On 20 June 2006 a new museum in Paris opened its doors for the first time, the Musée du Quai Branly. President Jacques Chirac inaugurated the museum in front of an audience that included, among others, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and France's most famous anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The museum is another enrichment of that fabulous city, already so well endowed with museums and monuments.

The Fifth Republic, founded by General de Gaulle in 1958, has been extraordinarily successful in the creation of new museums. De Gaulle himself did not feel the need to have a special museum built in order to commemorate him. He may have thought that he would be remembered anyway, and he was right. But he certainly stimulated French culture and had Paris embellished in many respects. His famous Minister of Culture André Malraux not only ordered the cleaning up of the blackened façades of many Paris monuments and other buildings, but also actively stimulated cultural activities outside Paris or, as the French say, in the provinces. Malraux also took a great interest in non-Western art and in this way helped the founding of the Quai Branly museum. De Gaulle's successor, Georges Pompidou, was of course the source of inspiration for the Museum of Modern Art, also known as the Centre Pompidou and particularly famous for its revolutionary architecture. Another less extravagant but also rightly famous building is the Institut du Monde Arabe which dates from the late 1980s and was built by Jean Nouvel, the architect who also built the Quai Branly Museum.

The processes of research proposals and evaluation have become ever more elaborate, but the system remains primitive. This paper argues for a fresh look at existing practices, with a view to developing less onerous and more efficient systems.

Conflicts between science and religion, autonomous reason and divine revelation seem to continue in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim heritage and traditions. This holds true both in the secular West and in the Muslim East, in the scientifically and technologically most advanced societies as well as in the scientifically and technologically most backward cultures and countries. This article reviews some of the problems and issues involved in this persistent conflict, and tries to deal with the question of why such disputes and controversies arise in the first place in scientifically very weak Muslim societies.

During 19th century there was a migration of angels from their usual places in religion, art, and literature into the field of natural sciences. In works of Carus, Fechner and Exner, angels became objects of physiology, comparative anatomy, and astronomy. Although traditionally angels are considered as images or materialisations of pure mind, respectively of metaphysical/transcendental elements, such empirical methods of dealing with heavenly creatures have several precursors in history. This article discusses the traces of angels within the history of knowledge and arts as a specific dialectic of secularisation, focusing on the metamorphosis of heavenly creatures into representatives of the miraculous in 18th century aesthetics. Concerning the issue of representation, the article analyses the disappearance of materiality of painting through techniques of reproduction as prerequisites to transform the angels into objects of experimental research in 19th century sciences. As a result, the angels may be interpreted as symptoms of the problem of visualisation within a context where sciences have to address the boundaries of positivistic methods, for instance as a historical example for the epistemological problems of brain imaging.

What kind of social arrangements pave the best way for a prosperous future in Europe? How should business systems, welfare schemes and labour markets be structured? Debating the future political path of the EU, the union leadership is launching a modernised ‘European social model’ as a major element of a renewed policy agenda. In addition, a growing body of research literature draws on the notion of social models when comparing institutions and performance in different industrialised countries. Besides confronting policymakers' self-confident declarations that a prosperous future is attainable if only societal institutions are modelled in accordance with one or another expert formula, there is a need for probing the potential, problematic exchange between social science research on social models and the way that use is made of them by policymakers. By assembling different academic expertise, the objective of this Focus is thus to contribute to a discussion around social models, economic prosperity, social justice, and political legitimacy in a way that is relevant for social science, public debate and policymaking.

The article argues that the question of this Focus about national models versus local aspirations must be supplemented with the question of a European dimension. The question is whether a European social model is conceivable in parallel to or beyond the local, the regional and the national models. The article argues that the question of prosperity in Europe must have a reasonable dimension of political redistribution of the fruits of economic growth. The concept of prosperity does not only have a bearing on the economic but also on the social. The article critically discusses the concepts of model and path dependency. Model is seen as a stereotype emerging in the dynamics between reflection on Self and imagination of the Other. Path dependencies are seen as trajectories laid out towards the past for a better understanding of the present, as ex post mental constructions, but they have no or little prognostic value. The argument is for a soft version of path dependency as a heuristic tool as opposed to hard versions with an ambition of prediction. The problem with the concept as such is that it is inscribed in a long tradition of ideals of predictability in social sciences based on a structural instead of a constructivist view of history and society.

Globalization is placing European societies under pressure to change. In the 1990s, researchers identified particular national models of capitalism. These were argued to consist of integrated and reinforcing institutions that created specific rules of the game for economic actors. These rules favoured the development of globally competitive firms in particular sectors where the institutional characteristics of the home society facilitated the building of distinctive types of capabilities. In this view, a global division of labour was developing based on institutional differences. Thus, national policy makers needed to reinforce institutional advantage and institutional specialisation by incremental adaptations to globalization. Reforms needed to be consistent with the underlying model of capitalism. This paper challenges such a view. It argues that firms are highly innovative and use institutions not as constraints but as resources that enable them to build new capabilities. It further argues that institutions are more diverse, malleable and multi-levelled than the national models perspective recognizes. Thus, options for change are much broader than predicted by the path-dependent national models framework. Indeed, the main issue for European societies in response to globalization is to ensure diversity and experimentation rather than simply seeking to reproduce a dominant logic.

Modern societies are characterised by profound changes in both working conditions and family formation. Today's workplaces are marked by high flexibility, great job instability and variable working hours. A dual-earner family has replaced the traditional male-breadwinner family and the norm is two working adults. However, the pattern of women's involvement in employment differs in all labour markets depending on the gendered division of paid work, unpaid work and care obligations. These differences can be seen as the combined effect of the individual household strategies and the shape of family and labour market policies in the European welfare regimes. The article analyses household strategies in combining paid work, unpaid work and care in four European countries – Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The main conclusion is that the division of paid work, unpaid work as well as caring obligations is gendered in all four countries. Compared with women, men tend to be more flexible, have more secure positions in the labour market and seem to be more involved in unpaid voluntary activities and seem thus more integrated in the society and have a higher level of civic participation. On the other hand, today, an increasing number of women are fully active in the labour market and their level of participation in civic activities becomes more and more similar to men's. However, the burdens of caring for children and other members of the household are still very unevenly divided between men and women, which makes the conflicts between obligations at work and in the households significantly more troublesome for women than for men.