Committee of Electronics and Telecommunications, Polish Academy of Sciences, Structure - Activities - Perspectives

Committee of Electronics and Telecommunications of the Polish Academy of Sciences (KEiT PAN) has been acting on behalf of scientific community in Poland since 1960. The article presents structure, statutory tasks, and Committee activities on behalf of the integration and development of electronics and telecommunications sciences and technology in Poland. The Committee of Electronics and Telecommunications of PAS is all the time an active participant of research life in the country. However, this participation is different than it used to be, and all the time is subject to intense changes. The authors present critically the current status of the Committee, but also undertake an effort to newly define the role, activity and potential of KEiT PAN, in completely new conditions of doing research in Poland, Europe and worldwide, than it was at that time, when the PAS Committees were originally defined. The conclusions, upon possible acceptance by the national research and technical communities of electronics and telecommunications, may possibly serve to change and/or optimise the work of the Committee in the near future

Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

The study of the collapse of past societies raises many questions for the theory and practice of archaeology. Interest in collapse extends as well into the natural sciences and environmental and sustainability policy. Despite a range of approaches to collapse, the predominant paradigm is environmental collapse, which I argue obscures recognition of the dynamic role of social processes that lie at the heart of human communities. These environmental discourses, together with confusion over terminology and the concepts of collapse, have created widespread aporia about collapse and resulted in the creation of mixed messages about complex historical and social processes

World-system position and democracy, 1972–2008

Global levels of democracy are higher than ever before, and democratic principles are now institutionalized as a world cultural norm. Nevertheless, a number of countries continue to feature governing systems that restrict political rights. Against this backdrop, I revisit traditional claims by world-system theory regarding the impact of the core/periphery hierarchy on national political systems. In doing so, I draw attention to the uneven character of democratic growth across world-system zones. Using an updated trichotomous measure of world-system position, and drawing from Freedom House and Polity IV ratings of democracy, I construct an annual time-series dataset producing a maximum of 5445 observations across 161 countries during the 1972–2008 period. Employing a series of random-effects tobit models with year-by-covariate interaction terms, I compare democratic growth among nations in the core, semiperiphery, and periphery. The results indicate significant gaps in democracy between core and non-core nations that are not dissipating over time, and that are perhaps growing slightly larger. In a series of robustness checks, I find that using an alternative measure of world-system position, an alternative measure of democracy, and an alternative estimation strategy produce similar results. In sum, despite the global spread of democracy, world-system boundaries remain fundamental in hindering cross-national convergence.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

The role of war in deep transitions: exploring mechanisms, imprints and rules in sociotechnical systems

This paper explores in what ways the two world wars influenced the development of sociotechnical systems underpinning the culmination of the first deep transition. The role of war is an underexplored aspect in both the Techno-Economic Paradigms (TEP) approach and the Multi-level perspective (MLP) which form the two key conceptual building blocks of the Deep Transitions (DT) framework. Thus, we develop a conceptual approach tailored to this particular topic which integrates accounts of total war and mechanisms of war from historical studies and imprinting from organisational studies with the DT framework’s attention towards rules and meta-rules. We explore in what ways the three sociotechnical systems of energy, food, and transport were affected by the emergence of new demand pressures and logistical challenges during conditions of total war; how war impacted the directionality of sociotechnical systems; the extent to which new national and international policy capacities emerged during wartime in the energy, food, and transport systems; and the extent to which these systems were influenced by cooperation and shared sacrifice under wartime conditions. We then explore what lasting changes were influenced by the two wars in the energy, food, and transport systems across the transatlantic zone. This paper seeks to open up a hitherto neglected area in analysis on sociotechnical transitions and we discuss the importance of further research that is attentive towards entanglements of warfare and the military particularly in the field of sustainability transitions