upper Austria) regarding the readiness of graduates to entering the workforce and the intercultural differences between the relevant regions.

A total of 20 Czech and Austrian companies from the relevant regions participated in the research. The results were obtained through in-depth guided interviews and a comparative method.

The qualitative study has theoretical implications in the context of new findings in the field of research. It contributes to the knowledge relating to the preparation of graduates for entering the workforce, and in the context of intercultural development, it extends this knowledge with the identified weaknesses of the mentioned preparation at the level of Czech or Austrian education.

The most effective and probable approach to enhance the development of cross-cultural competences in particular appears to be the integration of new techniques and content of education in the form of new subjects in cooperation with academics and practitioners from the particular country. Collaboration with these experts can build students' knowledge and skills from an intercultural environment to the highest degree possible.