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Hazards and accessibility
(2018)
The assessment of natural hazards and risk has traditionally been built upon the estimation of threat maps, which are used to depict potential danger posed by a particular hazard throughout a given area. But when a hazard event strikes, infrastructure is a significant factor that can determine if the situation becomes a disaster. The vulnerability of the population in a region does not only depend on the area’s local threat, but also on the geographical accessibility of
the area. This makes threat maps by themselves insufficient for supporting real-time decision-making, especially for those tasks that involve the use of the road network, such as management of relief operations, aid distribution, or planning of evacuation routes, among others. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a multidisciplinary approach divided in two parts. First, data fusion of satellite-based threat data and open infrastructure data from OpenStreetMap, introducing a threat-based routing service. Second, the visualization of this data through cartographic generalization and schematization. This emphasizes critical areas along roads in a simple way and allows users to visually evaluate the impact natural hazards may have on infrastructure. We develop and illustrate this methodology with a case study of landslide threat for an area in Colombia.
Regulatory focus is a motivational construct that describes humans’ motivational orientation during goal pursuit. It is conceptualized as a chronic, trait-like, as well as a momentary, state-like orientation. Whereas there is a large number of measures to capture chronic regulatory focus, measures for its momentary assessment are only just emerging. This paper presents the development and validation of a measure of Momentary–Chronic Regulatory Focus. Our development incorporates the distinction between self-guide and reference-point definitions of regulatory focus. Ideals and ought striving are the promotion and prevention dimension in the self-guide system; gain and non-loss regulatory focus are the respective dimensions within the reference-point system. Three-survey-based studies test the structure, psychometric properties, and validity of the measure in its version to assess chronic regulatory focus (two samples of working participants, N = 389, N = 672; one student sample [time 1, N = 105; time 2, n = 91]). In two further studies, an experience sampling study with students (N = 84, k = 1649) and a daily-diary study with working individuals (N = 129, k = 1766), the measure was applied to assess momentary regulatory focus. Multilevel analyses test the momentary measure’s factorial structure, provide support for its sensitivity to capture within-person fluctuations, and provide evidence for concurrent construct validity.
Even though concerns about adverse distributional implications for the poor are one of the most important political challenges for carbon pricing, the existing literature reveals ambiguous results. For this reason, we assess the expected incidence of moderate carbon price increases for different income groups in 87 mostly low- and middle-income countries. Building on a consistent dataset and method, we find that for countries with per capita incomes of below USD 15,000 per year (at PPP-adjusted 2011 USD) carbon pricing has, on average, progressive distributional effects. We also develop a novel decomposition technique to show that distributional outcomes are primarily determined by differences among income groups in consumption patterns of energy, rather than of food, goods or services. We argue that an inverse U-shape relationship between energy expenditure shares and income explains why carbon pricing tends to be regressive in countries with relatively higher income. Since these countries are likely to have more financial resources and institutional capacities to deal with distributional issues, our findings suggest that mitigating climate change, raising domestic revenue and reducing economic inequality are not mutually exclusive, even in low- and middle-income countries.
The armed conflict in Afghanistan since 2001 has raised manifold questions pertaining to the humanitarian rules relative to the conduct of hostilities. In Afghanistan, as is often the case in so-called asymmetric conflicts, the geographical and temporal boundaries of the battlefield, and the distinction between civilians and fighters, are increasingly blurred. As a result, the risks for both civilians and soldiers operating in Afghanistan are high. The objective of this article is to assess whether - and if so how much - the armed conflict in Afghanistan has affected the application and interpretation of the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution - principles that form the core of legal rules pertaining to the conduct of hostilities.
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.
Coping, taming or solving
(2017)
One of the truisms of policy analysis is that policy problems are
rarely solved. As an ever-increasing number of policy issues are
identified as an inherently ill-structured and intractable type of
wicked problem, the question of what policy analysis sets out
to accomplish has emerged as more central than ever. If solving
wicked problems is beyond reach, research on wicked problems
needs to provide a clearer understanding of the alternatives.
The article identifies and explicates three distinguishable
strategies of problem governance: coping, taming and solving.
It shows that their intellectual premises and practical
implications clearly contrast in core respects. The article argues
that none of the identified strategies of problem governance is
invariably more suitable for dealing with wicked problems.
Rather than advocate for some universally applicable approach
to the governance of wicked problems, the article asks under
what conditions different ways of governing wicked problems
are analytically reasonable and normatively justified. It
concludes that a more systematic assessment of alternative
approaches of problem governance requires a reorientation of
the debate away from the conception of wicked problems as a
singular type toward the more focused analysis of different
dimensions of problem wickedness.
In October 2016, following a campaign led by Labour Peer Lord
Alfred Dubs, the first child asylum-seekers allowed entry to the UK
under new legislation (the ‘Dubs amendment’) arrived in England.
Their arrival was captured by a heavy media presence, and very
quickly doubts were raised by right-wing tabloids and politicians
about their age. In this article, I explore the arguments
underpinning the Dubs campaign and the media coverage of
the children’s arrival as a starting point for interrogating
representational practices around children who seek asylum. I
illustrate how the campaign was premised on a universal politics
of childhood that inadvertently laid down the terms on which
these children would be given protection, namely their innocence.
The universality of childhood fuels public sympathy for child
asylum-seekers, underlies the ‘child first, migrant second’
approach advocated by humanitarian organisations, and it was a
key argument in the ‘Dubs amendment’. Yet the campaign
highlights how representations of child asylum-seekers rely on
codes that operate to identify ‘unchildlike’ children. As I show, in
the context of the criminalisation of undocumented migrants‘,
childhood is no longer a stable category which guarantees
protection, but is subject to scrutiny and suspicion and can,
ultimately, be disproved.
Previous research informs us about facilitators of employees’ promotive voice. Yet little is known about what determines whether a specific idea for constructive change brought up by an employee will be approved or rejected by a supervisor. Drawing on interactionist theories of motivation and personality, we propose that a supervisor will be least likely to support an idea when it threatens the supervisor’s power motive, and when it is perceived to serve the employee’s own striving for power. The prosocial versus egoistic intentions attributed to the idea presenter are proposed to mediate the latter effect. We conducted three scenario-based studies in which supervisors evaluated fictitious ideas voiced by employees that – if implemented – would have power-related consequences for them as a supervisor. Results show that the higher a supervisors’ explicit power motive was, the less likely they were to support a power-threatening idea (Study 1, N = 60). Moreover, idea support was less likely when this idea was proposed by an employee that was described as high (rather than low) on power motivation (Study 2, N = 79); attributed prosocial intentions mediated this effect. Study 3 (N = 260) replicates these results.
Research has consistently shown that males play violent video games more frequently than females, but factors underlying this gender gap have not been examined to date. This approach examines the assumption that males play violent video games more because they anticipate more enjoyment and less guilt from engaging in virtual violence than females. This may be because males are less empathetic, tend to morally justify physical violence more and have a greater need for sensation and aggression in video game play than females. Results of a path model based on survey data of 444 respondents and using multi-step multiple mediation analyses confirm these assumptions. Taken together, the findings of this study shed further light on the gender gap in violent video game use.
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.
One of the most striking features of recent public sector reform in Europe is privatization. This development raises questions of accountability: By whom and for what are managers of private for-profit organizations delivering public goods held accountable? Analyzing accountability mechanisms through the lens of an institutional organizational approach and on the empirical basis of hospital privatization in Germany, the article contributes to the empirical and theoretical understanding of public accountability of private actors. The analysis suggests that accountability is not declining but rather multiplying. The shifts in the locus and content of accountability cause organizational stress for private hospitals.
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.
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.
This paper focuses on some of the factors explaining recent trends in decentralisation, and some areas where decentralisation has had a positive impact, including bringing citizens into public affairs, improving sub-national public administration, and stimulating local economic development. It concludes by exploring the dangers and the implications for governments of differing capabilities starting out on the decentralisation path. More specifically, the paper stresses the underlying incentive structures within states in reform. It suggests a country-specific discussion of both vertical and horizontal incentive structures in decentralisation, as well as clear-cut accountability within a public sector in change. While vertical incentive structures mean defined rules for intergovernmental relationships, horizontal incentive structures mean defined rules between local governments, their citizens and the local private sector. Both sets of incentives need to be reformed jointly to stimulate better results from decentralisation and for better performance of local government. Neglecting one of them, could harm development. Above all, politics and processes are key to understanding, and eventually, managing decentralisation effectively.
The end of the cold war division of the Baltic Sea in 1989, and the three Baltic states’ return to independence in 1991 created new opportunities for the decision-makers of the area, as well as new possibilities for fashioning security in the region. This article will examine the security debate affecting the Baltic Sea region in the post-cold war period, and in particular, the relevance of the European Union to that debate. The following section will examine various concepts of security relevant to the Baltic region; the third section looks at the EU and the Baltic area; and the last part deals with the implications that EU membership by the Baltic Sea states may have for the security of the Baltic Sea zone.
The article mobilises the concept of strategic culture in order to identify the impact of history upon contemporary security policy. The article will first look at the "wholesale construction" of a strategic culture after the Second World War in West Germany before exploring its impact upon security policy since the end of the Cold War in two areas: the Bundeswehr's out-of-area role and conscription. The central argument presented here is that the strategic culture of the former Federal Republic now writ large on to the new united Germany sets the context within which security policies are designed. This strategic culture, as will be argued, acts as both a facilitating and a restraining variable on behaviour, making certain policy options possible and others impossible.