Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems, we analyse the importance of different styles of expectation (cognitive and normative) for global research and development. In our study, we find that contrary to Luhmann's prediction in 1971, the normative expectation style still plays a...

Im Unterschied zu zeitgenössischen Diagnosen über den Zustand moderner Gesellschaften, geht die Analyse davon aus, daß die These der Desintegration dieser Gesellschaften empirisch völlig ungeklärt ist. Zur Durchführung von systematischen und empirischen Studien sind allererst...

This paper analyses whether Switzerland has still expanded its social programmes after the end of the so-called golden age. Quantitative evidence points to this trend and ana-lysing reforms in pensions, health insurance, unemployment insurance and family pol-icy reinforces this conclusion, with...

Path dependence as a concept in institutional theories has become increasingly popular in economics and other social sciences. The key idea is that in a sequence of events, the latter events are not (completely) independent from those that occurred in the past. Yet, common usage of the concept...