Publications

This article explores why left-wing parties tend to avoid advocating higher taxes for the rich—and why they sometimes do put them on the agenda. The ‘tax taboo’ is driven by electoral calculations. Public opinion on taxing the rich is ambivalent. Narratives of taxes harming the economy are nurtured by right-wing parties and business lobbies. This discourages the left from mobilizing on the issue. However, recent campaigns by the German Social Democrats (2021) and Labour in Britain (2017) overcame this taboo with distinct pro-tax programs. Our comparative analysis traces common factors and strategic considerations of party actors. It highlights the role of policy entrepreneurs, who act as catalysts through their exceptional motivation and competence. Additionally, our case studies point to party competition as an important factor. Right-wing parties face a trilemma between the goals of balanced budgets, low taxes, and investment, making them less compelling critics of left-wing tax plans.

Against the backdrop of rising populist movements and autocratic regimes worldwide, policy makers, publics, and academics are increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of mis- and disinformation on democracy. While there is debate about the actual share of fabricated content in online communication environments, such forms of information manipulation appear in many shapes and with varying degrees of deviation from facts. What unifies them is their use of narratives to distort public debate, sow division, and seed doubt in institutions. However, with increasing scholarly attention, the literature on information manipulation is becoming increasingly fragmented, calling for stronger integration. Particularly, different strands of research use either framing or narrative perspectives in their analyses. After reviewing essential forms of information manipulation and systematizing them on different levels of analysis, the paper addresses this fragmentation by proposing and testing a multilevel framework that integrates both framing and narrative perspectives on information manipulation. The framework was tested in an exploratory case study in the context of the 2024 European Parliament elections. Based on the results, the benefits and limitations of the framework are discussed. The overall aim of this paper is to add to the systematic use of terminology in the analysis of information manipulation phenomena.

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Wandermodi des Milieubegriffs in der Soziologie, indem er vier zentrale Stationen nachzeichnet: (1) die diszipli- näre Reinigung bei Émile Durkheim, der den Milieubegriff durch eine positivis- tische Methodologie soziologisiert, dabei aber seine naturwissenschaftlichen und kosmischen Ursprünge weiterträgt; (2) die alltägliche Verbildlichung bei Heinrich Zille, der das „Milljöh“ durch Zeichnungen und sozialkritische Darstellungen popularisiert und dabei eine Form der Spontansoziologie praktiziert; (3) die stra- tegische Empirisierung zwischen Marktforschung und Sozialstrukturanalyse, in der der Milieubegriff als Kategorie u. a. für die Lebensstilforschung genutzt wird; sowie (4) die affektive Ansteckung bei Gilles Deleuze und Félix Guattari, die das Milieu als dynamisches, vibrierendes Konzept im Rahmen poststrukturalistischer Theorie reartikulieren. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass Reinigung und Zirkulation des Begriffs keine Gegensätze sind, sondern sich gegenseitig bedingen: Während begriffliche Reini- gung der Abgrenzung dient, ermöglicht sie zugleich die bessere Zirkulation und Anwendbarkeit des Milieubegriffs. Durch die Analyse der verschiedenen Wander- modi wird deutlich, dass der Begriff des Milieus zugleich in Denkmilieus eingebettet ist, die seine Wanderbewegungen und Versuche seines Stillstellens regulieren – nicht immer erfolgreich.

There is now wide agreement that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch as a result of human activities, which is often encapsulated in the concept of the “Anthropocene.” Meanwhile, there remains considerable debate about the impact of economic growth on planetary ecosystems. In this article, we bring these two aspects together by exploring patterns and biases of knowledge production on the Anthropocene in International Relations (IR) as a discipline with a mandate to study “the global.” We grasp general publishing patterns through a bibliometric analysis of journal articles in IR during the 2000–25 period, which reveals that the increasing focus on the Anthropocene still leaves (post-)growth questions largely sidelined. A closer reading of the ten most-cited articles in the sample further indicates that growth is at best an afterthought in much IR scholarship on the Anthropocene. Only when considering additional contributions, including from the cognate field of International Political Economy (IPE), with an explicit interest in (post-)growth, do links between the Anthropocene and the pursuit of growth emerge. The ideational and material dynamics involved in this pursuit thus remain strangely absent from mainstream IR debate about the causes and consequences of the Anthropocene.

This study attempts to widen the scope of African ecocriticism and emphasize the roles of nonhuman life forms in literary representations of sustainable environments. Using Joe Ushie’s poetry collection, A Reign of Locusts, for a discourse situated within the African material ecocritical problematic, the study submits that some African poets valorize their birthplaces’ natures not only in recognition of the agency of their places, but also in deployment of traditionalism against the failures of modernity. That is, such African poets often shift from the romanticization of their indigenous ecologies to activism against the force that modernity exerts on the environment. While recognizing the enduring force of modernity, the poets, through their poetics of nature, suggest that the promotion of traditional ways of relating to the earth is one of the ways in which humans can ensure a sustainable environment.

This introductory paper outlines and situates the special issue’s core concept of growth infrastructures, defined as socio-material arrangements oriented towards or facilitating the pursuit of economic growth. We argue that the quest for continuous economic growth is not merely a matter of policy or institutional design, but instead more deeply embedded in intersections of ‘hard’ physical objects and ‘softer’ social relations. Mobilizing scholarship from across the social sciences, we bridge the study of infrastructures with the study of (post-)growth, two research agendas whose disconnect has inhibited deeper insights into the infrastructural relations underpinning (post-)growth regimes. Deliberate foregrounding of the relational underpinnings of growth is necessary, we contend, to better account for how infrastructures and the politics of (post-)growth are socio-materially entangled.

The first twenty-one books of Albert the Great’s massive paraphrastic commentary on Aristotle’s De animalibus (completed in the 1260s) were followed by something very different in books 22-26, namely brief narrative descriptions of various animals arranged alphabetically and relying extensively upon Thomas of Cantimpré’s De natura rerum. The result is a peculiar composite that first articulates the general or common principles of animals—e.g., the manner of their reproduction, their nutrition, growth, shared behaviors, etc.—but then provides brief, narrative descriptions of different animal species which are sourced primarily from Thomas of Cantimpré’s encyclopedia (ca. 1256). In the following pages I examine Albert’s use in his De animalibus of Thomas of Cantimpre’s narrative descriptions in De natura rerum. I will show that although Albert often criticized Thomas’s text, he utilized it nonetheless to satisfy the requirements for a natural science and to make that science accessible to a wider audience.

The shift to hybrid work has introduced new organizational challenges for higher education institutions (HEIs), especially when balancing academic freedom, managerial oversight, digital infrastructure, and global mobility. This study explores how three German universities are developing hybrid work policies in the context of institutional complexity. Using the Field-Level Deduction framework and the institutional logics perspective, we examine how these universities balance professional, managerial, market, and digital logics in their formal policies on mobile work and workation. Drawing on a comparative case study of mobile work agreements and expert interviews with the involved key actors, we identify three emerging modes of creative assembly: (1) flexibility oriented toward academic freedom, (2) structured balance through procedural clarity, and (3) standardization with strong risk aversion. Although these universities operate under the same legal framework, their hybrid work models vary considerably, suggesting different ways in which institutional logics can be selectively coupled. The study provides exploratory insights into the diversity of hybrid work in German HEIs and introduces creative assembly as a conceptual lens for understanding how universities navigate institutional complexity. The findings are not statistically representative but serve the purpose of analytic generalization, offering conceptual insights. These insights lay the theoretical groundwork for future empirical research examining the effects of different assemblies on outcomes such as academic productivity, collegiality, student engagement, and international competitiveness.

Despite widespread concern about levels of administrative burden within universities, understanding of the associated dimensions and drivers remains limited. Addressing the resulting lacuna, this paper presents a granular analysis of what academic staff within one national university system regard as the key dimensions and specific drivers of the administrative burdens they encounter at work. The data underlying our analyses are drawn from responses to an in-depth survey on administrative workloads from 350 academic staff working at 37 Australian universities. Our findings reveal that while generic administrative responsibilities add administrative burden, such burden is perhaps most acutely felt in the core academic work domains of teaching and research. In terms of perceptions of drivers, we find that two major strategies that universities have pursued to gain efficiencies—administrative centralization and administrative service automation—have resulted in what is widely experienced by academic staff as an intensification of their administrative burden.

This article provides the first comprehensive account of the forms and functions of apologies in Nigerian English, with a view to examining the factors that condition speakers’ choice of the linguistic forms of apologies in different text types as well as potential differences between apologies elicited via discourse completion tasks and those found in corpus data. Analysing the data from a postcolonial pragmatics approach, the article identifies nativised forms of apologising due to influence from indigenous Nigerian languages and reveals that the linguistic forms of apologies produced by Nigerian English speakers are systematically conditioned by the communicative situation. It suggests that it is the written mode of language production that allows speakers to choose speech acts without time pressure rather than the type of data as such, which influences the choice of linguistic forms of speech acts. Thus, the study contributes to the description of pragmatic variation in Nigerian English.

Bodies are immanent element of socio-cultural negotiation. Since the 19th century, Egyptology has produced vast knowledge on the ancient Egyptian bodies (human, divine, animal), however, mainly by focusing on funerary aspects of ancient Egyptian culture. Different paradigm shifts and turns of the last few decades (hermeneutics, semiotics, social-constructivism, ontology etc.), echo through Egyptology, but are still not part of the dominant discourse. This is also the case for the so-called “body turn”, an important epistemological turning point, that came largely unnoticed in Egyptology. Previous body centred Egyptological publications are either too specific in their focus or too broad in their presentation of Ancient Egyptian corporealities. To balance this out and reflect the latest state of research, this volume brings together selected contributions from the fields of Egyptology and Northeast African Archaeology. The focus is on both conceptualizations of the bodies by ancient Egyptians and Egyptologists. The topics of the contributions cover familiar but also new aspects. They range from division of labour, disability, gender roles, erotic, magic, fragmented and narrated bodies, other-than-human corporealities, to questions of ethics and the place of Egyptology in current approaches to past bodies. Various textual, pictorial, and archaeological sources, as well as human remains, are analyzed both from synchronic and diachronic perspectives. From the theoretical and methodological point of view, the publication provides deeper insights into a number of different approaches and their application to the ancient material (among others: osteoarchaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, semiotics, new materialism, ontology, etc.), which makes the book an important reading for all career stage Egyptologists (students to professionals) and the broader interested public.

How do transnational actors handle institutional configurations in which they need or are expected to work together, even though cooperation is likely to diminish their distinctiveness? For officials of international organizations (IOs) whose mandates and memberships overlap, this tension can induce lasting identity stress. In this article, I argue that one way for IO officials to cope with this stress is by mobilizing ‘atrocity stories’ as boundary work devices. To exemplify the dynamics surrounding this widely overlooked inter-organizational practice, I examine a prominent case of ‘twin’ organizations: the relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. I draw on more than 40 semi-structured interviews to demonstrate that both IMF and World Bank officials field seemingly trivial atrocity stories to shore up their organizational identities while acknowledging obvious ideational and operational similarities between the IOs. Thus, they not only determine what are shared tasks and what are not, but also delineate who they are as representatives of two routinely and closely interacting IOs. The analysis clarifies how a reliance on atrocity stories can help actors to tame the identity stress that stems from their interactions.

While borders are on the rise in both political practice and academic research, more mundane practices of boundary work continue to make, remake and unmake transnational knowledges, spaces and identities. In this special section, we argue that global politics unfolds through boundary work, an understudied but highly effective set of ordering practices that shape the conditions for and dynamics of global (non-)cooperation. We leverage recent innovations in the study of boundary work in other fields to transcend the conventional portrayal of boundaries as instruments of exclusion and competition. Instead, we equally attend to their potential to facilitate inclusion and cooperation between otherwise differently positioned actors. Building on this conceptual foundation, the contributions to this collection offer novel, empirically grounded insights into diverse types of boundary work (competitive, collaborative and configurational) across several important transnational domains and institutional sites. These insights will be of particular relevance to practitioners of global politics, who regularly confront boundaries. Overall, we encourage scholars of International Relations to pay more attention to the constitutive effects and dynamics of boundary work in global politics.