Aktuelle Publikationen

Innovation-oriented firms encourage their staff to generate ideas, but lack the resources to sponsor them all. Entrepreneurially minded employees may respond to this discrepancy with creative deviance, i.e., pursue ideas despite managerial orders to stop. We elucidate this understudied flipside of corporate entrepreneurship by theorising and testing organisational and individual antecedents to creative deviance. Strain theory leads us to hypothesise that organisational support for innovation reduces creative deviance. Based on achievement goal theory, we conjecture that mastery goals foster creative deviance. These predictors are expected to interact in their impact on creative deviance. Data from 659 employees support our hypotheses. Our study contributes to corporate entrepreneurship theory by expounding an important, but so far understudied form of innovative behaviour, extends strain theory by showing how individual traits can reinforce or mitigate the structural strain created by organisations, and advances research on achievement goals by connecting mastery achievement orientation to deviant behaviour. In terms of practical implications, our study indicates how leaders may promote compliant innovation through organisational support and how they can increase person-job fit by screening candidates’ achievement goals during recruitment.

It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g., left vs right) and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces alignment and polarization as emergent properties of opinion dynamics in a multi-dimensional space of continuous opinions. The mechanisms for the change of agents’ opinions in this multi-dimensional space are derived from cognitive dissonance theory and structural balance theory. We test assumptions from proximity voting and from directional voting regarding their ability to reproduce the expected emerging properties. We further study how the emotional involvement of agents, i.e., their individual resistance to change opinions, impacts the dynamics. We identify two regimes for the global and the individual alignment of opinions. If the affective involvement is high and shows a large variance across agents, this fosters the emergence of a dominant ideological dimension. Agents align their opinions along this dimension in opposite directions, i.e., create a state of polarization.

Deutschland gehört zu den zehn Staaten, die sich in den letzten 25 Jahren am häufigsten im UN-Sicherheitsrat mit Redebeiträgen zu Wort meldeten - und zwar nicht nur dann, wenn die Bundesrepublik Mitglied war. Anhand neuer Methoden der Textanalyse lässt sich zeigen, welche thematischen Schwerpunkte Deutschland setzt und mit welchen Koalitionen.

This article explores the moral politics of the welfare state and the social conflicts that underlie them. We argue that existing research on the moralism of redistributive and social policy preferences is overly one-dimensional, with a longstanding concentration on attitudes toward welfare state beneficiaries. To widen our understanding of the phenomenon, we introduce the concept of motive attribution: that is, how people answer the question “what drives others to take the positions that they hold?” Doing so allows us to shift the subject of moralistic attitudes, with a move toward uncovering what citizens think of those who hold a given social policy stance. The article then lays out a first systematic overview of motive attributions using an original dataset built from nationally representative surveys conducted in ten Western democracies. Comparing responses across these countries, we draw out important cross-national differences in ascribed motives, including within welfare state regime types.

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Recent years have witnessed a host of innovations for conducting research with qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Concurrently, important issues surrounding its uses have been highlighted. In this article, we seek to help users design QCA studies. We argue that establishing inference with QCA involves three intertwined design components: first, clarifying the question of external validity; second, ensuring internal validity; and third, explicitly adopting a specific mode of reasoning. We identify several emerging approaches to QCA rather than just one. Some approaches emphasize case knowledge, while others are condition oriented. Approaches emphasize either substantively interpretable or redundancy-free explanations, and some designs apply an inductive/explorative mode of reasoning, while others integrate deductive elements. Based on extant literature, we discuss issues surrounding inference with QCA and the tools available under different approaches to address these issues. We specify trade-offs and the importance of doing justice to the nature and goals of QCA in a specific research context.

Im Rahmen der Regionalpolitik kann der Bund Steuererleichterungen für industrielle Unternehmen gewähren, die Arbeitsplätze in strukturschwachen Gebieten schaffen oder neu ausrichten. Die Wirksamkeit des Instruments war bisher umstritten. In einer neuen Studie im Auftrag des Staatssekretariats für Wirtschaft (Seco) wurde ein spezielles statistisches Verfahren angewendet, um die Wirksamkeit der Steuererleichterungen zu untersuchen. Die Analyse mit dem sogenannten Regressions-Diskontinuitäts- Design (RDD) zeigt, dass die Einführung des Instruments zwar bescheidene, aber doch signifikant positive Effekte auf die regionale Arbeitsmarktentwicklung in den untersuchten Gebieten hat. Generell gingen die Arbeitsplätze im Industriesektor in den wirtschaftlich benachteiligten Gebieten zwischen 2008 und 2016 zwar zurück. Der allgemeine Rückgang konnte innerhalb der anspruchsberechtigten Regionen aber leicht abgeschwächt werden.

Policy scholars typically assume that implementing actors should follow democratically decided rules in linear, predictable ways. However, this assumption does not factor in the operational challenges and multiple accountability relations facing policy implementers in contemporary, hybrid policy implementation settings. Shifting the focus to throughput (governance process) and output legitimacy (results), this paper explores how throughput dimensions affect the implementation of policy outputs. We study a hybrid policy—the Swiss Forest Policy 2020—in a federalist, multi-level implementation context. We find that accountability dilemmas have negative consequences for output implementation, particularly when professionalism clashes with rules. Accountability dilemmas are exacerbated by policy incoherence and interact with policy ambiguity. However, high issue salience can partially compensate for the negative effects of these factors. In sum, we highlight how the role of implementing actors in democratic countries goes beyond rule-following: accountability relations and other throughput dimensions crucially affect output legitimacy.

This article addresses the question of to what extent conventional theories of high reliability organizations and normal accidents theory are applicable to public bureaucracy. Empirical evidence suggests precisely this. Relevant cases are, for instance, collapsing buildings and bridges due to insufficient supervision of engineering by the relevant authorities, infants dying at the hands of their own parents due to misperceptions and neglect on the part of child protection agencies, uninterrupted serial killings due to a lack of coordination among police services, or improper planning and risk assessment in the preparation of mass events such as soccer games or street parades. The basic argument is that conceptualizing distinct and differentiated causal mechanisms is useful for developing more fine-grained variants of both normal accident theory and high reliability organization theory that take into account standard pathologies of public bureaucracies and inevitable trade-offs connected to their political embeddedness in democratic and rule-of-law-based systems to which belong the tensions between responsiveness and responsibility and between goal attainment and system maintenance. This, the article argues, makes it possible to identify distinct points of intervention at which permissive conditions with the potential to trigger risk-generating human action can be neutralized while the threshold that separates risk-generating human action from actual disaster can be raised to a level that makes disastrous outcomes less probable.

Forschungsfrage: Die wissenschaftliche Managementforschung zeigt deutlich, dass Mitarbeiterengagement eine wichtige Rolle für den Erfolg von organisationalem Wandel spielt. Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich daher mit der Frage, wie Mitarbeiterengagement in Zeiten organisationalen Wandels gefördert werden kann.

Methodik: Der vorliegende Artikel fasst die empirische Studienlage zu den Treibern von Mitarbeiterengagement in Zeiten organisationalen Wandels zusammen.

Praktische Implikationen: Zentrale Interventionen zur Förderung von Mitarbeiterengagement in Zeiten organisationalen Wandels sind "Job Crafting" und transformationale Führung.

How do sub-state regions respond to immigration and what drives their policy choices? Combining the cross-national literature on citizenship and integration policy with the literature on immigration federalism, it is hypothesized that sub-state nationalism and multilevel party politics explain why some regions formulate more restrictive immigrant integration policies than others. Analyzing integration laws of German, Italian and Spanish regions demonstrates that socioeconomically inclusive measures dominate, regardless of national context. Where restrictive provisions occur at all, they are associated with minority nationalism and the strength of anti-immigrant parties, while leftist regions facing right-wing national governments tend to adopt a more inclusive policies.

Political scientists have conventionally assumed that achieving democracy is a one-way ratchet. Only very recently has the question of “democratic backsliding” attracted any research attention. We argue that democratic instability is best understood with tools from complexity science. The explanatory power of complexity science arises from several features of complex systems. Their relevance in the context of democracy is discussed. Several policy recommendations are offered to help (re)stabilize current systems of representative democracy.