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This book arose from a conversation between Lars Engwall and Richard Whitley during the 2003 European Group for Organization Studies Colloquium in Copenhagen about important topics for future research. We agreed then, and this has been amply confirmed by subsequent events, that the proliferation of research eval- tion schemes, especially in Europe, was an important feature of the changing re- tionships between the state, universities and scientific research more generally, which needed systematic and comparative analysis. With the support of the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, this discussion led to workshops in Uppsala and Manchester involving colleagues from Australia, Germany and the Netherlands at which the main framework for such an analysis was developed. This framework then formed the basis for the conference at Bielefeld in 2005 at which earlier versions of most of the papers in this volume were presented and extensively discussed. We are very grateful for the support of the PRIME network of the European Commission and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science for this c- ference, as well as the invaluable efforts of Peter Weingart of the University of Bielefeld. We are also greatly indebted to the members of the Editorial Board who commented on various drafts of these papers as well as to Aant Elzinga, Stefan Kuhlmann, Philippe Laredo, Arie Rip and Nic Vonortas who acted as referees.

The majority of studies on the quality of life have been conducted in Western contexts and are based on Western participants. Comparatively speaking, there are only a few studies that have been conducted in different Chinese contexts. Also, there are fewer QOL studies based on children and adolescents, or studies that examine the relationship between QOL and economic disadvantage. In addition, more research is needed to address the methodological issues related to the assessment of quality of life. This volume is a constructive response to the challenges described above. It is the first book to cover research in Chinese, Western and global contexts in a single volume. It is a ground-breaking volume in which Chinese studies on the quality of life are collected. The book includes papers addressing family QOL, quality of life in adolescents experiencing economic disadvantage, and methodological issues in the assessment of QOL. It is written by researchers working in a variety of disciplines.

This book deals with methods to evaluate scientific productivity. In the book statistical methods, deterministic and stochastic models and numerous indexes are discussed that will help the reader to understand the nonlinear science dynamics and to be able to develop or construct systems for appropriate evaluation of research productivity and management of research groups and organizations. The dynamics of science structures and systems is complex, and the evaluation of research productivity requires a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods and measures. The book has three parts. The first part is devoted to mathematical models describing the importance of science for economic growth and systems for the evaluation of research organizations of different size. The second part contains descriptions and discussions of numerous indexes for the evaluation of the productivity of researchers and groups of researchers of different size (up to the comparison of research productivities of research communities of nations). Part three contains discussions of non-Gaussian laws connected to scientific productivity and presents various deterministic and stochastic models of science dynamics and research productivity. The book shows that many famous fat tail distributions as well as many deterministic and stochastic models and processes, which are well known from physics, theory of extreme events or population dynamics, occur also in the description of dynamics of scientific systems and in the description of the characteristics of research productivity. This is not a surprise as scientific systems are nonlinear, open and dissipative.

This new Yearbook addresses the question of how policy, place, and organization are made to matter for a new research field to emerge. Bringing together leading historians, sociologists, and organizational researchers on science and technology, the volume answers this question by offering in-depth case studies and comparative perspectives on multiple research fields in their nascent stage, including molecular biology and materials science, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology. The Yearbook brings to bear the lessons of constructivist ethnography and the “practice turn” in Science and Technology Studies (STS) more broadly on the qualitative, comparative, and critical inquiry of new research fields. In doing so, it offers unprecedented insights into the complex interplay of national research policies, regional clusters, particular research institutions, and novel research practices in and for any emerging field of (techno-)science. It systematically investigates national and regional differences, including the variable mobilization of such differences, and probes them for organizational topicality and policy relevance.

This book has several objectives. Most basically it presents an approach to assessing interorganizational innovation diffusion. To do this we have tried to link contempo­ rary organizational theory with more person-centered diffusion theory. We have also combined contingency theory with the resource dependence perspective to explain why organizations might choose to initially consider an innovation, re­ define it to suit their particular environmental context, and then implement it. Another objective has been to examine how environmental constraints can limit the ways in which diffusion channels form, and can determine when diffusion can be truly organizational and when it will depend upon individuals. In doing so, we have tried to indicate how organizational structures emerge to manage re­ sources in ways that are consistent with those environmental constraints. We have borrowed the notion of boundary management from resource dependence, and we have used it to examine how organizations use various boundary management strategies to preserve their autonomy in exchange relationships with other organi­ zations. We have done this both at the network level and at the level of individual organizations.

Social capital is a widely acknowledged candidate for implementing beneficial democratic processes and promoting public health. Healthy ties. Social capital, population health and survival traces the path from the conceptualization to the implementation of social capital. To provide empirical proof of the effects of social capital on public health is a serious challenge and the main focus of the book. In the Nordic countries, personal identification codes linking data from various sources, nation-wide population registers, nationally representative and re-tested health surveys, and the long tradition of epidemiology submit to serve well the research into social capital and public health. Up-to-date longitudinal data on social capital and health outcomes are carefully described and reviewed in this book. In Finland, the Swedish-speaking minority is very long-lived and has better health as compared with the Finnish-speaking majority.

Social differences in health and mortality constitute a persistent finding in epidemiological, demographic, and sociological research. This topic is increasingly discussed in the political debate and is among the most urgent public health issues. However, it is still unknown if socioeconomic mortality differences increase or decrease with age. This book provides a comprehensive, thoughtful and critical discussion of all aspects involved in the relationship between socioeconomic status, health and mortality. In a well-written language, it synthesizes the sociological theory of social inequality and an empirical study of mortality differences that has been performed at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Rostock, Germany). The best available datasets from Denmark and the USA, as two very different countries, are used to analyze the age pattern of social mortality differences, the Danish register data covering the whole Danish population between 1980 and 2002. This study is the most comprehensive analysis of socioeconomic mortality differences in the literature, in terms of data quantity, quality, and the statistical method of event-history modeling. It makes important new theoretical and empirical contributions. With a new method it also addresses the question whether the measurement of social mortality differences in old age so far has been biased by mortality selection due to unobserved heterogeneity.'This book signifies an important step forward in theory, empirical data analysis and methodology and an advancement for many disciplines involved in the subject of socioeconomic differences in old age mortality'. Prof. Dr. Gabriele Doblhammer, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany