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Ghana’s local government system has been subject to various reform attempts which all involved some sort of decentralisation. This article tries to link decentralisation to changing national policy frames and the various governments’ need to maintain political control. Consequently, decentralisation becomes a dependent variable of the so called bureaucratic development state. After a brief discussion of the colonial and post-colonial local government system in Ghana, emphasis is placed on the crisis of the post colonial state and the emergence of a new local government system in 1988 - which was successfully transformed into the administrative system of Ghana’s 4th republic after 1992. Local participation has been substantially improved an sustained by the introduction of the District Assemblies Common Fund in 1993 which transfers 5% of the national tax income to the districts.
The author shows the strong relation between political developments, frontiers and their graphical representation on maps. Human rights, economic globalisation and the European integration process do change national policy and erode classical border lines. Still today, maps with lines and colours as their main graphic elements represent the world of the 19th century with separate national states in atlases, schoolbooks and electronic media. The main argument of the article insists on stressing the political character of maps and showing the contradiction between the cartographic picture of the world and the recent international transformations. The author concludes with the question of whether maps can reproduce these new developments at all.
Efficiency is central to understanding the communicative and cognitive underpinnings of language. However, efficiency management is a complex mechanism in which different efficiency effects-such as articulatory, processing and planning ease, mental accessibility, and informativity, online and offline efficiency effects-conspire to yield the coding of linguistic signs. While we do not yet exactly understand the interactional mechanism of these different effects, we argue that universal attractors are an important component of any dynamic theory of efficiency that would be aimed at predicting efficiency effects across languages. Attractors are defined as universal states around which language evolution revolves. Methodologically, we approach efficiency from a cross-linguistic perspective on the basis of a world-wide sample of 383 languages from 53 families, balancing all six macro-areas (Eurasia, North and South America, Australia, Africa, and Oceania). We explore the grammatical domain of verbal person-number subject indexes. We claim that there is an attractor state in this domain to which languages tend to develop and tend not to leave if they happen to comply with the attractor in their earlier stages of evolution. The attractor is characterized by different lengths for each person and number combination, structured along Zipf's predictions. Moreover, the attractor strongly prefers non-compositional, cumulative coding of person and number. On the basis of these and other properties of the attractor, we conclude that there are two domains in which efficiency pressures are most powerful: strive towards less processing and articulatory effort. The latter, however, is overridden by constant information flow. Strive towards lower lexicon complexity and memory costs are weaker efficiency pressures for this grammatical category due to its order of frequency.
Value research has a long and extensive history of theoretical definitions and empirical investigations using large scale quantitative surveys. However, the way the general population understands, defines, and relates to the concept of values, and how these views vary across individuals is seldom addressed. The present study examined subjective interpretations of the term through focus group interviews, and reports on the development of a Value Conceptualisation Scale (VCS) that distinguishes six dimensions of different views on values: normativity, relevance, validity, stability, consistency, and awareness. Focus group interviews (n = 38) as well as several surveys (n = 100, n = 1519, n = 903, n = 94) were used to develop, refine, and test the scale in terms of response variety, temporal stability, as well as convergent and discriminant validity. These systematic results show that views on values do indeed vary significantly between participants. Correlations with dogmatism, preference for consistency, and metacognition were found for corresponding dimensions. The VCS provides an original measure, which enables future research to explore this variation on the conceptualisation of values.
Historical narratives play an important role in constructing contemporary notions of citizenship. They are sites on which ideas of the nation are not only reaffirmed but also contested and reframed. In contemporary Germany, dominant narratives of the country’s modern history habitually focus on the legacy of the Third Reich and tend to marginalize the country’s rich and highly complex histories of immigration. The article addresses this commemorative void in relation to Berlin’s urban landscape. It explores how the city’s multilayered architecture provides locations for the articulation of marginal memories—and hence sites of urban citizenship—that are often denied to immigrant communities on a national scale. Through a detailed examination of a small celebration in 1965 that marked the anniversary of the founding of the modern Turkish republic, the article engages with the layers of history that coalesce around such sites in Berlin.
As research on sexual aggression has been growing, methodological issues in assessing prevalence rates have received increased attention. Building on work by Abbey and colleagues about effects of question format, participants in this study (1,253; 621 female; 632 male) were randomly assigned to one of two versions of the Sexual Aggression and Victimization Scale (SAV-S). In Version 1, the coercive tactic (use/threat of physical force, exploitation of the inability to resist, verbal pressure) was presented first, and sexual acts (sexual touch, attempted and completed sexual intercourse, other sexual acts) were presented as subsequent questions. In Version 2, sexual acts were presented first, and coercive tactics as subsequent questions. No version effects emerged for overall perpetration rates reported by men and women. The overall victimization rate across all items was significantly higher in the tactic-first than in the sexual-act-first conditions for women, but not for men. Classifying participants by their most severe experience of sexual victimization showed that fewer women were in the nonvictim category and more men were in the nonconsensual sexual contact category when the coercive tactic was presented first. Sexual experience background did not moderate the findings. The implications for the measurement of self-reported sexual aggression victimization and perpetration are discussed.
In Turkey, there is a shortage of studies on the prevalence of sexual aggression among young adults. The present study examined sexual aggression victimization and perpetration since the age of 15 in a convenience sample of N = 1,376 college students (886 women) from four public universities in Ankara, Turkey. Prevalence rates for different coercive strategies, victim-perpetrator constellations, and sexual acts were measured with a Turkish version of the Sexual Aggression and Victimization Scale (SAV-S). Overall, 77.6% of women and 65.5% of men reported at least one instance of sexual aggression victimization, and 28.9% of men and 14.2% of women reported at least one instance of sexual aggression perpetration. Prevalence rates of sexual aggression victimization and perpetration were highest for current or former partners, followed by acquaintances/friends and strangers. Alcohol was involved in a substantial proportion of the reported incidents. The findings are the first to provide systematic evidence on sexual aggression perpetration and victimization among college students in Turkey, including both women and men.
The article explores Europeanisation as an effect of European political integration, a process driven by struggles over the legitimate political and social order that is to prevail in Europe. Firstly, an analytic framework is constructed, drawing on insights from Pierre Bourdieu’s work on similar struggles over nation-stateness. Secondly, the mechanisms identified are used to assess the role played by economic experts and expertise in the process of European political integration. It is argued that concepts arising from economic disciplines, agents educated in economics, and practising economic professionals influence European political integration and have benefited from Europeanisation initiated by this process. Special emphasis is placed on strategies of integrating Europe by law or by market, on governing Europe using economic expertise, on the role played by economic academia in researching and objectifying Europe, and on staffing European institutions with economists.
The security policy of Pakistan is aimed at a reduction of nuclear threats in the South Asian region. It is only natural, that a state, whose national security is endangered by a mighty neighbor, will have to strengthen its defense capacities. Unfortunately, the effective collective measures to prevent and to remove threats to peace and international security as laid down in the Charter of the United Nations prove to be an unreliable promise. Ever since India carried out its first nuclear tests in 1974, Pakistan has been forced into a race to catch up with the capabilities if its neighbor. Nevertheless, Pakistan chose a minimalist approach and refrained from converting its nuclear capabilities into weapon systems. Pakistan is against an arms race in the South Asian region, and opposes the concept of first use of nuclear weapons. To ensure lasting peace, a common vision on disarmament is necessary.
The comprehensive transformation after the breakdown of communist rule was also reflected in a profound change in national policies. The dominating approach in the days of the old regime were grounded in the concept of a single nation state. The years since 1989 witnessed a rise of new democratic attitudes towards national and ethnic minorities. National minorities make up 3 to 4% of the population. Their total number is estimated to be approximately 1.0 to 1.3 Million people. Contemporary national policy rejects the principle of assimilation (polonization) of national and ethnic minorities while supporting their integration.
Über kaum ein Thema werden so hitzige Debatten geführt wie über Geschlechtsidentität. Das Wissen darum, dass Gender sozial konstruiert ist, wird von Anti-Gender Aktivist*innen häufig als ‚Gender-Ideologie‘ bezeichnet und ruft heftige Gegenreaktionen hervor. Dies gilt nicht nur in Deutschland – sondern länderübergreifend. Auffällig viele der transnationalen Anti- Gender Mobilisierungen der letzten 20 Jahre finden bezogen auf Bildungseinrichtungen statt. Dieser Beitrag widmet sich der besonderen Rolle der Universität und der Wissenschaft für transnationale Anti-Gender Diskurse. Anhand verschiedener Beispiele zeige ich auf, dass das Verhältnis zwischen Anti-Gender Bewegungen und Wissenschaft geprägt ist von widersprüchlichen Dynamiken, von Abgrenzung aber auch Imitation. In ihrem Zusammenspiel wirken beide Dynamiken mobilisierend und tragen zum Erstarken regressiver Rollenbilder und antidemokratischer rechter Bewegungen in der breiteren Gesellschaft bei. Der letzte Teil des Beitrags ruft daher zu mehr Selbstreflexion der wissenschaftlichen Praxis auf Grundlage feministischer und intersektionaler Ansätze auf.
The economic reforms in the German Democratic Republic during the 60s, known as "New Economic System" (NES) or "Economic System of Socialism" (ESS) have been characterised by historians as truly technocratic. What is often not known is the fact, that during the first debate on economic reform in Eastern Germany in 1954-1958 the idea of democratic reform was prominent thanks to the role and writing of the outstanding GAR economist Fritz Behrens, who favoured a diminished role of the state in the economy and the self-rule of the workers in the factories. Behrens and his followers were denounced by party leader Walter Ulbricht as "revisionist". Together with his economic advisor, Wolfgang Berger, originally a scholar of Behrens’, he started the NES and ESS in the 60s. Behrens remained barred from the management of the reform, in which Berger plaid a prominent role. When Behrens began again to publish his demands for a democratic reform in 1967, thus intervening in the progress of the reform, he was forced to leave his academic job into retirement. In 1971, Erich Honekker succeeded Ulbricht. The economic reform was stopped. And Berger lost his job, too.
While at the time of Goethe, Turkey and other parts of the world seemed to be far away. Today’s Germany is confronted with the pressure of globalization. With regard to environmental issues or the threat of terrorism, international co-operation and combined efforts are strongly demanded. Unfortunately, the German higher education system is not prepared to face these challenges. The article calls for the education of an elite at German universities, which is fit to work in national as well in international institutions. The author presents the Master’s of International Relations coursework at the Technical University of Dresden.
Already at the beginning of the fifties on the initiative of Italy, negotiations began between the Italian and German governments for the recruitment of migrant-workers, which ended in 1955 with a bilateral agreement between the two countries. Through this recruitment policy and because of the labour-market (Industry and Building) the Italian migration was composed prevalently of men. Female immigration happened in the setting of family reunification and less as an independent movement project. After years of stagnation of italian emigration in the eighties it may also be noted that, since the early nineties, there has been a revival of immigration to Germany. This and modernisation processes in Italy changed the gender composition of the Italian immigration flow to Germany: the distance between male and female immigration is decreasing. A peculiarity of the Italians in Germany is the low occupational participation of women in comparison with other women from EU countries. However, we could observe regional differences, which depend on the migration typologies and the dominating economic structure in the areas. The paper will analyse this different aspects (immigration-processes, migrant-typologies and labour-market participation) by female Italian migrants.
Since 1989 the German-Czech relationship has been burdened by the problem of a just assessment of World War II and the following forced transfer of the Sudeten Germans. Why are democrats on both sides who acknowledge the same values and principles unable to reach an agreement about crucial events in the past? The political and legal differences imply a moral dissent which is not being discussed systematically. The article tries to investigate the deficits of the moral arguments on both sides.
High-throughput proteomics approaches have resulted in large-scale protein–protein interaction (PPI) networks that have been employed for the prediction of protein complexes. However, PPI networks contain false-positive as well as false-negative PPIs that affect the protein complex prediction algorithms. To address this issue, here we propose an algorithm called CUBCO+ that: (1) employs GO semantic similarity to retain only biologically relevant interactions with a high similarity score, (2) based on link prediction approaches, scores the false-negative edges, and (3) incorporates the resulting scores to predict protein complexes. Through comprehensive analyses with PPIs from Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and Homo sapiens, we show that CUBCO+ performs as well as the approaches that predict protein complexes based on recently introduced graph partitions into biclique spanned subgraphs and outperforms the other state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, we illustrate that in combination with GO semantic similarity, CUBCO+ enables us to predict more accurate protein complexes in 36% of the cases in comparison to CUBCO as its predecessor.
This essay takes an Anglophone Cultural Studies approach to reflect on the interdependence among as well as the individual (implicit) impact of the elements constituting our (embodied) power structures. These are, e.g., bodily experience/s such as shame and fear, everyday and institutional discourses and practices, but also manifestations of differences and particularities that we transform into phenomena such as “norms”, “binary systems” and “binary organisations”. The analysis of seemingly cyclic “Othering processes” and patterns of violence shows how people who identify as trans*, inter*, or non-binary have to live through and embody epistemological, emotional, and/or physical violence. At the same time, the descriptions illustrate numberless potential forms of resistance and change.
The Bush Administration supported, earlier than some West European NATO partners, the reunification of the two German states. When the crisis of the political system in East Germany escalated in 1989, the US-government tried to link the support for far-reaching democratic reforms with a rapid involvement of all NATO members in the unification strategy of the Bonn government. For the Bush administration, the most complicated task was to convince the Moscow leadership that a loss of the GDR as a strategic domain in the Central Europe, and NATO membership of a united Germany, would not undermine security interests of the Soviet Union. At the End of the East-West-Conflict, German unification was in full accordance with the global strategic interests of the United States.
In August 1997 the Australian Government released the first White Paper ever issued on its foreign policy. As one important element, this essay tries to delineate the pro Asia-Pacific shift of Australia’s international economic and security orientations, particularly since the early 1970s - a foreign policy which could rest upon an certain bipartisan basis. The recently launched White Paper represents a new reflection upon Australia’s national interests and a soft relativisation of the strong emphasis on regional and multilateral foreign policy performances of former governments. According to a least the author’s judgement, the fundamental legacy of Australia’s international relations remain: a certain (a definite?) contradiction between the country’s predominant cultural and ethnic (!) heritage on the one hand and its geographical location on the other.
Confronted with new dimensions of international problems, Germany needs a new foreign policy elite that is able to deal with the pending challenges in world politics. Therefore, the author points out, it is necessary to reorganize the German way to recruit personal for international tasks and the manner of its education at German universities. Furthermore, the German society should revise its general hostile attitude towards the elite and recognize it as an important driving force in politics.