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This chapter tackles the analysis and function of Article 43 of the 1951 Convention and Article VIII of the 1967 Protocol. It explains that a multilateral treaty can be enforced when met with necessary conditions, such as the Article 24 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT). The provision also regulates the 1951 Convention's entry into force of States' ratification or accession. The chapter notes that the 1967 Protocol entered into force after Sweden deposited its instrument of accession. It elaborates on the specific details needed for the ratification or accession prior to the entry into force.
Using novel longitudinal data, this paper studies the short- and medium-term effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 on social trust of adolescents in Germany. Comparing adolescents who responded to our survey shortly before the start of the war with those who responded shortly after the conflict began and applying difference-in-differences (DiD) models over time, we find a significant decline in the outcome after the war started. These findings provide new evidence on how armed conflicts influence social trust and well-being among young people in a country not directly involved in the war.
This chapter looks into the 1951 Convention's Article 39 and the 1967 Protocol's Article V. In 2000, the Secretary-General identified the 1951 Convention as belonging to a core group of 25 multilateral treaties representative of the key objectives of the UN and the spirit of its Charter. Additionally, the rules found in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) apply to the 1951 Convention as a matter of customary international law. On the other hand, the 1967 Protocol does not amend the 1951 Convention but binds its parties to observe the substantive provisions. The chapter cites that the 1967 Protocol constitutes an independent and complete international instrument that is open not only to the States parties to the 1951 Convention.
Article 34 1951 Convention
(2024)
This chapter tackles the features and historical development of the 1951 Convention's Article 34. It explains the function of the provision, which primarily focuses on requesting Contracting States to facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of refugees. Moreover, the provision forms the legal bases for local integration and naturalization as some of the traditional durable solutions to refugeehood. The soft obligation imposed by Article 34 primarily focuses on the long-term solution by naturalization. The chapter then elaborates on the balance between local integration, naturalization, and voluntary return after it was disrupted due to the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.
Article 1 E 1951 Convention
(2024)
This chapter elaborates on the function of Article 1 E of the 1951 Convention, which was originally aimed at German refugees. It refers to a special group of people who qualify for refugee status but enjoy the rights of national citizens despite their lack of formal citizenship. The article's object and purpose revolve around excluding persons from refugee protection who do not need any international protection since they have the status of national citizens. Additionally, access to refugee status is excluded ipso facto because the individual may resort to effective protection similar to that of citizenship upon being admitted to the country of sojourn. The chapter explains how Article 1 E is an integral part of the balanced system of international refugee protection prescribed by the Convention.
This chapter focuses on the features of Article 1's paragraph 1 of the 1951 Convention. The article primarily determines the scope of application of the Convention's ratione personae while outlining the basis of the protection of refugees. Additionally, Article 1 addresses the concerns surrounding the inclusion, cessation, and exclusion of refugees. The chapter then tackles the historical development of the article by considering the instruments used prior to the 1951 Convention. It also cites that the Constitution of the International Refugee Organization appears to contain an ambiguity as to how the refugee notion was perceived, so refugees only became the IRO Constitution's concern when they have valid objections to returning to their home country.
The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees adopted on 28 July 1951 in Geneva provides the most comprehensive codification of the rights of refugees yet attempted. Consolidating previous international instruments relating to refugees, the 1951 Convention with its 1967 Protocol marks a cornerstone in the development of international refugee law. At present, there are 144 States Parties to one or both of these instruments, expressing a worldwide consensus on the definition of the term refugee and the fundamental rights to be granted to refugees. These facts demonstrate and underline the extraordinary significance of these instruments as the indispensable legal basis of international refugee law. This Commentary provides for a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol on an article-by-article basis, exposing the interrelationship between the different articles and discussing the latest developments in international refugee law. In addition, several thematic contributions analyse questions of international refugee law which are of general significance, such as regional developments and the relationship between refugee law and the law of the sea.
Workplace friendships
(2023)
Workplace friendships, i.e., when work colleagues are also friends, are a widespread phenomenon in organizations which has attracted increasing research interest in recent decades. Numerous studies have investigated consequences of workplace friendships and found positive outcomes, such as increased employee job satisfaction or organizational performance, as well as negative outcomes, such as decreased knowledge-sharing between different friendship cliques. Other studies have examined what shapes workplace friendships, focusing on determinants such as personality or the spatial composition of organizations. Finally, an increasing number of studies focus on multiplex workplace friendships, where employees who are friends are also linked by a specific work-focused relationship. In this chapter, we first take stock of the literature on workplace friendships by providing an overview of their antecedents and consequences at the individual, the group, and the organizational level, and review the smaller body of research on multiplex workplace friendships. Second, we critically discuss practical implications of workplace friendships, focusing on their relevance to three current challenges for employees and organizations: the increase in virtual work, social inequalities in organizations, and the increased overlap of professional and private life. Finally, we provide recommendations for organizations on how to address these challenges and effectively manage workplace friendships.
Breaking down barriers
(2024)
Many researchers hesitate to provide full access to their datasets due to a lack of knowledge about research data management (RDM) tools and perceived fears, such as losing the value of one's own data. Existing tools and approaches often do not take into account these fears and missing knowledge. In this study, we examined how conversational agents (CAs) can provide a natural way of guidance through RDM processes and nudge researchers towards more data sharing. This work offers an online experiment in which researchers interacted with a CA on a self-developed RDM platform and a survey on participants’ data sharing behavior. Our findings indicate that the presence of a guiding and enlightening CA on an RDM platform has a constructive influence on both the intention to share data and the actual behavior of data sharing. Notably, individual factors do not appear to impede or hinder this effect.
Social media constitute an important arena for public debates and steady interchange of issues relevant to society. To boost their reputation, commercial organizations also engage in political, social, or environmental debates on social media. To engage in this type of digital activism, organizations increasingly utilize the social media profiles of executive employees and other brand ambassadors. However, the relationship between brand ambassadors’ digital activism and corporate reputation is only vaguely understood. The results of a qualitative inquiry suggest that digital activism via brand ambassadors can be risky (e.g., creating additional surface for firestorms, financial loss) and rewarding (e.g., emitting authenticity, employing ‘megaphones’ for industry change) at the same time. The paper informs both scholarship and practitioners about strategic trade-offs that need to be considered when employing brand ambassadors for digital activism.
Disinformation campaigns spread rapidly through social media and can cause serious harm, especially in crisis situations, ranging from confusion about how to act to a loss of trust in government institutions. Therefore, the prevention of digital disinformation campaigns represents an important research topic. However, previous research in the field of information systems focused on the technical possibilities to detect and combat disinformation, while ethical and legal perspectives have been neglected so far. In this article, we synthesize previous information systems literature on disinformation prevention measures and discuss these measures from an ethical and legal perspective. We conclude by proposing questions for future research on the prevention of disinformation campaigns from an IS, ethical, and legal perspective. In doing so, we contribute to a balanced discussion on the prevention of digital disinformation campaigns that equally considers technical, ethical, and legal issues, and encourage increased interdisciplinary collaboration in future research.
Between reality & fantasy
(2023)
Synthetische Medien ermöglichen die zunehmend automatisierte Erstellung virtueller Influencer, von denen bereits einige Millionen Follower in sozialen Medien gewonnen haben. Unter der Leitung von Professor Stefan Stieglitz und Sünje Clausen (Universität Potsdam) und in Kooperation mit Sanofi hat ein Forschungsprojekt untersucht, wie computergenerierten Charaktere für die Influencer-Kommunikation im Unternehmensumfeld genutzt werden können. Nähere Informationen zu den Forschungsergebnissen können in der Communication Insights nachgelesen werden: eine kurze Einführung in die Influencer-Kommunikation, potenziellen Vorteile als auch Herausforderungen von virtuellen Influencern, Tipps für den Prozess der Gestaltung und Nutzung eines virtuellen Influencers.
What does the future hold for corporate communications? The Communications Trend Radar is an applied research project. On an annual basis, it identifies relevant trends for corporate communications from the fields of society, management, and technology. The research team at the University of Potsdam (Professor Stefan Stieglitz, Sünje Clausen, MS.) and Leipzig University (Professor Ansgar Zerfass, Dr Michelle Wloka) identified the following trends for 2024: Information Inflation, AI Literacy, Workforce Shift, Content Integrity, Decoding Humans. More information on the trends can be found in the Communications Trend Radar Report 2024
Rankings have grown in importance in the last decades. This is particularly evident in, but not limited to, academia. In this paper, we propose a power analytical take on academic rankings as a transnational(izing) phenomenon. In doing so, we make two contributions. First, we develop a conceptual definition of rankings as consecratory institutions. After providing an overview of the most prominent types of rankings in the academic field and discussing the different forms they can take, we suggest that rankings operate through subjectivation, zero-sum comparisons, quantification, publication and generating a doxical belief. Second, we propose that rankings fulfil a strategic double function. As a particularly momentous consecratory institution, rankings propel power shifts in the academic field and beyond by preferring (and being pushed by) specific academic milieus, types of agents, paradigms, and strategies. As a dispositif, rankings operate at the intersection of different fields, open academic fields up for a lay audience and advance processes of transnationalization by facilitating new modes of governance for hubs of state institutions, private corporations, media corporations, and data providers. Concluding, we argue that the consecration and dispositif functions rely on some basic principles of the practical functioning of rankings.
Over the last few decades, a network of misogynist blogs, websites, wikis, and forums has developed, where users share their bigoted, sexist, and toxic views of society in general and masculinity and femininity in particular. This chapter outlines conceptual framework of hegemonic and hybrid masculinity. It provides a brief overview of the historical development of the manosphere and its various configurations and present our analysis of the masculinities performed by the five groups of the manosphere. The concept of hegemonic masculinity was articulated by Connell and colleagues in the 1980s as “the pattern of practice that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue.” Prior to the advent of the manosphere, an online iteration of male supremacist mobilizations, both Men’s Rights Activists and Pick-up artists developed as offline movements in the 1970s. MRAs perceive their respective societies as inherently stacked against men. This chapter analyses the masculinities of the manosphere and how they “repudiat[e] and reif[y]” hegemonic masculinity and male supremacism.
The power of opposition
(2022)
Proposing a novel way to look at the consolidation of democratic regimes, this book presents important theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of democratic consolidation, legislative organization, and public opinion.
Theoretically, Simone Wegmann brings legislatures into focus as the main body representing both winners and losers of democratic elections. Empirically, Wegmann shows that the degree of policy-making power of opposition players varies considerably between countries. Using survey data from the CSES, the ESS, and the LAPOP and systematically analyzing more than 50 legislatures across the world and the specific rights they grant to opposition players during the policy-making process, Wegmann demonstrates that neglecting the curial role of the legislature in a democratic setting can only lead to an incomplete assessment of the importance of institutions for democratic consolidation.
The Power of Opposition will be of great interest to scholars of comparative politics, especially those working on questions related to legislative organization, democratic consolidation, and/or public opinion.
Don’t settle for less
(2021)
Agricultural production worldwide has been increasing in the last decades at a very fast pace and with it the waste generation. Livestock activities are one of the largest producers of residues in the agricultural sector and contribute greatly to climate change. The present chapter gives an introduction and an in-depth analysis of the waste management of livestock for the conversion in a circular agriculture and economy based on research and experience in the sector conducted in the last decades. The conversion of animal waste into energy generation is an opportunity for farmers to obtain additional economic benefits, while contributing to the environment by preventing the release of GHGs into the atmosphere. The use of animal waste for energy generation through anaerobic digestion is a progressive technique and is being widely accepted in Europe, where Germany is the leading country in the use of biogas plants for energy production among others in the European Union. Economically speaking, the livestock industry faces the challenge of converting its production into a clean and more profitable production. The goal of this chapter is to analyze the economic benefit as well as the environmental contribution and future challenges of the use of livestock waste in the biorefineries sector from different perspectives, based on an intensive literature review. This review is accompanied by a geospatial analysis component, mapping biogas reactor hotspots and clusters in Germany, by means of methods of spatial statistics as analysis methods as kernel density estimations (KDE) and K-means clustering, based on volunteer geographic data. The applied methods easily can be transferred to other regions and allow a quick macroscopic overview over existing biogas reactors; furthermore, an identification of cluster and hotspots with a high biogas potential, that in a subsequent step can be analyzed in depth in larger scales.
Gender at the crossroads
(2023)
Since the early 2000s, the United Nations (UN) global counterterrorism architecture has seen significant changes towards increased multilateralism, a focus on prevention, and inter-institutional coordination across the UN’s three pillars of work. Throughout this reform process, gender aspects have increasingly become presented as a “cross-cutting” theme. In this article, I investigate the role of gender in the UN’s counterterrorism reform process at the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, or “triple nexus”, from a feminist institutionalist perspective. I conduct a feminist discourse analysis of the counterterrorism discourses of three UN entities, which represent the different UN pillars of peace and security (DPO), development (UNDP), and humanitarianism and human rights (OHCHR). The article examines the role of gender in the inter-institutional reform process by focusing on the changes, overlaps and differences in the discursive production of gender in the entities’ counterterrorism agendas over time and in two recent UN counterterrorism conferences. I find that gendered dynamics of nested newness and institutional layering have played an essential role both as a justification for the involvement of individual entities in counterterrorism and as a vehicle for inter-institutional cooperation and struggle for discursive power.
This book brings together a variety of innovative perspectives on the inclusion of gender in the governance of (counter-)terrorism and violent extremism.
Several global governance initiatives launched in recent years have explicitly sought to integrate concern for gender equality and gendered harms into efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism (CT/CVE). As a result, commitments to gender-sensitivity and gender equality in international and regional CT/CVE initiatives, in national action plans and at the level of civil society programming, ´have become a common aspect of the multilevel governance of terrorism and violent extremism. In light of these developments, there is a need for more systematic analysis of how concerns about gender are being incorporated in the governance of (counter-)terrorism and violent extremism and how it has affected (gendered) practices and power relations in counterterrorism policy-making and implementation.
Ranging from the processes of global and regional integration of gender into the governance of terrorism, via the impact of the shift on government responses to the return of foreign fighters, to state and civil society-led CVE programming and academic discussions, the essays engage with the origins and dynamics behind recent shifts which bring gender to the forefront of the governance of terrorism. This book will be of great value to researchers and scholars interested in gender, governance and terrorism.
The chapters in this book were originally published in Critical Studies on Terrorism.
Atwood (2022) analyzes the effects of the 1963 U.S. measles vaccination on longrun labor market outcomes, using a generalized difference-in-differences approach. We reproduce the results of this paper and perform a battery of robustness checks. Overall, we confirm that the measles vaccination had positive labor market effects. While the negative effect on the likelihood of living in poverty and the positive effect on the probability of being employed are very robust across the different specifications, the headline estimate-the effect on earnings-is more sensitive to the exclusion of certain regions and survey years.
From laggards to leaders
(2021)
The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change embraces the participation of non-state actors in a separate governance track – the ‘Non-state actor zone for global action’ (nazca) – that runs alongside the formal track of unfccc negotiations and the implementation of the Paris Agreement by State Parties through ‘nationally determined contributions’. unfccc Secretariat is entrusted with orchestrating non-state global and transnational initiatives, partnerships and networks. The involvement of non-state actors in the implementation of the Paris Agreement helps to address an action gap by countries that are unable or unwilling to implement ambitious ndcs.
However, the increased prominence of initiatives driven by non-state actors also increases their direct and indirect influence on processes and rules which raises a number of questions with regards to the legitimacy of action and the democratic deficit of the global climate regime. Balancing legitimacy with effectiveness requires non-state initiatives to ensure transparent and inclusive governance, and accountability towards progress against their goals and pledges.
Despite its encouragement towards private initiatives, the Paris Agreement creates surprisingly little regulatory space for non-state actors to gain hold. Neither are there measures that would link ndcs to nazca initiatives, nor are functional requirements such as transparency or reporting extended to non-state initiatives. While the Paris Agreement marks an important step towards harnessing private sector ability and ambition for climate action, more remains to be done to create a truly enabling framework for private action to strive and complement public efforts to address climate change.
The politics of fear
(2022)
From victims to activists
(2022)
The EU and its member countries have been laggards in using forest carbon to reduce EU emissions. The European Green Deal aims to change this. As part of its long-term emissions reductions, the EU aims to offset this by creating land-based carbon sinks, especially forest carbon sinks as well as carbon capture and storage. This chapter focuses on the role of forest carbon as part of the EU's climate policies towards achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It furthermore examines the European Commission's proposed forest strategy and its proposal for a revised LULUCF Regulation. The chapter shows that the logic of appropriateness dominates the European Commission's forest policies. Finally, the chapter makes policy recommendations on how the EU could credibly use long-term carbon sinks to achieve climate neutrality.
Long-term environmental policy remains a vexing puzzle of environmental policy. Following its definition, the author reviews the methods suitable for the study of long-term environmental policy and develops a typology of policy instruments to cope with these challenges. The concluding section offers five central research challenges to advance the study of long-term environmental policy.
Effectiveness
(2021)
Challenges, triggers and initiators of climate policies and implications for policy formulation
(2020)
Werner Krause and Christina Gahn argue that we need to pay more attention to how the media communicates the results of opinion polls to the public. Reporting methodological details, such as margins of error, can alter citizens’ vote choices on election day. This has important implications for elections around the world
The impact of civilian harm on strategic outcomes in war has been the subject of persistent debate. However, the literature has primarily focused on civilian casualties, thereby overlooking the targeting of civilian infrastructure, which is a recurrent phenomenon during war. This study fills this gap by examining the targeting of healthcare, one of the most indispensable infrastructures during war and peace time. We contend that attacks on medical facilities are distinct from direct violence against civilians. Because they are typically unrelated to military dynamics, the targeting of hospitals is a highly visible form and powerful signal of civilian victimization. To assess its effects, we analyze newly collected data on such attacks by pro-government forces and event data on combat activities in Northwest Syria (2017-2020). Applying a new approach for panel data analysis that combines matching methods with a difference-in-differences estimation, we examine the causal effect of counterinsurgent bombings on subsequent violent events. Distinguishing between regime-initiated and insurgent-initiated combat activities and their associated fatalities, we find that the targeting of hospitals increases insurgent violence. We supplement the quantitative analysis with unique qualitative evidence derived from interviews, which demonstrates that hospital bombings induce rebels to resist more fiercely through two mechanisms: intrinsic motivations and civilian pressure. The results have important implications for the effects of state-led violence and the strength of legal norms that protect noncombatants.
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 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.
Many prediction tasks can be done based on users’ trace data. This paper explores divergent and convergent thinking as person-related attributes and predicts them based on features gathered in an online course. We use the logfile data of a short Moodle course, combined with an image test (IMT), the Alternate Uses Task (AUT), the Remote Associates Test (RAT), and creative self-efficacy (CSE). Our results show that originality and elaboration metrics can be predicted with an accuracy of ~.7 in cross-validation, whereby predicting fluency and RAT scores perform worst. CSE items can be predicted with an accuracy of ~.45. The best performing model is a Random Forest Tree, where the features were reduced using a Linear Discriminant Analysis in advance. The promising results can help to adjust online courses to the learners’ needs based on their creative performances.
The devil in disguise
(2021)
Envy constitutes a serious issue on Social Networking Sites (SNSs), as this painful emotion can severely diminish individuals' well-being. With prior research mainly focusing on the affective consequences of envy in the SNS context, its behavioral consequences remain puzzling. While negative interactions among SNS users are an alarming issue, it remains unclear to which extent the harmful emotion of malicious envy contributes to these toxic dynamics. This study constitutes a first step in understanding malicious envy’s causal impact on negative interactions within the SNS sphere. Within an online experiment, we experimentally induce malicious envy and measure its immediate impact on users’ negative behavior towards other users. Our findings show that malicious envy seems to be an essential factor fueling negativity among SNS users and further illustrate that this effect is especially pronounced when users are provided an objective factor to mask their envy and justify their norm-violating negative behavior.
The metaverse is envisioned as a virtual shared space facilitated by emerging technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), big data, spatial computing, and digital twins (Allam et al., 2022; Dwivedi et al., 2022; Ravenscraft, 2022; Wiles, 2022). While still a nascent concept, the metaverse has the potential to “transform the physical world, as well as transport or extend physical activities to a virtual world” (Wiles, 2022). Big data technologies will also be essential in managing the enormous amounts of data created in the metaverse (Sun et al., 2022). Metaverse technologies can offer the public sector a host of benefits, such as simplified information exchange, stronger communication with citizens, better access to public services, or benefiting from a new virtual economy. Implementations are underway in several cities around the world (Geraghty et al., 2022). In this paper, we analyze metaverse opportunities for the public sector and explore their application in the context of Germany’s Federal Employment Agency. Based on an analysis of academic literature and practical examples, we create a capability map for potential metaverse business capabilities for different areas of the public sector (broadly defined). These include education (virtual training and simulation, digital campuses that offer not just online instruction but a holistic university campus experience, etc.), tourism (virtual travel to remote locations and museums, virtual festival participation, etc.), health (employee training – as for emergency situations, virtual simulations for patient treatment – for example, for depression or anxiety, etc.), military (virtual training to experience operational scenarios without being exposed to a real-world threats, practice strategic decision-making, or gain technical knowledge for operating and repairing equipment, etc.), administrative services (document processing, virtual consultations for citizens, etc.), judiciary (AI decision-making aids, virtual proceedings, etc.), public safety (virtual training for procedural issues, special operations, or unusual situations, etc.), emergency management (training for natural disasters, etc.), and city planning (visualization of future development projects and interactive feedback, traffic management, attraction gamification, etc.), among others. We further identify several metaverse application areas for Germany's Federal Employment Agency. These applications can help it realize the goals of the German government for digital transformation that enables faster, more effective, and innovative government services. They include training of employees, training of customers, and career coaching for customers. These applications can be implemented using interactive learning games with AI agents, virtual representations of the organizational spaces, and avatars interacting with each other in these spaces. Metaverse applications will both use big data (to design the virtual environments) and generate big data (from virtual interactions). Issues related to data availability, quality, storage, processing (and related computing power requirements), interoperability, sharing, privacy and security will need to be addressed in these emerging metaverse applications (Sun et al., 2022). Special attention is needed to understand the potential for power inequities (wealth inequity, algorithmic bias, digital exclusion) due to technologies such as VR (Egliston & Carter, 2021), harmful surveillance practices (Bibri & Allam, 2022), and undesirable user behavior or negative psychological impacts (Dwivedi et al., 2022). The results of this exploratory study can inform public sector organizations of emerging metaverse opportunities and enable them to develop plans for action as more of the metaverse technologies become a reality. While the metaverse body of research is still small and research agendas are only now starting to emerge (Dwivedi et al., 2022), this study offers a building block for future development and analysis of metaverse applications.
While school supervision structures in the German Länder were extensively reformed during the last decades, systematic analyses of these reforms are missing. This chapter contributes to this research gap by providing an overview of the implemented reforms of school supervision structures in the German Länder. The effects of these reforms are analysed in order to answer the question of whether a convergence of school supervision systems is a result of these reforms. In a first step, a distinction is made to identify system-changing reforms. Although a decrease of the number or a concentration on one school supervision system is not a result of the analysis, it is argued that there is a convergence of school supervision structures, as a clear trend against school supervision systems with lower school supervisory boards can be observed.
Immune to COVID?
(2021)