Aktuelle Publikationen

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Bootlegging-Projekte sind dezentrale Innovationsvorhaben, die zunächst im Verborgenen ohne Wissen des Top Managements begonnen werden. Bei der AUDI AG haben solche Projekte eine lange Tradition. In der Vergangenheit haben sie zu bahnbrechenden Innovationen wie dem quattro-Antrieb geführt. Als Teil eines dreieinhalbjährigen Kooperationsprojekts der Universität St.Gallen mit der Technischen Entwicklung von Audi untersuchten die Autoren in einer Interviewstudie (mit 20 Mitgliedern von Forschungs- und Entwicklungsteams und sechs Vertretern für das höhere Management) bezugnehmend auf das Konzept der Kreativen Devianz, was diese dezentralen Innovationsprojekte erfolgreich macht.

We compare data across 24,624 Twitter users to examine differences between entrepreneurs and the general population. Our analyses reveal that entrepreneurs manifest more positive and fewer negative emotions than the general population. Entrepreneurs also communicate more about work, and less about aspects related to personal life. Interestingly, during the early phases of a venture, positive emotions and work concerns increase, while negative emotions and life concerns decrease. Counterintuitively, work and negative emotions are negatively associated. Entrepreneurs express negative emotions 2.26 times less, and these negative emotions reduce by 8% after successful fundraising. Our work has implications for the understanding of work-life balance and of emotions in entrepreneurial contexts.

Following its global diffusion during the last decade, the Internet was expected to become a liberation technology and a threat for autocratic regimes by facilitating collective action. Recently, however, autocratic regimes took control of the Internet and filter online content. Building on the literature concerning the political economy of repression, this article argues that regime characteristics, economic conditions, and conflict in bordering states account for variation in Internet filtering levels among autocratic regimes. Using OLS-regression, the article analyzes the determinants of Internet filtering as measured by the Open Net Initiative in 34 autocratic regimes. The results show that monarchies, regimes with higher levels of social unrest, regime changes in neighboring countries, and less oppositional competition in the political arena are more likely to filter the Internet. The article calls for a systematic data collection to analyze the causal mechanisms and the temporal dynamics of Internet filtering.

Research has demonstrated that, in a variety of settings, environmental factors influence migration. Yet much of the existing work examines objective indicators of environmental conditions as opposed to the environmental perceptions of potential migrants. This paper examines migration decision-making and individual perceptions of different types of environmental change (sudden vs. gradual environmental events) with a focus on five developing countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, Uganda, Nicaragua, and Peru. The survey data include both migrants and non-migrants, with the results suggesting that individual perceptions of long-term (gradual) environmental events, such as droughts, lower the likelihood of internal migration. However, sudden-onset events, such as floods, increase movement. These findings substantially improve our understanding of perceptions as related to internal migration and also suggest that a more differentiated perspective is needed on environmental migration as a form of adaptation.

This paper aims to deliver experimental evidence on the dispute between two behavioral models of electoral turnout. Both models share the idea that the subjects’ voting propensities are updated from their past propensities, aspirations, and realized payoffs. However, they differ in the exact specification of the feedback mechanism. The first model has a strong feedback mechanism toward 50 percent, while the other has only moderate feedback. This difference leads to two distinct distributions of voter types: the first model generates more casual voters who vote and abstain from time to time. The latter generates more habitual voting behavior. Thus far, the latter model seemed to be better supported empirically because survey data reveal more habitual voters and abstainers than casual voters. Given that the two models differ in their propensity updating mechanism in dynamic processes, a more direct test of their assumptions as well as implications with survey data is still pending. We designed a laboratory experiment in which subjects repeatedly make turnout and voting decisions. The result from experimental data is mixed, but more supportive of the second model with habitual voters and abstainers.

Die Studie untersucht am Beispiel der Fair-Handelsbewegung, wie sich die Entstehung und Verbreitung des ethischen Konsums in Europa seit dem Ende der 1990er-Jahre erklären lässt. In Ergänzung zu den existierenden akteurszentrierten Erklärungen ethischen Konsums werden Ansätze sozialer Bewegungstheorien verwendet, welche die organisationalen Dimensionen der Fair-Handelsbewegung und die nationalen Opportunitätsstrukturen in den Blick nehmen. Im Artikel wird argumentiert, dass der Wandel der Feldlogik der Fair-Trade-Bewegung von einer zivilgesellschaftlichen hin zu einer Marktlogik einen zentralen Impuls für die Entstehung und die Diffusion des Konsums fair gehandelter Produkte, aber auch für das Wissen über Fair Trade darstellte. Die Hypothesen werden anhand einer Mehrebenen-Analyse mit Daten einer Eurobarometer-Umfrage (1997) überprüft, die um Informationen zu den nationalen Fair-Trade-Organisationen und den ökonomischen und kulturellen Opportunitätsstrukturen ergänzt wurden. Die Ergebnisse stützen die These des zentralen Einflusses der organisierten Vermarktlichung auf die Moralisierung der Märkte und weisen auf die spezifischen Mobilisierungsstrategien der Fair-Handelsbewegung hin.

This article investigates the determinants of parliamentary support for international fiscal aid. Departing from the literature on presidential systems, it analyses an exemplary case of a parliamentary system, Germany. Two theoretical accounts are distinguished. The first perceives MPs as policy-seekers and focuses on the positioning of government and opposition parties and individual MPs on an economic left‒right and a pro- versus anti-EU dimension. The second regards MPs as vote-seekers and presumes an electoral district connection. The statistical analysis of a new data-set containing information on 17 Bundestag roll-call votes from 2009 to 2015 finds support for the first account: voting in favour of fiscal aid measures is mainly driven by government membership and EU support. By contrast, neither economic ideologies, nor district or mandate characteristics influence support for fiscal aid. The article contributes to a growing literature on the domestic politics of international political economy.

This article offers an overview of the conceptual, substantive, and practical issues surrounding “big data” to provide one perspective on how the field of public affairs can successfully cope with the big data revolution. Big data in public affairs refers to a combination of administrative data collected through traditional means and large-scale data sets created by sensors, computer networks, or individuals as they use the Internet. In public affairs, new opportunities for real-time insights into behavioral patterns are emerging but are bound by safeguards limiting government reach through the restriction of the collection and analysis of these data. To address both the opportunities and challenges of this emerging phenomenon, the authors first review the evolving canon of big data articles across related fields. Second, they derive a working definition of big data in public affairs. Third, they review the methodological and analytic challenges of using big data in public affairs scholarship and practice. The article concludes with implications for public affairs.

Many accounts of civil war violence assume that a conflict’s master cleavage also explains the local occurrence of violence. Some scholars, however, have argued that violence is often the result of local cleavages and feuds, many of which may be unrelated to the conflict’s master cleavage. How is local violence related to the conflict’s master cleavage? Using a computational model, this paper studies an alliance mechanism proposed by Kalyvas (2006, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Cambridge University Press), where macro-actors support local ones that fight on their behalf. While these alliances create a principal–agent problem, the model shows that they can raise the overall severity of the conflict and serve the interests of the macro-actor. However, the model also shows that these mechanisms work only under limited conditions. Alliances can increase the level of violence perpetrated in the interest of the macro-actor, but only if (a) the latter supports agents that have in the past fought along the master cleavage and if (b) this happens in rural areas. This emphasizes again the importance of the rural dimension in the study of civil war.

Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference: validity of climate science, scale of ecological risk, scale of climate politics, and support for mitigation policy. These dimensions yield four clusters of cases producing a fractured global field. Positive values on the dimensions show modest association with emissions reductions. Data-mining media research is needed to determine trends in this global field.