Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät
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Transcending the conventional debate around efficiency in sustainable consumption, anti-consumption patterns leading to decreased levels of material consumption have been gaining importance. Change agents are crucial for the promotion of such patterns, so there may be lessons for governance interventions that can be learnt from the every-day experiences of those who actively implement and promote sustainability in the field of anti-consumption. Eighteen social innovation pioneers, who engage in and diffuse practices of voluntary simplicity and collaborative consumption as sustainable options of anti-consumption share their knowledge and personal insights in expert interviews for this research. Our qualitative content analysis reveals drivers, barriers, and governance strategies to strengthen anti-consumption patterns, which are negotiated between the market, the state, and civil society. Recommendations derived from the interviews concern entrepreneurship, municipal infrastructures in support of local grassroots projects, regulative policy measures, more positive communication to strengthen the visibility of initiatives and emphasize individual benefits, establishing a sense of community, anti-consumer activism, and education. We argue for complementary action between top-down strategies, bottom-up initiatives, corporate activities, and consumer behavior. The results are valuable to researchers, activists, marketers, and policymakers who seek to enhance their understanding of materially reduced consumption patterns based on the real-life experiences of active pioneers in the field.
Almost half of the political life has been experienced under the
state of emergency and state of siege policies in the Turkish
Republic. In spite of such a striking number and continuity in the
deployment of legal emergency powers, there are just a few legal
and political studies examining the reasons for such permanency
in governing practices. To fill this gap, this paper aims to discuss
one of the most important sources of the ‘permanent’ political
crisis in the country: the historical evolution of legal emergency
power. In order to highlight how these policies have intensified
the highly fragile citizenship regime by weakening the separation
of power, repressing the use of political rights and increasing the
discretionary power of both the executive and judiciary authori-
ties, the paper sheds light on the emergence and production of
a specific form of legality based on the idea of emergency and the
principle of executive prerogative. In that context, it aims to
provide a genealogical explanation of the evolution of the excep-
tional form of the nation-state, which is based on the way political
society, representation, and legitimacy have been instituted and
accompanying failure of the ruling classes in building hegemony
in the country.
Justice as relationality
(2020)
By introducing a notion of socio-ecological justice, this article aims to deepen the relationship between environment and justice, which has already been firmly established by environmental justice movements and scholarship. Based on extensive fieldwork on local community struggles against small-scale run-of river hydropower plants in Turkey, it expands the justice frame of environmental justice scholarship by going beyond the established conceptions of environmental justice as distribution - of environmental hazards and benefits, recognition and representation. Drawing on ethnographical fieldwork conducted in the East Black Sea region of Turkey, the article introduces the notion of socio-ecological justice to translate the relationality of the social and the ecological, of human life and non-human world, to the vocabulary of justice. It aims to extend the strictly humanist borders of social justice by maintaining that our intrinsic and intimate relations with the non-human world are an essential part of our well-being, and central to our needs to pursue a fair, decent life. It also seeks to contribute to the broader debate to facilitate a 'progressive composition' o f a common, more-than-human world.
The UN sustainable development goals contain environmental, economic, and social objectives. They may only be reached, or at least it would be easier to reach them, if instead of a trade-off between these objectives that implies a need for balancing them, there are synergies to be reaped. This paper discusses how the structures of economic models typically used in policy analysis influence whether win-win strategies for the environment and the economy can be conceptualised and analysed. With a focus on climate policy modelling, the paper points out how, by construction, commonly used model structures find mitigation costs rather than benefits. This paper describes mechanisms that, when added to these model structures, can bring win- win options into a model's solution horizon, and which provide a spectrum of alternative modelling approaches that allow for the identification of such options.
Die schrumpfende Mittelschicht ist nicht nur in der Öffentlichkeit ein vieldiskutierter Themenbereich. Eine Vielzahl an wissenschaftlichen Fachdisziplinen setzt sich aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven mit der Mittelschicht im Kontext des Wandels von Schichtungsgefügen auseinander. Während die gesellschaftliche Mitte in Deutschland ein etabliertes Forschungsgebiet ist, liegen für Österreich hingegen bislang kaum Studien vor. Vor diesem Hintergrund vereint der Sammelband konzeptionelle und empirische Beiträge zur österreichischen Mittelschicht aus Soziologie, Politikwissenschaften, Staatswissenschaft, und Zeitgeschichte. Ziel ist die umfassende multidisziplinäre Darstellung des Status Quo der Mittelschicht in Österreich. Die Beiträge in diesem Sammelband bieten einen Überblick über historische Perspektiven, unterschiedliche Theorietraditionen, sowie gegenwärtige empirische Befunde und sozialpolitische Analysen.
This paper aims to contribute to exploring the design possibilities of robots for use in human-robot interaction. In an experiment, we investigate the influence of the human's personality and the robot's design, especially its humanization, on its acceptance. We use the Almere model, the Big 5 personality traits, and the anthropomorphic gestalt variants to build the foundation for our investigation. The assumption that an anthropomorphized robot variant would, in principle, be preferred to the standard variant when a natural choice is enforced could not be evidenced in our experiment. This allows for the interpretation that anthropomorphism does not necessarily lead to intentional perception and, consequently, does not guarantee that it can automatically generate acceptance.
Dem Mitarbeiter zu Diensten
(2021)
Die Weiterbildung und Qualifizierung der Mitarbeiter sind zentrale Erfolgsfaktoren des digitalen Wandels. Die zentrale Herausforderung besteht darin, diese maßgeschnitten anzubieten sowie notwendige Akzeptanz nicht vorauszusetzen, sondern ebenso als Zielgröße anzusehen. Dies geschieht jedoch nur, wenn die Mitarbeiter als Partner gesehen werden, deren Bedürfnisse und Verständnis nachhaltig berücksichtigt werden. Dieser Beitrag schlägt vor diesem Hintergrund einen Ansatz vor, Weiterbildung als Personennahe Dienstleistung zu realisieren. Dafür wird zuerst ein skizzenhafter Überblick über grundlegende Kompetenzanforderungen des digitalen Wandels gegeben. Danach wird die aktuelle Situation betrieblicher Weiterbildung in der digitalen Transformation beleuchtet. Hierzu wurde in einem Zeitraum von sechs Monaten im Rahmen einer quantitativen Untersuchung erhoben, wie Beschäftigte die digitale Transformation ihres Unternehmens und daraus resultierende Bedarfe betrieblicher Weiterbildung wahrnehmen. Darauf basierend werden drei aktuelle Paradoxe abgeleitet, die mit einer Durchführung von Weiterbildung als Personennahe Dienstleistung verhindert werden können. Empfehlungen und Lösungsansätze werden hierzu diskutiert und weiterer Forschungsbedarf abgeleitet.
Der abschließende Beitrag des multidisziplinären Sammelbands zielt darauf ab Perspektiven und Befunde zur Mittelschicht in Österreich aus der Soziologie, der Ökonomie, den Politikwissenschaften und der Zeitgeschichte zusammenzufassen und Verknüpfungen zwischen unterschiedlichen Analysen und Disziplinen zu benennen. Im Ergebnis liefert diese systematisierende Analyse der Beiträge einen umfassenden status quo der österreichischen Mitte in Hinblick auf Bildungserträge, Religionsausübung, Solidaritäts- und Abgrenzungsprozesse, Wahlverhalten, Vertrauen in Institutionen, psychische Gesundheit, Geschlechterungleichheit und vieles mehr. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Diskussion und werden neun Thesen zur jüngsten und zukünftigen Entwicklung der unter Druck stehenden gesellschaftlichen Mitte formulieren. Diese Thesen können als Beitrag zu einer laufenden gesellschaftspolitischen Debatte aber auch als Anregung für weitere sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung verstanden werden.
Labour market entry poses enormous challenges for recently arrived refugees, ranging from language barriers, devaluation of human capital, unfamiliarity with customs of the job search process to outright discrimination. How can refugees overcome these challenges and quickly enter gainful employment? In this paper, we draw on interviews with 26 male and female refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, conducted in 2017 and 2018, who came to Austria in 2015 and 2014 and who have successfully entered employment. We depict refugees’ own perspectives on and strategies for fast job entry and integration. Personal agency and a proactive approach of seeking and seizing opportunities are key for overcoming initial barriers and entering upon positive integration pathways. At the same time, refugees’ personal agency is essential for establishing social ties to the host society, which also play a crucial role in early labour market integration. Finally, institutions of the Austrian labour market (the ‘apprenticeship’-system) interact with refugees’ agency in most intricate ways, both setting up nearly insurmountable barriers but also providing specific opportunities for refugees.