Aktuelle Publikationen

Diversity Management hat sich in der Personalpolitik deutscher Unternehmen als unverzichtbares Element etabliert. Die Motive hierfür sind unterschiedlich und reichen von politisch-normativer Notwendigkeit bis zur Erwartung ökonomischer Vorteile. Vor diesem Hintergrund analysiert der Beitrag die Ergebnisse der aktuellen internationalen Forschung zum Zusammenhang zwischen Gender Diversity und Organisationserfolg. Dabei werden unter anderem erfolgskritische Randbedingungen dieses Zusammenhangs betrachtet, darunter auch Ansätze des Managements von Diversity. Es zeigt sich, dass die einschlägige Forschung derzeit keine Schlüsse auf eine generelle ökonomische Vorteilhaftigkeit von Gender Diversity zulässt; auch konnten bisher nur wenige Randbedingungen als erfolgskritisch identifiziert werden. Defizite der bisherigen Forschung bestehen vor allem in der unzureichenden theoretischen Fundierung und methodischen Heterogenität der empirischen Untersuchungen; überdies sind Studien im Kontext deutschsprachiger Unternehmen ausgesprochen selten. Der Beitrag diskutiert Implikationen für Forschung und Praxis des Managements von Gender Diversity.

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dc.contributor.author: Arndt, Daniel

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Political consumption is an individualized form of collective action that varies considerably across Europe. Citizens as consumers participate in boycotts and ‘positive’ buying of goods based on ethical, political and environmental considerations. Overcoming the individualistic bias of past research, the comparative analysis extends actor-centred explanations by focusing on political, cultural and economic opportunity structures and on globalization as contextual factors. Economic opportunities for political consumption are provided by national affluence, retailing structures and the supply of environmental and fair-labelled goods. Political and cultural opportunities are facilitated by ‘statist’ institutions, social movement organizations as well as trust and post-materialist culture. The impact of globalization is measured by international economic exchange. Logistic multi-level models on the first wave of the European Social Survey for 19 countries reveal that economic opportunity structures and political institutions best explain variations, while globalization does not affect citizens’ decisions to voice their interest in consumption. Finally, the effect of individual value orientations is increased by a low-cost context.

Flexible Beschäftigungsverhältnisse wie Zeitarbeit und freie Mitarbeit weisen hohe Zuwachsraten auf. Bisher ist aber noch wenig darüber bekannt, wie die Betroffenen diese Beschäftigungsformen bewerten. Der vorliegende Aufsatz definiert zunächst das Konstrukt der Präferenz für flexible Beschäftigung, um die Bewertung dieser Beschäftigungsform operationalisierbar zu machen. Dann werden das Konstrukt der Präferenz sowie mögliche Korrelate zunächst im Rahmen einer Interviewstudie (n = 26) analysiert. Im Anschluss daran werden Hypothesen entwickelt und anhand einer quantitativen Befragung von n = 197 flexibel Beschäftigten geprüft. Hierbei zeigt sich, dass die Persönlichkeitseigenschaft Offenheit für Erfahrung sowie die Einstellungen Arbeitszufriedenheit und Identifikation mit dem Beruf in signifikantem Zusammenhang mit der Präferenz für flexible Beschäftigung stehen.

Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit den nationalen und internationalen Einflussfaktoren, die in den letzten 25 Jahren drei wesentliche Dimensionen des französischen Hochschulsystems – politics, policies und polity – geprägt haben. Das Augenmerk der Analyse richtet sich vor allem auf die unterschiedlichen Steuerungsinstrumente und Einflusspotentiale internationaler Organisationen, insbesondere der Europäischen Union und der Organisation für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung, sowie die Fähigkeit des Nationalstaats, Politikwandel hervorzurufen. Es wird gezeigt, dass die französische Hochschulpolitik in den letzten zehn Jahren von einem Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Kontinuität und Wandel geprägt ist. Einerseits lässt sich ein allmählicher Wandel hin zu mehr Autonomie und Wettbewerb für die Hochschulen feststellen, der aufgrund von Internationalisierungsprozessen wie dem BolognaProzess sowie dem unterdurchschnittlichen Abschneiden französischer Hochschulen bei internationalen Leistungsvergleichen intensiviert wurde. Anderseits hat das Festhalten an der bildungspolitischen Leitidee der Chancengleichheit in vielen Fällen die Reformdynamik ausgebremst.

Against a background of institutional change and organizational reform, we analyze the politicization of the European Commission’s bureaucracy. Politicization can generally be defined as the substitution of bureaucratic neutrality by introducing political considerations into the human resource management and behaviour of civil servants. The concepts of direct and professional politicization serve as vantage points for our analysis. The empirical data are taken from documentary analysis and recent online and semi-structured surveys of Commission officials. We show that Commission bureaucrats, although they are highly sensitive to the political side of their job, are less politicized since the Kinnock reforms than before. While the College of the Commission seems to have indeed become more politically responsive to its supranational peers and national governments, the Commission’s bureaucracy can be characterized as weakly politicized or, according to current debates, as quite instrumental in a Neo-Weberian sense.

Dutch elections continue to be the most volatile of Western Europe. But to what extent do voters’ changes in vote intentions continue to be structured by underlying ideological dimensions? This article discusses various theories on the ideological structure of the Dutch party system at the electoral level, and the way they relate to processes of dealignment and realignment. We test these theories using the 1Vandaag Opinion Panel data set, which follows 54 763 respondents in 53 waves between November 2006 and June 2010. We assess individuals’ changes in vote intentions, and analyse the structure in these changes. We draw three conclusions. First, Dutch voters are boundedly volatile and they tend to stick to one of two blocks of parties: a block of traditionally left-wing parties (PvdA, SP, GL) and a block of right-wing parties (CDA, VVD, TON and PVV). D66 functions as the electoral lynchpin between these blocks. Second, the Dutch party system is best described by a sociocultural dimension and a socio-economic dimension. Third, there is support for realignment (along the sociocultural dimension) and continued alignment (along the socio-economic dimension). Yet, we find evidence for widening electoral divisions: there is an electoral gap in the traditionally crowded political centre.

In this article, we address whether international student comparisons have changed the dynamics of French secondary education policy. We focus on the increasingly significant impact of the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD)’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) on France, a country previously known for its aversion to international comparisons and its turbulent relationship with the OECD. We argue that not only are transnational pressures – in our study the perception of PISA – crucial determinants for the fate of potential reform measures, but also the capacity of the state to transform its education system and take corrective measures. Along these lines, we also examine the role of historically embedded guiding principles of education, in the French case most notably that of equality (égalité). We focus, in particular, on efforts of French policy-makers to emulate elements of the recent ‘PISA champion’ Finland.

This article makes two claims: first, it argues that the impact of fiscal austerity varies across different types of public spending. In particular, we show that discretionary spending (public investment) is hit harder by fiscal austerity than entitlement spending (public spending on pensions and unemployment) because of different institutional and political constraints. Second, we find that electoral institutions affect how governments solve this trade-off. Discretionary spending is cut back more severely in countries with an electoral system based on proportional representation than in a majoritarian system. Our empirical analysis relies on a methodological approach (composite data analysis) that takes into account interdependencies between budgetary categories. Using data for 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 1979 to 2003, we find strong evidence for the varying impact of fiscal stress on the budget shares of discretionary and entitlement spending as well as strong interactive effect between fiscal austerity and electoral institutions.

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The literature is divided as to how ethnicity affects wartime patterns of violence in civil wars. This article conducts an assessment of the relative impact of two competing explanations for violence in Bosnia’s civil war. One account of this conflict attributes violence to the intentions of ethnic groups to create ethnically homogenous territories, thus advocating a macroterritorial explanation where the origin of violence is external to the locations it is perpetrated at. Competing theories, however, describe violence in Bosnia as a result of local ethnic resentment and fear that were activated once the war had started. Results from spatial regression provide evidence for violence “from above” and “from below,” showing that there is evidence for both macro- and microeffects of ethnicity on violence. In addition, I estimate a finite mixture model that is able to tell where and under which conditions the respective mechanisms apply best.

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Contemporary research on civil war has largely dismissed the role of political and economic grievances, focusing instead on opportunities for conflict. However, these strong claims rest on questionable theoretical and empirical grounds. Whereas scholars have examined primarily the relationship between individual inequality and conflict, we argue that horizontal inequalities between politically relevant ethnic groups and states at large can promote ethnonationalist conflict. Extending the empirical scope to the entire world, this article introduces a new spatial method that combines our newly geocoded data on ethnic groups’ settlement areas with spatial wealth estimates. Based on these methodological advances, we find that, in highly unequal societies, both rich and poor groups fight more often than those groups whose wealth lies closer to the country average. Our results remain robust to a number of alternative sample definitions and specifications.

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