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The potential impact of farmer's innovations for the development of food regimes is the topic of this chapter. Two case studies analysed from the perspective of strategic niche management show that there is niche formation visible as an alternative to the dominant modern food regime. These innovations are based upon the active rediscovery of marginalised and often forgotten knowledge and result in effective linkages between old and new knowledge. This retro side of innovations can have a large potential for developing viable alternatives for rural development. Social scientists play an important role in the understanding of the retro side of innovations and its potential and influence on the prevailing knowledge and information systems inside and outside of the scientific domain.

The purpose of this study is to examine the ongoing dynamics of the public service sector reform through an embedding process of a municipal enterprise from the field of basic social and health care services – a pilot model in Finland.

The framework of a multi‐level perspective on transitions is used to describe the change process. At the lowest level of this perspective are the experimental niches acting as “seeds of change” represented by the case organisation, a municipal enterprise operating in the basic social and health care sector. The data consist of 16 thematic interviews with the key persons of the operating system, analysed with the principles of content analysis.

The examination uncovers diverse pressures affecting niche level innovations and manifesting as clashes and controversies between old and new ways of thinking, but these clashes can also act as a platform for innovations when opened up, analysed and facilitated.

Clashes that appear in societal transition processes and regime changes, both in the regimes and also on the organisational level, should not be seen solely as bottlenecks, because they can act as innovation potential when opened up and facilitated. This implies the need for not only new technological, service‐related and organisational innovations in the public sector reform, but also innovative practices, “second level innovations”.

This paper contributes to the discussion on the ongoing change processes in the reform of the social and health care sector, emphasising emerging clashes not only as obstacles but opportunities.

Attempts to discover an internal logic in the high‐speed events taking place in the former Soviet Union. In addressing the problems of the country′s disintegration, examines the issue in its socioeconomic, political and territorial‐administrative aspects. Analyses, for this purpose, the nature of Soviet society prior to Gorbachev′s reforms, its present transitional stage and its probable direction in the near future.

This study aimed at investigating the value relevance of book value and earnings and the relationship between earnings and operating cash flow of two different financial reporting regimes in Malaysia. A market and nonmarket valuation approaches were utilised for that purpose. The result of market valuation approach of pool sample shows that book values and earnings are value relevant. We also observed that the change in financial reporting regime affects significantly the value relevance of book value and but not earnings. While book value and earnings are value relevant during the MASB period, only book value is value relevance during the FRS period. The result of non‐market valuation approach on the other hand, shows that the change in financial reporting regime has no significant effect on the relationship between earnings and operating cash flow. The result of market valuation approach implicates that the introduction of new or improved standards under FRS regime strengthen the position of book value thus leaving earnings behind in equity valuation. The result of non‐market valuation model implicates that the level of relationship between earnings and operating cash flow persists as long as operating cash flow comprise of cash and cash equivalent components whereas earnings comprise of cash and accruals components. The study contributes to the existing literature in the area of the effect of adoption of FRS on value relevance of accounting numbers in Malaysia.

Was the October Revolution inevitable? If yes, what was its real character? If not, could it have been avoided or taken a different course? What was the role played in it by Lenin? Using the dialectical method of analysis, an attempt is made to provide answers to these questions. The following points are stressed: (1) Given the general and particular conditions of Russian life created by the First World War and the February Revolution, the break with the old democratic mixed capitalist form and the establishment of the new totalitarian state capitalist form of the social development were inevitable. (2) The fact that this process was headed by Lenin was accidental and, hence, avoidable. (3) But Lenin individualised the general and particular features of the October Revolution in terms of the names of the events associated with the revolution, of the time of its occurrence, of its participants and of their positions during and after the revolution.

Rishton, a small town in Uzbekistan, has been producing pottery for centuries. This chapter investigates how the pottery and ceramists’ society in Rishton changed during the 20th century, the 70 year-long Soviet era in particular. It seeks to answer the question of how the traditions of Muslim artisans in a feudal society were rearranged and relocated in the Soviet production system. Importantly, the apprentice system especially helped to preserve many older methods and customs, such as the veneration of Islamic patron saints, among ceramists. This chapter also sheds light on the ways in which these traditions have changed in the shifting economy since Uzbekistan became independent in 1991.

This paper seeks to draw attention to the historical and institutional context of Norwegian home care and to the way in which care agencies have been pressed to reconcile competing demands caused by conflicting policy aims and administrative values. The paper also aims to explore how ideas of contractual management have been interpreted and put into practice in this field of tension.

The study draws on policy documents, historical and social research reports, and personal interviews with managers and home care staff from three different case studies representing different eras of management ideas. From this micro perspective the study examines professional work as the intersection between new public management and the health care state.

The findings demonstrate how contractual management is highly influenced by competing drivers of change. Reforms, stressing cost reduction, do not act as a unidirectional reform programme. Instead, they are infused with administrative arguments linked to previous reform ideas aiming to create legitimacy both from “above” and from “below”. The dynamic of change often has unintended consequences which in turn prompt further reform efforts.

The paper provides insights into the complexity of change following on from New Public Management (NPM). More specifically, change is characterised by tensions originating in competing normative drivers as well as the co‐existence of old and new forms of organising.

WHAT IS MEANT BY A MODERN MANAGEMENT STYLE? HOW SOME OF THE IDEAS WENT SOUR. We are now in a position to develop a better understanding of how change comes about in organisations and society — a study that has been monstrously neglected. Not all change works in the same way: change sequences can fall into several patterns. In some cases people simply start doing new things or doing old things in a new way, sometimes by accident, often because old restraints vanish; once the innvoators do it and get away with it or demonstrate the advantages others follow — very often they have no choice but to follow, if they are to stay in the race.

This chapter sheds light on long-term trends in the level and structural dynamics of investments in Russian human capital formation from government, corporations, and households. It contributes to the literature discussing theoretical issues and empirical patterns of modernization, human development, as well as the transition from a centralized to a market economy. The empirical evidence is based on extensive utilization of the dataset introduced in Didenko, Földvári, and Van Leeuwen (2013). Our findings provide support for the view expressed in Gerschenkron (1962) that in late industrializers the government tended to substitute for the lack of capital and infrastructure by direct interventions. At least from the late nineteenth century the central government's and local authorities' budgets played the primary role. However, the role of nongovernment sources increased significantly since the mid-1950s, i.e., after the crucial breakthrough to an industrial society had been made. During the transition to a market economy in the 1990s and 2000s the level of government contributions decreased somewhat in education, and more significantly in research and development, but its share in overall financing expanded. In education corporate funds were largely replaced by those from households. In health care, Russia is characterized by an increasing share of out-of-pocket payments of households and slow development of organized forms of nonstate financing. These trends reinforce obstacles to Russia's future transition, as regards institutional change toward a more significant and sound role of the corporate sector in such branches as R&D, health care, and, to a lesser extent, education.

The Epidemiologic Transition can help us understand a fundamental puzzle about aging. The puzzle stems from two seemingly contradictory facts. The first fact is that death rates from noninfectious degenerative maladies – the so-called diseases of aging – increase as people age. It seems to be at odds with the historical fact that for nearly a century in which people were aging more than ever before, the aggregate rates of such diseases have been decreasing. In what sense can both be true? Crucial to resolving the puzzle are the age-profiles of such diseases in cohorts that grew up in the different regimes of the Transition. For each cohort, noninfectious diseases had increased with age, resulting in an upward-sloping age profile, which affirms the first fact. As the regimes were transitioning from the Malthusian to the modern one, however, the profiles of successive cohorts had been shifting downward: death rates from noninfectious diseases were shrinking at each age, signifying the newer cohorts’ greater aging potentials. The shifting profiles had been renewing the cohort mix of the population, shaping the century-long descent of such diseases in aggregate, giving rise to the historical fact. The profiles had shifted early in the cohorts’ adult years, associating closely with the newer epidemiologic conditions in childhood. Those conditions appear to be a circumstance under which aging potentials of cohorts could be misgauged, including in one troubling episode in the first half of the nineteenth century when the potentials had reversed.