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This study evaluates the challenges, institutional impacts and responses of German local authorities to the COVID-19 pandemic from a political science point of view. The main research question is how they have contributed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and to what extent the strengths and weaknesses of the German model of municipal autonomy have influenced their policy. It analyses the adaptation strategies of German local authorities and assesses the effectiveness of their actions up to now. Their implementation is then evaluated in five selected issues, e.g. adjustment organization and staff, challenges for local finances, local politics and citizen’s participation. This analysis is reflecting the scientific debate in Germany since the beginning of 2020, based on the available analyses of political science, law, economics, sociology and geography until end of March 2021.
After some seventy years of intensive debates, there is an increasingly strong consensus within the academic and practitioner communities that development is both an objective and a process towards improving the quality of people's lives in various societal dimensions – economic, social, environmental, cultural and political – and about how subjectively satisfied they are with it. Since 2015, the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN) reflect such consensus. The sections behind this argument are based on a review of (i) three key theoretical contributions to development and different phases of development thinking; (ii) global and regional governance arrangements and institutions for development cooperation; (iii) upcoming challenges to development policy and practice stemming from a series of new global challenges; and, (iv) development policy as a long and steady, increasingly global and participatory learning process.
I argue that Hegel’s Logic traces an emergent-purposive, logical method that entails two key identities in reason. These identities are (1) between a logic of freedom and necessity, and (2) between the possibilities of a priori and a posteriori reasoning in a purposive method. The purposive method of the Logic is the basis for these identities and, in Hegel’s view, facilitates the transition from Kant’s transcendental idealism to absolute idealism. I suggest that this method is Hegel’s attempt to rework a critique of philosophy according to Kant’s insight about the principle grounding the formal purposiveness of the faculties, what Hegel calls, “one of Kant’s greatest services to philosophy.”
Introduction
(2021)
Kant wrote in the Critique of Pure Reason, “For the law of reason to seek unity is necessary, since without it we would have no reason, and without that, no coherent use of the understanding, and, lacking that, no sufficient mark of empirical truth.” This unity of reason, taken as a holistic condition, was central to the convictions of the idealists. To them, Kant layed bare the right path forward, but also fundamental failings in his execution of a critique of reason which needed to be overcome in order for reason to secure its own, internal end. In this chapter, I discuss key themes in the positive inheritance of Kant’s thought in classical German philosophy and offer an overview of the arguments and significances of each contribution to this volume. The aim is not to minimize important differences between Kant and post-Kantian Idealists, but rather to emphasize core retentions of Kant’s thought.
Extract: [...]In the first part of this paper I trace the language shift from Breton to French within the historical, social and ideological framework in which it occurred. I then argue that 19th and 20th-century attempts by scholars and militants to rehabilitate the Breton language led to the creation of a unified standard (peurunvan).2 The consequence has been the rise of a three-way diglossic rapport between the speakers of French, the new Breton standard3 and those of the traditional Breton vernaculars. Taking the varieties of southern Cornouaille (Finistère) between Quimper and Quimperlé as a point of comparison,4 I focus on a number of phonological, morphological, syntactical and lexical features which, though far from exhausttive, are not generally taken into account in the new standard language. These details provide a general idea of how varieties of Breton function at the micro-dialectological level, as well as ways in which they can differ from the standard and other spoken varieties. The paper concludes with observations regarding the necessity to consider languages, language varieties and their speakers within relevant social contexts.[...]
With the latest technological developments and associated new possibilities in teaching, the personalisation of learning is gaining more and more importance. It assumes that individual learning experiences and results could generally be improved when personal learning preferences are considered. To do justice to the complexity of the personalisation possibilities of teaching and learning processes, we illustrate the components of learning and teaching in the digital environment and their interdependencies in an initial model. Furthermore, in a pre-study, we investigate the relationships between the learner's ability to (digital) self-organise, the learner’s prior- knowledge learning in different variants of mode and learning outcomes as one part of this model. With this pre-study, we are taking the first step towards a holistic model of teaching and learning in digital environments.
Industry 4.0, i.e. the connection of cyber-physical systems via the Internet in production and logistics, leads to considerable changes in the socio-technical system of the factory. The effects range from a considerable need for further training, which is exacerbated by the current shortage of skilled workers, to an opening of the previously inaccessible boundaries of the factory to third-party access, an increasing merging of office IT and manufacturing IT, and a new understanding of what machines can do with their data. This results in new requirements for the modeling, analysis and design of information processing and performance mapping business processes.
In the past, procedures were developed under the name of “process-oriented knowledge management” with which the exchange and use of knowledge in business processes could be represented, analyzed and improved. However, these approaches were limited to the office environment. A method that makes it possible to document, analyze and jointly optimize the new possibilities of knowledge processing by using artificial intelligence and machine learning in production and logistics in the same way and in a manner compatible with the approach in the office environment does not exist so far. The extension of the modeling language KMDL, which is described in this paper, will contribute to close this research gap.
This paper describes first approaches for an analysis and design method for a knowledge management integrating man and machine in the age of Industry 4.0.
Process models are the basic ingredient for many attempts to improve business processes. The graphical depiction of otherwise not observable behavior in an enterprise is one of the most important techniques in the digital society. They help to enable decision making in the design of processes and workflows. Nevertheless it is not easy to correctly model business processes. Some approaches try to detect errors by an automated analysis of the process model. This contribution focuses on the creation of the first model from scratch. Which errors occur most frequently and how can these be avoided?
The authors propose that while tacit knowledge is a valuable resource for developing new business models, its externalization presents several challenges. One major challenge is that individuals often don’t recognize their tacit knowledge resources, while another is the reluctance to share one’s knowledge with others. Addressing these challenges, the authors present an application-oriented serious game-based haptic modeling approach for externalize tacit knowledge, which can be used to develop the first versions of business models based on tacit knowledge. Both conceptual and practical design fundamentals are presented based on elaborated theoretical approaches, which were developed with the help of a design science approach. The development of the research process is presented step by step, whereby we focused on the high accessibility of the presented research. Practitioners are presented with guidelines for implementing their serious game projects. Scientists benefit from starting points for their research topics of externalization, internalization, and socialization of tacit knowledge, development of business models, and serious games or gamification. The paper concludes with open research desiderata and questions from the presented research process.
Manufacturing companies still have relatively few points of contact with the circular economy. Especially, extending life time of whole products or parts via remanufacturing is an promising approach to reduce waste. However, necessary cost-efficient assessment of the condition of the individual parts is challenging and assessment procedures are technically complex (e.g., scanning and testing procedures). Furthermore, these assessment procedures are usually only available after the disassembly process has been completed. This is where conceptualization, data acquisition and simulation of remanufacturing processes can help. One major constraining aspect of remanufacturing is reducing logistic efforts, since these also have negative external effects on the environment. Thus regionalization is an additional but in the end consequential challenge for remanufacturing. This article aims to fill a gap by providing an regional remanufacturing approach, in particular the design of local remanufacturing chains. Thereby, further focus lies on modeling and simulating alternative courses of action, including feasibility study and eco-nomic assessment.
As part of the digitization, the role of artificial systems as new actors in knowledge-intensive processes requires to recognize them as a new form of knowledge bearers side by side with traditional knowledge bearers, such as individuals, groups, organizations. By now, artificial intelligence (AI) methods were used in knowledge management (KM) for knowledge discovery, for the reinterpreting of information, and recent works focus on the studying of different AI technologies implementation for knowledge management, like big data, ontology-based methods and intelligent agents [1]. However, a lack of holistic management approach is present, that considers artificial systems as knowledge bearers. The paper therefore designs a new kind of KM approach, that integrates the technical level of knowledge and manifests as Neuronal KM (NKM). Superimposing traditional KM approaches with the NKM, the Symbiotic Knowledge Management (SKM) is conceptualized furthermore, so that human as well as artificial kinds of knowledge bearers can be managed as symbiosis. First use cases demonstrate the new KM, NKM and SKM approaches in a proof-of-concept and exemplify their differences.
Faced with the triad of time-cost-quality, the realization of knowledge-intensive tasks at economic conditions is not trivial. Since the number of knowledge-intensive processes is increasing more and more nowadays, the efficient design of knowledge transfers at business processes as well as the target-oriented improvement of them is essential, so that process outcomes satisfy high quality criteria and economic requirements. This particularly challenges knowledge management, aiming for the assignment of ideal manifestations of influence factors on knowledge transfers to a certain task. Faced with first attempts of knowledge transfer-based process improvements [1], this paper continues research about the quantitative examination of knowledge transfers and presents a ready-to-go experiment design that is able to examine quality of knowledge transfers empirically and is suitable to examine knowledge transfers on a quantitative level. Its use is proven by the example of four influence factors, which namely are stickiness, complexity, competence and time pressure.
A growing number of business processes can be characterized as knowledge-intensive. The ability to speed up the transfer of knowledge between any kind of knowledge carriers in business processes with AR techniques can lead to a huge competitive advantage, for instance in manufacturing. This includes the transfer of person-bound knowledge as well as externalized knowledge of physical and virtual objects. The contribution builds on a time-dependent knowledge transfer model and conceptualizes an adaptable, AR-based application. Having the intention to accelerate the speed of knowledge transfers between a manufacturer and an information system, empirical results of an experimentation show the validity of this approach. For the first time, it will be possible to discover how to improve the transfer among knowledge carriers of an organization with knowledge-driven information systems (KDIS). Within an experiment setting, the paper shows how to improve the quantitative effects regarding the quality and amount of time needed for an example manufacturing process realization by an adaptable KDIS.
Since more and more business tasks are enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based techniques, the number of knowledge-intensive tasks increase as trivial tasks can be automated and non-trivial tasks demand human-machine interactions. With this, challenges regarding the management of knowledge workers and machines rise [9]. Furthermore, knowledge workers experience time pressure, which can lead to a decrease in output quality. Artificial Intelligence-based systems (AIS) have the potential to assist human workers in knowledge-intensive work. By providing a domain-specific language, contextual and situational awareness as well as their process embedding can be specified, which enables the management of human and AIS to ease knowledge transfer in a way that process time, cost and quality are improved significantly. This contribution outlines a framework to designing these systems and accounts for their implementation.
Since more and more production tasks are enabled by Industry 4.0 techniques, the number of knowledge-intensive production tasks increases as trivial tasks can be automated and only non-trivial tasks demand human-machine interactions. With this, challenges regarding the competence of production workers, the complexity of tasks and stickiness of required knowledge occur [1]. Furthermore, workers experience time pressure which can lead to a decrease in output quality. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have the potential to assist workers in knowledge-intensive work grounded on quantitative insights about knowledge transfer activities [2]. By providing contextual and situational awareness as well as complex classification and selection algorithms, CPS are able to ease knowledge transfer in a way that production time and quality is improved significantly. CPS have only been used for direct production and process optimization, knowledge transfers have only been regarded in assistance systems with little contextual awareness. Embedding production and knowledge transfer optimization thus show potential for further improvements. This contribution outlines the requirements and a framework to design these systems. It accounts for the relevant factors.
Although the literature on the determinants of training has considered individual and firm-related characteristics, it has generally neglected regional factors. This is surprising, given the fact that labour markets differ by regions. Regional factors are often ignored because (both in Germany and abroad) many data sets covering training information do not include detailed geographical identifiers that would allow a merging of information on the regional level. The regional identifiers of the National Educational Panel Study (Starting Cohort 6) offer opportunities to advance research on several regional factors. This article summarizes the results from two studies that exploit these unique opportunities to investigate the relationship between training participation and (a) the local level of firm competition for workers within specific sectors of the economy and (b) the regional supply of training measured as the number of firms offering courses or seminars for potential training participants.
Expanding modeling notations
(2022)
Creativity is a common aspect of business processes and thus needs a proper representation through process modeling notations. However, creative processes constitute highly flexible process elements, as new and unforeseeable outcome is developed. This presents a challenge for modeling languages. Current methods representing creative-intensive work are rather less able to capture creative specifics which are relevant to successfully run and manage these processes. We outline the concept of creative-intensive processes and present an example from a game design process in order to derive critical process aspects relevant for its modeling. Six aspects are detected, with first and foremost: process flexibility, as well as temporal uncertainty, experience, types of creative problems, phases of the creative process and individual criteria. By first analyzing what aspects of creative work modeling notations already cover, we further discuss which modeling extensions need to be developed to better represent creativity within business processes. We argue that a proper representation of creative work would not just improve the management of those processes, but can further enable process actors to more efficiently run these creative processes and adjust them to better fit to the creative needs.
The will of the masses
(2020)
This article describes the way of Conrado Balweg from the Tingguian-tribe in the Cordillera mountains/Philippines, who was educated in Catholic seminaries, entered a missionary congregation, was ordained priest and joined the communist insurgency New People’s Army. There he quickly attained the rank of a political officer and military commander. Balweg held teachings on Marxism in remote villages, he organized several ambushes on government troops and conducted people’s courts against traitors. Over time he developed a special indigenous Maoism and broke away from the party-line and, which was the reason why he was killed by the NPA in 1999. In a contextualized biographical portrait we track the question: How did Maoist thought become part of Balweg’s conviction? As a hypothesis we assumed, that Maoist thought was integrated in Catholic tenets (e.g. interpreting God’s will as the will of the masses). After a close analysis of intellectual backgrounds and political events it turned out, that Maoist ideology superseded religious motives instead. This is crucial to understand if violence was justified in the name of God or in the name of the people.
This book brings together case studies dealing with historical as well as recent phenomena in former socialist nations, which testify the transfer of knowledge about religion and atheism. The material is connected on a semantic level by the presence of a historical watershed before and after socialism as well as on a theoretical level by the sociology of knowledge. With its focus on Central and Eastern Europe this volume is an important contribution to the research on nonreligion and secularity.
The collected volume deals with agents and media within specific cultural and historical contexts. Theoretical claims and conceptions by single agents and/or institutions in which the imparting of knowledge about religion and atheism was or is a central assignment, are analyzed. Additionally, procedures of transmitting knowledge about religion and atheism and of sustaining related institutionalized norms, interpretations, roles and practices are in the focus of interest.
The book opens the perspective for the multidimensional and negotiating character of legitimation processes, being involved in the establishment or questioning of the institutionalized opposition between religion and atheism or religion and science.
The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Chadic language spoken in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Focus in Gùrùntùm is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focus constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Gùrùntùm allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS) in principle, the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that arise as the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements that govern the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as newinformation, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfectivity marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we show at the end of the paper that a can also function as a foregrounding device at the level of discourse structure.
Degérando’s three prize essays and the shift in linguistic thought at the turn of the 19th century
(2016)
Degérando started out from the views of the French ideologists on the relationship of language and thought, but increasingly distanced himself from them. This is already evident based on the choice of reference authors and also on the increasing emphasis on empirical research. His prize essays reflect the fundamental changes in linguistic thought during the late 18th century. He was successful in the competition of the Institut National (1797/1799) and with another essay at the Berlin Academy (1802). His main argument against Condillac and the ideologists is that empirical knowledge does not depend on signs. Therefore, the development of better languages will not improve this kind of human knowledge.
The grammatization of European vernacular languages began in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance and continued up until the end of the 18th century. Through this process, grammars were written for the vernaculars and, as a result, the vernaculars were able to establish themselves in important areas of communication. Vernacular grammars largely followed the example of those written for Latin, using Latin descriptive categories without fully adapting them to the vernaculars. In accord with the Greco-Latin tradition, the grammars typically contain sections on orthography, prosody, morphology, and syntax, with the most space devoted to the treatment of word classes in the section on “etymology.” The earliest grammars of vernaculars had two main goals: on the one hand, making the languages described accessible to non-native speakers, and on the other, supporting the learning of Latin grammar by teaching the grammar of speakers’ native languages. Initially, it was considered unnecessary to engage with the grammar of native languages for their own sake, since they were thought to be acquired spontaneously. Only gradually did a need for normative grammars develop which sought to codify languages. This development relied on an awareness of the value of vernaculars that attributed a certain degree of perfection to them. Grammars of indigenous languages in colonized areas were based on those of European languages and today offer information about the early state of those languages, and are indeed sometimes the only sources for now extinct languages. Grammars of vernaculars came into being in the contrasting contexts of general grammar and the grammars of individual languages, between grammar as science and as art and between description and standardization. In the standardization of languages, the guiding principle could either be that of anomaly, which took a particular variety of a language as the basis of the description, or that of analogy, which permitted interventions into a language aimed at making it more uniform.
In 1916, three years after the death of Ferdinand de Saussure, the Cours de linguistique générale (CLG) was published in Geneva. This foundational work marked the beginning of a discipline that has profoundly influenced the development of the humanities ever since.
What sources influenced the CLG? Do the main concepts of this seminal work have the same validity today as they did in 1916? How has the recent development of language sciences influenced its reception? How does this text account for meaning and communication within the context of speech (parole)?
In order to explore these questions, one hundred years after the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's seminal work on General Linguistics, Polis--The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities held an interdisciplinary conference that gathered 14 international specialists from various disciplines: general linguistics, pragmatics, philology, dialectology, translation studies, terminology, and philosophy.
The first section of this work reassesses the sources and further influence of the CLG on modern linguistics. The book's second part discusses some of the main concepts and dichotomies of the CLG (constitution of the linguistic method, arbitrariness of sign, main dichotomies), under the light of both the original manuscripts and recent linguistic developments (influence of dialectology or translation studies). The third and last part handles the pragmatic and semantic dimensions of language, suggesting new avenues of reflection that could not yet have been fully taken into account within the CLG itself.
Uniting 14 scholarly articles, together with an introduction, an index locorum and a collective bibliography, this volume hopes to encourage readers with its reappraisal and reinterpretation of Saussure's ground-breaking work and thus contribute to the future development of linguistics and humanities.
On the evidential use of English adverbials and their equivalents in Romance languages and Russian
(2017)
The present study investigates the use of equivalents of the English adverbials seemingly and apparently with a specific morphological structure in Romance languages and Russian, i.e. Spanish al parecer, Portuguese ao parecer and ao que parece, French avoir l’air de, Italian all’apparenza and in apparenza as well as Russian по-видимому. The underlying hypothesis is that the function and syntactic behaviour of these adverbial locutions are motivated by their morphological composition. It is to investigate whether the adverbials may be used sentence-initially, parenthetically, as an adverbial with broad or narrow scope or as a component of a modalised predication. The adverbial locutions are treated as means of expression where evidentiality and epistemic modality represent overlapping functional-semantic categories.
Geleitwort
(2020)
Conclusion
(2019)
Although mothers and fathers in almost all rich democracies are entitled to some form of paid parenting leave, fathers in particular do not take all the leave available to them. As employers play an important role in the implementation of parenting leave policies, this chapter investigates which workplace characteristics influence mothers' and fathers' uptake of their statutory leave entitlements. In Part 1, we estimate the size of the gap between statutory leave entitlement and leave uptake across genders and countries by combining data from the OECD and the European Labor Force Survey. In Parts 2 and 3, we review the literature on structural, cultural, and normative explanations for the gap in parenting leave uptake. We conclude the chapter with suggestions for further research, including the need for reliable data on the size of the implementation gap and research on non-European countries.
The chapter explores how the Security Council has reacted to the changing global order in terms of institutional reform and its working methods. First, we look at how the Security Council’s setup looks increasingly anachronistic against the tremendous shifts in global power. Yet, established and rising powers are not disengaging. In contrast, they are turning to the Council to address growing challenges posed by the changing nature of armed conflict, the surge of terrorism and foreign fighters, nuclear proliferation and persistent intra-state conflicts. Then, we explore institutional and political hurdles for Council reform. While various reform models have been suggested, none of them gained the necessary global support. Instead, we demonstrate how the Council has increased the representation of emerging powers in informal ways. Potential candidates for permanent seats and their regional counterparts are committed as elected members, peacekeeping contributors or within the Peacebuilding Commission. Finally, we analyze how innovatively the Council has reacted to global security challenges. This includes working methods reform, expansion of sanctions regimes and involvement of non-state actors. We conclude that even though the Council’s membership has not yet been altered, it has reacted to the changing global order in ways previously unaccounted for.
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is one of the most important multilateral institutions having the ambition to shape global governance and the only organ of the global community that can adopt legally binding resolutions for the maintenance of international peace and security and, if necessary, authorize the use of force. Created in the aftermath of World War II by its victors, the UNSC’s constellation looks increasingly anachronistic, however, in light of the changing global distribution of power. Adapting the institutional structure and decision-making procedures of the UNSC has proven to be one of the most difficult challenges of the last decades, while it is the institution that has probably been faced with the most vociferous calls for reform. Although there have been changes to the informal ways in which outside actors are drawn into the UNSC’s work and activities, many of the major players in the current international system seem to be deprived from equal treatment in its core patterns of decision-making. Countries such as Brazil, Germany, India and Japan, alongside emerging African nations such as Nigeria and South Africa, are among the states eager to secure permanent representation on the Council. By comparison, selected BRICS countries, China and Russia - in contrast to their role in other multilateral institutions - are permanent members of the UNSC and with this, have been “insiders” for a long time. This renders the situation of the UNSC different from global institutions, in which traditionally, Western powers have dominated the agenda.
Challenges, triggers and initiators of climate policies and implications for policy formulation
(2020)
This paper starts from the premise that Western states are connected to some of the harms refugees suffer from. It specifically focuses on the harm of acts of misrecognition and its relation to epistemic injustice that refugees suffer from in refugee camps, in detention centers, and during their desperate attempts to find refuge. The paper discusses the relation between hermeneutical injustice and acts of misrecognition, showing that these two phenomena are interconnected and that acts of misrecognition are particularly damaging when (a) they stretch over different contexts, leaving us without or with very few safe spaces, and (b) they dislocate us, leaving us without a community to turn to. The paper then considers the ways in which refugees experience acts of misrecognition and suffer from hermeneutical injustice, using the case of unaccompanied children at the well-known and overcrowded camp Moria in Greece, the case of unsafe detention centers in Libya, and the case of the denial to assistance on the Mediterranean and the resulting pushbacks from international waters to Libya as well as the preventable drowning of refugees in the Mediterranean to illustrate the arguments. Finally, the paper argues for specific duties toward refugees that result from the prior arguments on misrecognition and hermeneutical injustice.
This study utilizes cross-country survey data to analyze differences in attitudes toward cryptocurrency as an alternative to traditional money issued by a central bank. Particularly, we investigate women’s general attitude toward cryptocurrency systems. Results suggest that women invest less into cryptocurrency, show less interest in the future cryptocurrency investment, and see less economic potential in these systems than men do. Further evidence shows that these attitudes are directly connected with lower literacy in cryptocurrency systems. These findings support theory on gender differences in investment behavior. We contribute to the existing literature by conducting a cross-country survey on cryptocurrency attitudes in Europe and Asia, and hence show that this gender effect is robust across these cultures.
Celtic and Afro-Asiatic
(2007)
Extract: [...]It is not remarkable that structural similarities between the Insular Celtic and some Afro-Asiatic1 languages continue to exert a fascination on many people. Research into any language may be enlightening with regard to the understanding of all languages, and languages that show similar features are particularly likely to provide useful information. It is remarkable that the structural similarities between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic languages continue to be interpreted as diagnostic of some sort of special relationship between them; some sort of affinity or mutual affiliation that goes beyond the fact that they are two groups of human languages. This paper investigates again the fallacious nature of the arguments for the Afro-Asiatic/Insular Celtic contact theory (henceforth AA/IC contact theory). It takes its point of departure from Gensler (1993). That work is as yet unpublished, but has had considerable resonance. Such statements as the following indicate the importance that has been attached to the work: “After the studies of Morris-Jones, Pokorny, Wagner2 and Gensler it seems impossible to deny the special links between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic” (Jongeling 2000:64). And the ideas in question have been propagated in the popular scientific press,3 with the usual corollary that it is these ideas that are perceived by the interested but non-specialist public as being at the cutting edge of sound new research, when in fact they may simply be recycled ideas of a discredited theory. For these reasons it is appropriate to subject Gensler’s unpublished work to detailed critique.4 In particular, with regard to the twenty features of affinity between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic which Gensler investigated, it will be shown (yet again, in some cases): [...]
Education
(2019)
Vives emphasizes needlework as an appropriate occupation for all women, even for ‘a princess or a queen’. A wide variety of schools run by individual tradesmen or women offered instruction in certain fields, such as writing and calculus, while schools erected or licensed by the authorities concentrated on religious education. A large group of orphanages founded during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries provided a sound education for boys and girls. Authorities, parents and educational thinkers of the time were much less concerned with girls’ education than with that of boys. Private tutoring at home concentrated on the same subjects but, when boys were instructed at home, some girls had a chance to participate in a more academically oriented education. In most educational settings, be it at day schools, boarding schools or in private homes, teachers, mothers and governesses were expected to raise good housewives, pious mothers and obedient spouses.
Accountability is one of the most widely discussed concepts of public administration research and teaching in the last decade. But why is this case? Obviously accountability is, like its counterpart transparency, a “magic concept”, and an indispensable part of the prominent and omnipresent discourse on “good governance” as well as a significant element in debates about public sector reform. The same holds true for performance, which has been a magic and contested concept ever since New Public Management (NPM) entered the discourse about “modern” processes and structures of the public sector. But the third term in the title of this paper, legitimacy, even though it is one of the basic concepts of political science and democracy and is at the heart of Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy, has been surprisingly absent from current debates about the challenges of modern public administration, and for that sake also about the future of the welfare state. This chapter argues that different concepts of legitimacy lie at the heart of most debates about accountability and performance (input, output and throughput legitimacy), and that a better understanding of the relationships between accountability, performance and legitimacy can clarify some of the puzzles of contemporary research.
Emmanuel Kant asked three important questions which will always be with us: What can we know? What should we do? What may we hope for? These three key existentialist questions are, of course, also relevant for a reflection on the future of Public Administration: What can we know, as researchers in the field of Public Administration, about our object of public administration? What should we do as researchers and teachers to make sure we remain part of a solution and to guarantee that we are ahead of reality and its future problems? What kind of improvement (or not) may we hope for a public sector in an increasingly complex society? This chapter tries to explore some possible answers to these three important questions for our field of Public Administration. The background is our common project about ‘European Perspectives for Public Administration’ (EPPA), which we hope to establish as a continuous dialogue and discourse in the context of European Public Administration and the ‘European Group for Public Administration’ (EGPA).
Prosodic focus in Vietnamese
(2007)
This paper reports on pilot work on the expression of Information Structure in Vietnamese and argues that Focus in Vietnamese is exclusively expressed prosodically: there are no specific focus markers, and the language uses phonology to express intonational emphasis in similar ways to languages like English or German. The exploratory data indicates that (i) focus is prosodically expressed while word order remains constant, (ii) listeners show good recoverability of the intended focus structure, and (iii) that there is a trading relationship between several phonetic parameters (duration, f0, amplitude) involved to signal prosodic (acoustic) emphasis.
The chapter explores aspects of ‘memory games’ in postcommunist Poland vis-à-vis the country’s authoritarian communist past. In particular, it is interested in the populist moments of lustration and de-communization, and also after October 2015 when the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) won the parliamentary and presidential elections in Poland. The main argument is that even though legitimate considerations of lustration and de-communization play a role, a number of policies dealing with transitional justice are related to populist mobilization by the PiS. Against this background, the chapter discusses how far the transitional justice has been accompanied by the process of reframing the political memory about the guilt, suffering, and righteousness during communism. Populist legitimation aims at reconfiguring the public discourse on the transitional justice in a way that it is used to justify controversial public policies in tune with the interest of the groups currently in power, which present themselves as the true voice of the people. The core of the article deals with three main aspects of Polish memory games: (1) the meandering of lustration (mainly with regard to the position of the PiS/Law and Justice and PO/Civic Platform – the largest Polish political parties since 2005), (2) the lustration as the function of power, and (3) the role of the Institute of National Remembrance as a case of institutionalized memory games.
Dispersing the fog
(2020)
Countries in the Middle East generally fare poorly in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. One of the biggest challenges for the anti-corruption-regime in the Middle East are the many forms of corruption that are not being recognised as such on the local level, if assessed against a culturally relativistic benchmark. Our paper seeks to establish a unifying ground by providing a functional analysis of corruption which is both, normatively guiding and culturally sensitive. We demarcate our work as follows: (1) our reference point will be the phenomenon of institutional corruption, whereas (2) our working definition of corruption will conceive of corruption as a violation of role-specific norms that is motivated by the role-occupier’s private motives. In an attempt to offer a comprehensive approach, corruption will be viewed on two differing levels. On the external level, we will begin with an investigation of features within a norm-order that typically instantiate corruption. We will argue that corruption is externally conditioned by an authority’s inability to enforce and (re)establish the norms of conduct that ought to be action-guiding in office. This changes the expectation-structure within a norm-order and erodes public trust in the authorities, giving rise to willing perpetrators. Complementing this, the internal level of our framework will emphasize the motivational deficits of corrupt acts. It will be argued that this deficit can typically be found in societies that lack civic virtues. This, we suspect, is the functional reason why corrupt societies have such a hard time to overcome the problem: they lack both features and are, as a consequence, caught in a vicious circle as they struggle to strengthen civil society and consolidate institutional structures – whereas corruption increasingly disappears from the radar as it becomes accepted reality.