After the Second World War, both Greece and Italy experienced a Left-Right political polarization and a reproduction of earlier patterns of political patronage. Both Italy and Greece received international aid, including emergency relief, interim loans, and Marshall Plan funds. By the beginning of the 1950s, the Italian economy had recovered better from war destruction and had achieved industri...

This article operationalizes and tests the argument that “history matters” in a multiple pathway model of globalizing postsocialism, a period with radical economic transformations. Sequence analysis is utilized to identify typical careers of firms through ownership forms that indicate relational processes as responses to varying uncertainties. Regression models of efficiency and growth indicate...

The culture trap is the tendency to put cultural markers and habits above the demands of reason or compassion. It can reduce receptivity to new ideas and trigger Phoenix Cycles of catastrophe and renaissance. System research is then complicated by the historiographic problem of continuity and change, because there are no objective criteria for deciding whether "the system" survived or was destr...

The paper presents a software agents society, which implements a more efficient control and monitoring system for a complex heterogeneous system – multiple hydroelectric power plants connected in a chain on Somes River. The agent society can be superimposed over the existing SCADA control and monitoring network and aims to increase performance, efficiency and stability in the existing monitorin...