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It is often said that we live in a time of crisis for social democracy. Many of the West European centre-left parties that seemed the natural parties of government in the second half of the twentieth century are in decline. The most common long-term explanations centre on a shrinking working class, a widening gap between the party elite and their core voters, and the challenges from new populist parties and/or greens. Short-term policy factors include the failure to address the recent financial and refugee crises. None of these factors carry much explanatory weight for developments in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic in the three decades since the transition from communism. We find that much of the explanation for the rise and the fall of the five social democratic parties in these countries lies in the dynamics of party competition and party system change. All parties face dilemmas of policy, electoral appeal and coalition-building. The Central European cases suggest that it is how social democrats handle such challenges and make difficult choices about strategy and tactics that ultimately shapes their long-term fate. Centre-left parties are stronger masters of their fortunes than much of the literature on the decline of social democracy suggests. Consequently, seeking a common structural explanation for the rise and decline of social democratic parties might be a double fallacy: both empirically misleading and a poor base for policy advice.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 shook the Soviet Union to the core and provided the West with the iconic image of the freedom fighter willing to risk all for the cause of freedom. The pathos of the lost cause provided Hungarians with a new set of heroes akin to those of the failed 1848 Revolution, the best known being Prime Minister Imre Nagy who was executed for siding with the revolutionaries in their bid to establish a sovereign republic. His belated funeral on June 16, 1989 undermined the moral and political authority of the communist regime that had attempted to consign Nagy and his confederates to oblivion and seemed to mimic Emile Durkheim's analysis of piaculum and the conscience collective. But the spectacle of Nagy's funeral only temporarily shrouded significant differences between and within those factions demanding pluralist society, most recently revealed in the acrimonious celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. These debates are rooted in Hungary's deeply troubled past that strongly questioned republican values in contrast to the authoritarian values of the Hapsburg monarchy, alliance with the Axis, genocide, and its relationship to communism in the wake of the disaster of World War II. Jacques Derrida tells us that it is not easy to exorcise our ghosts; instead, we are prompted to reconstruction. Memory studies, stimulated by studies of the Holocaust, transformed the sociological imagination (especially Friedlander, 1993; LaCapra, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 1998d). There has been what Michael Roth referred to as “a turning of oneself so as to be in relation to the past” as an act of witness. The traumatic memory of the 1956 Revolution provides yet another case in which a traumatic past is still salient to the political actors in the contemporary arena. This chapter immerses itself in the emergence of historical sociology and with it “memory studies,” that is: (1) the relationship between identity, memory, and embodiment; and (2) the relationship between historical circumstance and collective memory formation (described in diverse approaches such as Adorno, 1959; 1997; Nora, 1989; Postone, Martha, & Kobyashi 2009). In particular, there is in historical sociology an emergent interest in (1) commemorative practices, memorializing addresses, memento; and (2) the struggles over memory, remembering, and forgetting.

This paper aims to analyze a special corporate banking product, the so-called cash-pool, which gained remarkable popularity in the recent years as firms try to centralize and manage their liquidity more efficiently.

A Monte Carlo simulation has been applied to assess the key benefits of the firms arising from the pooling of their cash holdings.

The main conclusion of the analysis is that the value of a cash-pool is higher in the case of firms with large, diverse and volatile cash flows having less access to the capital markets, especially if the partner bank is risky but offers a high interest rate spread at the same time. It is also shown that cash pooling is not the privilege of large multinational firms as the initial direct costs can be easily regained within a year even in the case of SMEs.

The novelty of this paper is the formalization of a valuation model. The literature emphasizes several benefits of cash pooling, such as interest rate savings, economy of scale and reduced cash flow volatility. The presented model focuses on the interest rate savings complemented with a new aspect: the reduced counterparty risk toward the bank.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the applicability of the original 36-item Food Choice Questionnaire (FCQ) model developed by Steptoe et al. (1995) in Hungary.

The national representative questionnaire involved 1,050 individuals in Hungary in 2015. Several multivariable statistical techniques were applied for the analysis of the data: confirmatory factor analysis, principal component analysis, and cluster and Log-linear analysis.

The results indicate that the original nine-factor model is only partially applicable to Hungary. This study successfully managed to distinguish the following factors: health and natural content, mood, preparation convenience, price and purchase convenience, sensory appeal, familiarity, and ethical concern. The FCQ scales proved to be suitable for the description of clusters based on specific food choices and demographic characteristics. By using the factors, the following five clusters were identified: modern food enthusiast, tradition-oriented, optimizer, easy-choice and un-concerned, all of which could be addressed by public health policy with individually tailored messages.

The Hungarian testing process of the FCQ model contributes to an examination of its usability and provides the possibility of fitting the model to different cultures.

The purpose of the paper is to present a possible way of discourse analysis of the meaning giving processes in a therapeutic community (TC).

Presentation of a research project, which aim is to analyse the attitudes towards the large group within the TC, is based on analysing the conceptual metaphors in semi-structured interviews.

The findings delineate a possible discourse, namely, the TC’s hidden discourse of working through the mirror-transference at the community level.

The paper proposes a possible content analysis method for better understanding the deep processes of the TC by examining the large group.

The paper emphasizes the matrix of a TC as a mentalizing scene.

The use of linguistic methods in understanding the hidden community level mentalizing processes.

This study aims to model and investigate low-loss wave-propagation modes across random media. The objective is to achieve better channel properties for applying radio links through random vegetation (e.g. forest) using a beamforming approach. Thus, obtaining the link between the statistical parameters of the media and the channel properties.

A beamforming approach is used to obtain low-loss propagation across random media constructed of long cylinders, i.e. a simplified two dimensional (2D) model of agroforests. The statistical properties of the eigenmode radio wave propagation are studied following a Monte Carlo method. An error quantity is defined to represent the robustness of an eigenmode, and it is shown that it follows a known Lognormal statistical distribution, thereby providing a base for further statistical investigations.

In this study, it is shown that radio wave propagation eigenmodes exist based on a mathematical model. The algorithm presented can find such modes of propagation that are less affected by the statistical variation of the media than the regular beams used in radio wave communication techniques. It is illustrated that a sufficiently chosen eigenmode waveform is not significantly perturbed by the natural variation of the tree trunk diameters.

As a new approach to obtain low-loss propagation in random media at microwave frequencies, the presented mathematical model can calculate scattering-free wave-propagation eigenmodes. A robustness quantity is defined for a specific eigenmode, considering a 2D simplified statistical forest example. This new robustness quantity is useful for performing computationally low-cost optimization problems to find eigenmodes for more complex vegetation models.

Research on entrepreneurial ecosystems has advanced over recent years and has become a popular topic. Despite the interest, previous work has focused on entrepreneurial ecosystems in large cities in the United States. Ecosystems in small cities, underpopulated rural areas, university towns and outside the USA have not been considered much. This paper begins to address this deficit by reviewing three groups of literature.

From the review, the paper builds a conceptual framework to consider entrepreneurial ecosystems led by universities. After summarizing the literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems, entrepreneurial universities and entrepreneurship education, the paper suggests a conceptual framework outlying the structure, components and mechanisms that enable universities to operate as catalysts in the creation of entrepreneurial ecosystems.

It is evident that on many of the “ingredients” of a successful entrepreneurial ecosystem, a resource-constrained environment would have many gaps. Building an entrepreneurship ecosystem in such contexts would be inherently challenging. The model presented suggests that the presence of a university in such locations should enhance the prospects of progress but that the nature of the university itself would impact any outcomes. Universities that make concerted efforts to be entrepreneurial and that have entrepreneurship programmes have strategies available to them that can enhance entrepreneurship ecosystems over time.

The contribution of this paper is to show “how” a university and its entrepreneurship programme can operationally address deficits in a local ecosystem and how it might bring about positive change. The paper also opens new avenues for entrepreneurship education researchers.

Digital technology is revolutionizing insurance distribution allowing the insurer companies to reach customers via multichannel. The aim of this study is to segment potential customers of life insurance based on their information search, purchasing channels and personal characteristics in the digital environment.

The study uses cross-sectional research survey. In total, 422 questionnaires were collected through a convenience sample of the Romanian population. The data was segmented based on consumer information touchpoints (online vs offline), purchase channel preference (offline by a professional vs online by a standardized platform) and personal characteristics (age, marital status and children).

The channel segmentation analysis revealed that information channel preferences are the most important clustering variables, followed by purchase channel preferences, marital status, having children and age. Four distinct segments were identified: young fully offliners (23.7%), mature fully offliners (31.5%), committed online searchers (23.2%) and cross-channel onliners (21.6%).

Insurance companies should adapt their communication and distribution strategy based on multichannel segmentation and should focus on digital touchpoints with costumers.

Firstly, the paper reveals multichannel and hybrid segmentation for life insurance. Secondly, it extends the already studied retail channels with search engines and companies' websites. Thirdly, it extends the behavioural variables for channel segmentation with technology acceptance behaviour, attitude towards life insurance, knowledge about life insurance, attitude towards personal selling and quality appraisal of online information sources.

This work deals with the case of the quad flat non-lead 64 (QFN64) electronic package generating a low power range ranging from 0.01 to 0.1W. It is installed on one side of a printed circuit board (PCB) that can be inclined relative to the horizontal plane with an angle varying between 0° and 90° (horizontal and vertical positions, respectively). The surface temperature of the electronic assembly is subjected to air natural convection.

Calculations are done by means of the finite volume method for many configurations obtained by varying the generated power and the inclination angle.

The distribution of the surface temperature is determined on all the assembly areas (QFN and PCB). The study shows that the thermal behaviour of the electronic device is influenced by the generated power and the inclination angle. The 3D numerical survey leads to correlations allowing calculation of the average surface temperature in any part of the assembly, according to the power generated by the QFN64 and the inclination angle.

The proposed accurate correlations are original and unpublished. They optimize the thermal design of the electronic QFN64 package, which is increasingly used in many engineering fields.

The environmental characteristics of international football can vary significantly from one country to another. As a result, the economic and market possibilities and the objectives of each national league are very heterogeneous. This article aims to examine the differences in revenue structures amongst European national football leagues (n = 50) and cluster them based on these structures. It also investigates which revenue structure would be more effective for similar leagues, considering the previously mentioned varying environmental characteristics of international football.

The study utilises a theoretical framework of business modelling, applied in a unique way to league organisers of national championships. Data on sports and business aspects were collected from sources such as the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Financial Benchmarking Reports, transfermarkt.de and related sources for the period 2015 to 2018. K-means cluster analysis, using the Euclidean distance approach, was employed to develop clusters based on revenue sources over a four-year average.

The paper presents the characteristics and year-to-year changes of nine developed clusters. Throughout the analysis, variables such as average overpayment and inequality between player values amongst leagues were prioritised. The study's practical implications can assist league organisers in enhancing the competitiveness of their leagues, supported by short case studies that provide illustrative examples.

The novelty of the current article lies in introducing innovative variables such as the variance of player value whilst focussing on meso-level analysis, providing a fresh contribution to the existing literature in the field for understanding revenue structures and performance in European national football leagues.