Comedic entrepreneurship in the Dutch Republic: Hieronymus Sweerts and his Koddige en ernstige opschriften

Boosting entrepreneurial intention (EI) and entrepreneurial decision (ED) among Vietnamese students is a hot topic with many researchers and policymakers. Based on the TPB theory, this study analyzes factors influencing students' EI and ED. It is emphasized that EI plays a mediating role between entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE), entrepreneurial education (EE), entrepreneurial support policy (ESP), and ED. In addition, university business incubators play a moderating role between ESE and EI and between EI and ED. A data set of 295 students was collected in most universities in Vietnam, and the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) model was used for the data analysis. The study outcomes demonstrated that all suggested factors positively impacted EI and ED, except that students with good ESE would skip the EI phase and go straight to ED. In other words, the mediating role of EI could have been better, even when University business incubators appeared. Another interesting result was that University business incubators performed better in the EI and ED relationship than ESE and EI. The research results provide scientific proof for the university and policymakers to build entrepreneurial training programs, ESP, and improve UBI's operation, promoting entrepreneurship among students.

Historians generally acknowledge that institutions shaping the political economy of the Dutch Republic were very efficient, thus contributing to its economic boom in the early modern period.1 One of the Dutch organizations often mentioned, but seldom systematically analyzed by economic historians,2 are welfare institutions. Nevertheless, charitable organizations formed an important part of the institutional framework of the early modern urban political economy. An abundance of historical literature has commented on their numerous functions, such as upholding social order, securing a reservoir of unskilled labourers, or even for settling feuds between local elites.3 Rather than focusing on the relationship between the poor and the elites, more recently some historians have come to stress the role of welfare provisions in (urban as well as religious) community building by a larger segment of the population, including the bourgeois middle groups.4 Most probably, financial management of charitable funds played a vital role in the sustainability of early modern poor relief.5 The purpose of this paper is to uncover how charitable institutions, especially those assisting the local outdoor poor, were financially maintained in the highly urbanized Dutch Republic. Which sources of income to charity were available, what were the financial possibilities and difficulties the almoners and deacons encountered, and what choices did they make in times of financial difficulties? In this paper, five towns are investigated in great detail: Delft and Leiden, two industrial towns in the core province of Holland, Utrecht, in the center of the Republic, which attracted many rentiers especially in the eighteenth century, Zwolle, in the more peripheral and agrarian Eastern part of the Northern Netherlands, and ’s-Hertogenbosch, which was at the frontier of the Generality Lands in the south (see Figure 1). We will establish trends over time, as well as similarities and differences between these towns, and try to explain these developments. The most important sources used for this analysis will be the financial records of several urban charities, which contain detailed information on the income structure as well as on the expenses of charitable organizations. Moreover, this paper aims to further the discussion on the proverbial generosity of Dutch citizens in the early modern period. Estimates by Peter Lindert suggest that per capita spending on poor relief was relatively high in the Dutch Republic, at least until the end of the eighteenth century,6 but his claims have not been substantiated by solid empirical evidence. Lindert’s assertion will be tested for mid-eighteenth century Delft and Leiden, for which total charitable expenditure as well as total annual revenues of the city-dwellers can be estimated. Furthermore, by giving detailed information on sources of income as well as expenses of local poor relief institutions, we hope to expose how generous Dutch people actually were, and how this relates to the financial strategies of charitable organizations in the early modern era. For this we will combine information from the poor relief administrations with other sources, such as tax records and wills. 2 The paper is structured as follows. First, we will briefly go into the organization of poor relief in the Dutch Republic, focusing on the case studies under investigation. Then, we will turn to an elaborate discussion of the different types of income of institutions that assisted the outdoor poor. Our main focus will be on the institutions managed by the civic administrators, but as in every town poor relief was organized in a different manner, we will, as far as the data allow us to, also discuss other institutions providing monetary assistance, for instance the Reformed diaconates. The subsequent section will deal with the cash flow management of the charities. The sources of income will be compared to the yearly expenses of charitable institutions, in order to address issues of financial management and durability. In the last paragraph, we will analyse to what extent the provisions under scrutiny contributed to the redistribution of means within Dutch towns. In the conclusion, we will analyse trends over time, and compare the financial management of poor relief institutions between towns and offer explanations.

This technical report presents the findings of the case study carried out in Northern Netherlands on the role of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the design and implementation of the Smart Specialisation Strategy (RIS3). It is one of the case studies undertaken in the project Higher Education for Smart Specialisation (HESS), an initiative of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the Directorate General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture. There is a long tradition of higher education in the Northern Netherlands, with the key characteristic of a strong presence of Universities of Applied Sciences and RUG University of Groningen. The regional HEIs are actively involved in strong bilateral collaborations projects and clusters and living labs encouraging collaborations within the regional ecosystems, being part of key ecosystem governance structures. Although regional HEIs have individually been very effective in driving particular projects, there is still not a collective institutional space for HEIs, undermining a strategic agenda for HE in the region. The Northern Netherlands has a strong ecosystem around a number of established sectors where there are robust relationships between HEIs and companies with innovative infrastructure. In the long-standing culture of collaboration of the regional ecosystem, the introduction of the RIS3 has constituted an opportunity to a concerted effort to streamline governance and to integrate activities to stimulate innovation. The key regional economic development issue remains the fact that it is a relatively sparse economic environment, which challenges the regional governance. The Northern Netherlands has the potential to function as a knowledge economy more efficiently at the level of the North through a better integration of the provincial knowledge economies. The connectedness of SMEs into regional networks can be improved building a natural innovation escalator by which individual connections with SMEs grow, become networks and evolves into key regional strengths. The region attracts a growing number of talented students, which can help build stronger connections between HEIs and regional innovators to strengthen firms' capacity and help in their retention. Finally, HEIs occupy a strong position in the existing regional ecosystem, as a site for experimentation and reflection, and it is key that they are encouraged to continue that work. The case study has coordinated closely with the ongoing discussions on the new RIS3 for the Multi-annual Financial Framework 2021-2027, contributing with findings that have helped the regional stakeholders in the definition of some of its future elements.

This chapter discusses the importance of public social life in the 21st century city. Edward Relph’s seminal concepts of place and placelessness are used to argue why social life is important, and the benefits of having a robust and diverse public social life activated in urban centers. The chapter deals with a discussion of some of the sociocultural factors that influence public social life in a contemporary city. If public life is acknowledged and valued by both the community and the city-makers, it will be supported by the physical and social environment. The chapter then argues that if a public social life is not socially and culturally valued, it is unlikely to be supported in the design and development of the built environment. Case studies of urban squares, as one key component of a city’s ground floor, are discussed as places that can facilitate the sociability of public life or as placeless spaces that fail to add social value.

This article presents and exemplifies an approach to the problem of revealing values related to capability in actual historical context. First, a conceptual framework is discussed that allows us to identify values underlying capability. Second, a case study is used to exemplify the conceptual framework and to locate values associated with capability in early modern public office. The case study on the (in)capability of Lodewijk Huygens (1631 – 1699), sheriff of Gorinchem between 1672 and 1684, shows what was considered (un)acceptable, (un)wanted and (in)tolerable behavior for a typical high-ranking seventeenthcentury public official in the Dutch Republic. The Huygens case teaches us that capability mainly consisted of adhering to the everyday rules of conduct among officials on the “shop-floor.” Formal legal standards and public opinion were of limited practical relevance. A capable magistrate should at least maintain harmony and balance on the practical side of the political arena.

As education and schooling are themselves repositioned and restratified in the new global work order, so research on education is itself repositioned. In such a situation, even if people go on researching as they researched before, their work may have been repositioned: sometimes so as to substantially shift, or even invert, the relevance and effect of that work. A crisis of positionality arises at this point because of the reconstitution and repositioning of the social relations of production. The importance of this for educational researchers, as public intellectuals, is clearly of great concern. Through a case study, some of the implications of this repositioning are assessed. In the final section, new strategies for rejuvenating public intellectual work are assessed. Certain aspects of New Right overreach are explored. Firstly, the attack on professional groups in general; secondly, the general attack on public life and the disinvestment in local communities, and thirdly, the ‘dumbing down’ of public media. These struggles are seen as central arenas in which public intellectual life can be repositioned and rejuvenated.

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The population of the North-Holland towns of Hoorn and Enkhuizen declined dramatically in the period 1680–1830, sinking to an all-time low at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Between 1622 and 1829 the population of Hoorn almost halved. In Enkhuizen the number of inhabitants declined by over 75 per cent up to 1840, while 2,500 of the original 3,615 houses disappeared. Despite extensive analysis of the economic and demographic decline of towns and cities in the Dutch Republic from a historical perspective, there has been relatively little research into the spatial consequences of this decline. Data concerning the question of whether and how municipal authorities regulated the practice of demolition is particularly scanty. This article, based on a case study of Hoorn and Enkhuizen provides an impression of the policies these two cities initiated with the aim of curbing or regulating the practice of demolition. Archival research into over 350 rediscovered renovation and demolition applications and legislation and regulation from the period 1795–1813 offers a more detailed picture of the scale, impact, location and policies surrounding the renovation and demolition process at the end of eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The applications reveal that the local authorities, and later the national government, expressly initiated policies aimed at tackling the impact of population decline and the practice of demolition and that this had direct consequences for the scale and extent of demolition. The authorities focused on three main points: preserving the townscape by preventing the visual degradation of the city, maintaining the safety of adjacent buildings and dikes, and maintaining property tax revenues. A comparison of practices in Hoorn and Enkhuizen also makes it possible to transcend the level of the individual town and make more general pronouncements about the consequences of policy for the urban landscape.

This chapter provides a case study of the entrepreneurship of Portuguese Jewish merchants in the Dutch Republic in the Early Modern period. Though similar case studies exist, none have focused specifically on Jewish entrepreneurs. The core aim is to determine which business strategies and values the Jewish entrepreneurs shared with their Dutch counterparts. It provides a history of the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam, followed by a definition of the early modern entrepreneur. It then examines the trade routes, products, range of trading capital, and social networks of the Portuguese Jewish entrepreneurs, and concludes that Portuguese Jewish and Dutch merchants operated their businesses in similar ways, but Portuguese Jewish merchants were willing to step out of their religious and social boundaries in pursuit of a stronger economic position and were able to do so through financial support gained by dealing in diverse, high quality trade.

Cities need social infrastructure, places that support social connection in neighborhoods and across communities. In the face of austerity in many places, the provision of such infrastructures are under threat. To protect such infrastructures, it is important to have robust arguments for their provision, maintenance, and protection. Through a case study of a dispute about the appropriate use and provisioning of an everyday park located in London, UK, this article examines what social infrastructure is and why it matters. The dispute has brought to the surface a number of critical questions about how to fund and provide collective, public social life. It has also raised questions about what types of social and collective life should be valued. To examine the dispute a sixfold typology is developed to explore the different registers of sociality afforded by social infrastructure: co-presence, sociability and friendship, care and kinship, kinesthetic practices, and civic engagement.

Mobility is crucial for maintaining well-being in later life. Previous research has shown that older adults’ mobility fluctuates throughout the day, with a particular focus on afternoon outdoor movement. This paper takes a broader approach and explores the seasonal differences and similarities in mobility and activity space in later life, using older adults in the Northern Netherlands as a case study. Seventeen older adults participated in the study, for which we used a mixed-methods approach combining GPS-, activity diaries, and in-depth interview data analysed through grounded visualisation. We have collected data from each participant for a week, once during fall/winter and once during summer. The findings of this paper defy common expectations around older adult mobility; for instance, the participants walked less in summer and had a larger activity space in winter. Equally, we demonstrate that it is crucial to distinguish between daily and incidental activity spaces, particularly when factoring in seasonal variations. Yet our mixed-methods approach revealed discrepancies between perceived and measured mobility and activity space. We argue that the intricate interplay of seasonal influences, weather conditions, and personal factors significantly shapes mobility practices in later life, underscoring the need for holistic planning of age-inclusive environments.

Abstract. Growth in adoption of distributed wind turbines for energy generation is significantly impacted by challenges associated with siting and accurate estimation of the wind resource. Small turbines, at hub heights of 40 m or less, are greatly impacted by terrestrial obstacles such as built structures and vegetation that can cause complex wake effects. While some progress in high-fidelity complex fluid dynamics (CFD) models has increased the potential accuracy for modelling the impacts of obstacles on turbulent wind flow, these models are too computationally expensive for practical siting and resource assessment applications. To understand the efficacy of available models in situ, this study evaluates classic and commonly used methods alongside new state-of-the-art lower-order models derived from CFD simulations and machine learning approaches. This evaluation is conducted using a subset of an extensive original dataset of measurements from more than 300 operational wind turbines in the northern Netherlands. The results show that data-driven methods (e.g. machine learning and statistical modelling) are most effective at predicting production at real sites with an average error in annual energy production of 2.5 %. When sufficient data may not be available de novo to support these data-driven approaches, models derived from high-fidelity simulations show promise and reliably outperform classic methods. On average these models have 6.3 %–11.5 % error compared with 26 % for classic methods and 27 % baseline error for reanalysis data without obstacle correction. While more performant on average, these methods are also sensitive to the quality of obstacle descriptions and reanalysis inputs.

This study examines the role and effectiveness of suburban, ethnic shopping centres in providing an alternative to public space. It is a response to the suburb's lack of good public spaces, and the resulting lack of community and sense of place, and is informed by the development of 'ethnoburbs' across North America. This study explores themes revealed by both literature and a series of field observations and intercept interview. A case study analyzing First Markham Place and how its mall patrons use the space revealed implications regarding the effectiveness of these malls as public spaces. The author found that the mall's role as a community hub provides opportunities to satisfy both practical and innate desires for cultural goods, services, and co-ethnic interactions, encourages a 'public life' not seen in conventional suburban malls, and creates a unique sense of place for members of the target ethnic community as well as non-members.

In Chinese cities, existing studies of liveability have either produced broad and unspecific results, or have overlooked liveability at the level of the street, in direct connection to the way people live. For this research, Shanghai, a Chinese city with foreign influences, is selected as case study city. The first stage of the study was conducted with design and planning professionals. Thereafter, an extensive field study consisting of interviews with residents and systematic observations was conducted on fifteen selected street sites nominalized as S, M, L, XL1 and XL2 streets, according to their historical-morphological characteristics. The study puts forth the definition of liveability at the level of residential streets in Shanghai through six liveability qualities: ‘the Local Humanized Environment’, ‘Physical Facilities for Living and the Mix of Uses’, ‘Local Economic Activities’, ‘Safety’, ‘Social Interaction and Public Life’, and ‘Sense of Place and Belonging’. The study reveals the value of social life and the particular way it manifests in Shanghai especially on the smallest streets (S and M streets). This has been particularly captured through the context-sensitive qualities of ‘social interaction and public life’, and ‘sense of place and belonging’, which are reinforced by the ‘local economic activities’ on residential streets. In regard to these three vulnerable, yet crucial qualities of liveability in Shanghai, the study identified the most significant differences when compared to the international literature on liveable streets. This research offers guidance to urban design and planning in order to improve liveability in this Chinese context.

This study examines the role and effectiveness of suburban, ethnic shopping centres in providing an alternative to public space. It is a response to the suburb's lack of good public spaces, and the resulting lack of community and sense of place, and is informed by the development of 'ethnoburbs' across North America. This study explores themes revealed by both literature and a series of field observations and intercept interview. A case study analyzing First Markham Place and how its mall patrons use the space revealed implications regarding the effectiveness of these malls as public spaces. The author found that the mall's role as a community hub provides opportunities to satisfy both practical and innate desires for cultural goods, services, and co-ethnic interactions, encourages a 'public life' not seen in conventional suburban malls, and creates a unique sense of place for members of the target ethnic community as well as non-members.