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A circulatory loop
(2023)
In the digitalization debate, gender biases in digital technologies play a significant role because of their potential for social exclusion and inequality. It is therefore remarkable that organizations as drivers of digitalization and as places for social integration have been widely overlooked so far. Simultaneously, gender biases and digitalization have structurally immanent connections to organizations. Therefore, a look at the reciprocal relationship between organizations, digitalization, and gender is needed. The article provides answers to the question of whether and how organizations (re)produce, reinforce, or diminish gender‐specific inequalities during their digital transformations. On the one hand, gender inequalities emerge when organizations use post‐bureaucratic concepts through digitalization. On the other hand, gender inequalities are reproduced when organizations either program or implement digital technologies and fail to establish control structures that prevent gender biases. This article shows that digitalization can act as a catalyst for inequality‐producing mechanisms, but also has the potential to mitigate inequalities. We argue that organizations must be considered when discussing the potential of exclusion through digitalization.
We and AI
(2021)
From learners to educators
(2020)
The rapid growth of technology and its evolving potential to support the transformation of teaching and learning in post-secondary institutions is a major challenge to the basic understanding of both the university and the communities it serves. In higher education, the standard forms of learning and teaching are increasingly being challenged and a more comprehensive process of differentiation is taking place. Student-centered teaching methods are becoming increasingly important in course design and the role of the lecturer is changing from the knowledge mediator to moderator and learning companion. However, this is accelerating the need for strategically planned faculty support and a reassessment of the role of teaching and learning. Even though the benefits of experience-based learning approaches for the development of life skills are well known, most knowledge transfer is still realized through lectures in higher education. Teachers have the goal to design the curriculum, new assignments, and share insights into evolving pedagogy. Student engagement could be the most important factor in the learning success of university students, regardless of the university program or teaching format. Against this background, this article presents the development, application, and initial findings of an innovative learning concept. In this concept, students are allowed to deal with a scientific topic, but instead of a presentation and a written elaboration, their examination consists of developing an online course in terms of content, didactics, and concept to implement it in a learning environment, which is state of the art. The online courses include both self-created teaching material and interactive tasks. The courses are created to be available to other students as learning material after a review process and are thus incorporated into the curriculum.
The study of subnational and local government systems and reforms has become an increasingly salient topic in comparative public administration. In many European countries, policy implementation, the execution of public tasks and the delivery of services to citizens are largely carried out by local governments, which, at the same time, have been subjected to multiple reforms and sometimes comprehensive institutional re-organizations. This chapter discusses analytical key concepts and outcomes of the comparative study of local governments and local government reforms. It outlines frameworks and analytical tools to capture the variety of institutional settings and developments at the local level of government. It provides an introduction into crucial comparative dimensions, such as functional, territorial and political profiles of local governments, and analyses current reform approaches and outcomes based on recent empirical findings. Finally, the chapter addresses salient issues to be taken up in future comparative studies about local government.
Over the past decades, the traditional profile of the German administrative system has significantly been reshaped and remoulded through reforms and transformations. Manifold modernization efforts have been undertaken to adjust administrative structures and procedures to increasing challenges and pressures. In this chapter, the attempt is made to outline major institutional reform paths in Germany from Weberian bureaucracy to most recent reforms towards a digital transformation of public administration. We will show to what extent the German administrative system has moved away from the classical Weberian bureaucracy to a hybrid system where elements of the ‘old’ model and new reform paradigms such as the NPM and digital government are hybridized, labelled the Neo Weberian State. The question will be addressed as to what extent this shift has taken shape and which hurdles and path-dependencies can be identified to explain partial persistence and continuity over time.
In response to strong revenue and income losses facing a large share of self-employed individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic, the German federal government introduced a €50bn emergency-aid program. Based on real-time online-survey data comprising more than 20,000 observations, we analyze the impact of this program on the confidence to survive the crisis. We investigate how the digitalization level of self-employed individuals influences the program’s effectiveness. Employing propensity score matching, we find that the emergency-aid program had only moderately positive effects on the confidence of self-employed to survive the crisis. However, self-employed whose businesses were highly digitalized, benefitted much more from the state aid than those whose businesses were less digitalized. This only holds true for those self-employed, who started the digitalization processes already before the crisis. Taking a regional perspective, we find suggestive evidence that the quality of the regional broadband infrastructure matters in the sense that it increases the effectiveness of the emergency-aid program. Our findings show the interplay between governmental support programs, the digitalization levels of entrepreneurs, and the regional digital infrastructure. The study helps public policy to improve the impact of crisis-related policy instruments, ultimately increasing the resilience of small firms in times of crises.
Digitalisation in industry – also called “Industry 4.0” – is seen by numerous actors as an opportunity to reduce the environmental impact of the industrial sector. The scientific assessments of the effects of digitalisation in industry on environmental sustainability, however, are ambivalent. This cumulative dissertation uses three empirical studies to examine the expected and observed effects of digitalisation in industry on environmental sustainability. The aim of this dissertation is to identify opportunities and risks of digitalisation at different system levels and to derive options for action in politics and industry for a more sustainable design of digitalisation in industry. I use an interdisciplinary, socio-technical approach and look at selected countries of the Global South (Study 1) and the example of China (all studies). In the first study (section 2, joint work with Marcel Matthess), I use qualitative content analysis to examine digital and industrial policies from seven different countries in Africa and Asia for expectations regarding the impact of digitalisation on sustainability and compare these with the potentials of digitalisation for sustainability in the respective country contexts. The analysis reveals that the documents express a wide range of vague expectations that relate more to positive indirect impacts of information and communication technology (ICT) use, such as improved energy efficiency and resource management, and less to negative direct impacts of ICT, such as electricity consumption through ICT. In the second study (section 3, joint work with Marcel Matthess, Grischa Beier and Bing Xue), I conduct and analyse interviews with 18 industry representatives of the electronics industry from Europe, Japan and China on digitalisation measures in supply chains using qualitative content analysis. I find that while there are positive expectations regarding the effects of digital technologies on supply chain sustainability, their actual use and observable effects are still limited. Interview partners can only provide few examples from their own companies which show that sustainability goals have already been pursued through digitalisation of the supply chain or where sustainability effects, such as resource savings, have been demonstrably achieved. In the third study (section 4, joint work with Peter Neuhäusler, Melissa Dachrodt and Marcel Matthess), I conduct an econometric panel data analysis. I examine the relationship between the degree of Industry 4.0, energy consumption and energy intensity in ten manufacturing sectors in China between 2006 and 2019. The results suggest that overall, there is no significant relationship between the degree of Industry 4.0 and energy consumption or energy intensity in manufacturing sectors in China. However, differences can be found in subgroups of sectors. I find a negative correlation of Industry 4.0 and energy intensity in highly digitalised sectors, indicating an efficiency-enhancing effect of Industry 4.0 in these sectors. On the other hand, there is a positive correlation of Industry 4.0 and energy consumption for sectors with low energy consumption, which could be explained by the fact that digitalisation, such as the automation of previously mainly labour-intensive sectors, requires energy and also induces growth effects. In the discussion section (section 6) of this dissertation, I use the classification scheme of the three levels macro, meso and micro, as well as of direct and indirect environmental effects to classify the empirical observations into opportunities and risks, for example, with regard to the probability of rebound effects of digitalisation at the three levels. I link the investigated actor perspectives (policy makers, industry representatives), statistical data and additional literature across the system levels and consider political economy aspects to suggest fields of action for more sustainable (digitalised) industries. The dissertation thus makes two overarching contributions to the academic and societal discourse. First, my three empirical studies expand the limited state of research at the interface between digitalisation in industry and sustainability, especially by considering selected countries in the Global South and the example of China. Secondly, exploring the topic through data and methods from different disciplinary contexts and taking a socio-technical point of view, enables an analysis of (path) dependencies, uncertainties, and interactions in the socio-technical system across different system levels, which have often not been sufficiently considered in previous studies. The dissertation thus aims to create a scientifically and practically relevant knowledge basis for a value-guided, sustainability-oriented design of digitalisation in industry.
Digital technology offers significant political, economic, and societal opportunities. At the same time, the notion of digital sovereignty has become a leitmotif in German discourse: the state’s capacity to assume its responsibilities and safeguard society’s – and individuals’ – ability to shape the digital transformation in a self-determined way. The education sector is exemplary for the challenge faced by Germany, and indeed Europe, of harnessing the benefits of digital technology while navigating concerns around sovereignty. It encompasses education as a core public good, a rapidly growing field of business, and growing pools of highly sensitive personal data. The report describes pathways to mitigating the tension between digitalization and sovereignty at three different levels – state, economy, and individual – through the lens of concrete technical projects in the education sector: the HPI Schul-Cloud (state sovereignty), the MERLOT data spaces (economic sovereignty), and the openHPI platform (individual sovereignty).
Technological change and development have been ongoing in the motion picture industry since its beginnings some 125 years ago. What further advancements of digitalization can be expected over the next decade and what are its implications for the industry’s value chain? To answer this question, we conducted an international two-stage Delphi study. The results suggested a more frequent use of smartphones as cameras, the emergence of full digital film sets and digital star avatars, as well as advancements in VR-based and interactive movies. The findings imply challenges for traditional players in the motion picture value chain. Production technology becomes both simpler and more complex, leading to the threat of new entrants.
Strategic management is the deliberate engagement of an administration with the challenges of fulfilling its mission and ensuring and improving its ability to act by clarifying measures of success, an understanding of how to influence patterns of action, and organiza-tional learning. In this respect, it is not just about planning, but about an understanding of the emerging strategies of the administration in fulfilling its tasks and the use of opportunities for performance improvement, taking into account stakeholder expectations, resource base and organizational capabilities.
RailChain
(2023)
The RailChain project designed, implemented, and experimentally evaluated a juridical recorder that is based on a distributed consensus protocol. That juridical blockchain recorder has been realized as distributed ledger on board the advanced TrainLab (ICE-TD 605 017) of Deutsche Bahn.
For the project, a consortium consisting of DB Systel, Siemens, Siemens Mobility, the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering, Technische Universität Braunschweig, TÜV Rheinland InterTraffic, and Spherity has been formed. These partners not only concentrated competencies in railway operation, computer science, regulation, and approval, but also combined experiences from industry, research from academia, and enthusiasm from startups.
Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) define distributed databases and express a digital protocol for transactions between business partners without the need for a trusted intermediary. The implementation of a blockchain with real-time requirements for the local network of a railway system (e.g., interlocking or train) allows to log data in the distributed system verifiably in real-time. For this, railway-specific assumptions can be leveraged to make modifications to standard blockchains protocols.
EULYNX and OCORA (Open CCS On-board Reference Architecture) are parts of a future European reference architecture for control command and signalling (CCS, Reference CCS Architecture – RCA). Both architectural concepts outline heterogeneous IT systems with components from multiple manufacturers. Such systems introduce novel challenges for the approved and safety-relevant CCS of railways which were considered neither for road-side nor for on-board systems so far. Logging implementations, such as the common juridical recorder on vehicles, can no longer be realized as a central component of a single manufacturer. All centralized approaches are in question.
The research project RailChain is funded by the mFUND program and gives practical evidence that distributed consensus protocols are a proper means to immutably (for legal purposes) store state information of many system components from multiple manufacturers. The results of RailChain have been published, prototypically implemented, and experimentally evaluated in large-scale field tests on the advanced TrainLab. At the same time, the project showed how RailChain can be integrated into the road-side and on-board architecture given by OCORA and EULYNX.
Logged data can now be analysed sooner and also their trustworthiness is being increased. This enables, e.g., auditable predictive maintenance, because it is ensured that data is authentic and unmodified at any point in time.
Industry 4.0
(2020)
Industry 4.0 has had a strong influence on the debate on the digitalization of industrial processes, despite being criticized for lacking a proper definition. However, Industry 4.0 might offer a huge chance to align the goals of a sustainable development with the ongoing digital transformation in industrial development. The main contribution of this paper is therefore twofold. We provide a de-facto definition of the concept "Industry 4.0" from a sociotechnical perspective based on its most often cited key features, as well as a thorough review of how far the concept of sustainability is incorporated in it.
The recently adopted German Online Access Act triggered the creation of digitalization labs for designing digital services, bringing together federal, state, and local authorities; end-users; and private-sector actors. These labs provide opportunities for boundary spanning due to organizational field and lab features. Our comparative case studies on three digitalization labs show variations in boundary spanning and reveal lab members de-coupling from their parent organizations to a varying extent. We have concluded labs offer boundary spanning that supports safeguarding the legitimacy of innovative policy designs but also raise concerns over public accountability.
Traditional organizations are strongly encouraged by emerging digital customer behavior and digital competition to transform their businesses for the digital age. Incumbents are particularly exposed to the field of tension between maintaining and renewing their business model. Banking is one of the industries most affected by digitalization, with a large stream of digital innovations around Fintech. Most research contributions focus on digital innovations, such as Fintech, but there are only a few studies on the related challenges and perspectives of incumbent organizations, such as traditional banks. Against this background, this dissertation examines the specific causes, effects and solutions for traditional banks in digital transformation − an underrepresented research area so far.
The first part of the thesis examines how digitalization has changed the latent customer expectations in banking and studies the underlying technological drivers of evolving business-to-consumer (B2C) business models. Online consumer reviews are systematized to identify latent concepts of customer behavior and future decision paths as strategic digitalization effects. Furthermore, the service attribute preferences, the impact of influencing factors and the underlying customer segments are uncovered for checking accounts in a discrete choice experiment. The dissertation contributes here to customer behavior research in digital transformation, moving beyond the technology acceptance model. In addition, the dissertation systematizes value proposition types in the evolving discourse around smart products and services as key drivers of business models and market power in the platform economy.
The second part of the thesis focuses on the effects of digital transformation on the strategy development of financial service providers, which are classified along with their firm performance levels. Standard types are derived based on fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), with facade digitalization as one typical standard type for low performing incumbent banks that lack a holistic strategic response to digital transformation. Based on this, the contradictory impact of digitalization measures on key business figures is examined for German savings banks, confirming that the shift towards digital customer interaction was not accompanied by new revenue models diminishing bank profitability. The dissertation further contributes to the discourse on digitalized work designs and the consequences for job perceptions in banking customer advisory. The threefold impact of the IT support perceived in customer interaction on the job satisfaction of customer advisors is disentangled.
In the third part of the dissertation, solutions are developed design-oriented for core action areas of digitalized business models, i.e., data and platforms. A consolidated taxonomy for data-driven business models and a future reference model for digital banking have been developed. The impact of the platform economy is demonstrated here using the example of the market entry by Bigtech. The role-based e3-value modeling is extended by meta-roles and role segments and linked to value co-creation mapping in VDML. In this way, the dissertation extends enterprise modeling research on platform ecosystems and value co-creation using the example of banking.