Organisationsentwicklung in M&A Prozessen

Technical issues like legal matters or different types of due diligence predominate during the execution of mergers and acquisitions. Personnel issues only get considered during the post-merger integration phase. However, the success of mergers and acquisitions depends considerably on the early and correct involvement of the human resource and organization development (OD) department in every phase of the merger.     

Promoting object constancy. Writing as a nursing intervention

1. Object constancy is an important developmental milestone that many psychiatric patients have not achieved. 2. Asking patients to write down thoughts and feelings will assist the nurse in reinforcing a continuous experience of self as a necessary antecedent to self and object constancy. 3. Object constancy allows the patient to be more autonomous in relationships. Writing will help the patient become more independent in managing thoughts and feelings. 4. Using an object relations framework for this commonly prescribed nursing intervention will assist nurses in providing a focus and goal for the use of writing.     

Representations of Social Work in the Australian News Media

How the news media constructs social work has been an area of great concern for the social work profession for several decades. It is a discussion within the professional literature that has been dominated by the assumption that the media has portrayed an unfairly critical representation of the profession. To address a significant dearth of knowledge surrounding this highly discussed but poorly researched topic, this article presents the findings from a study that analysed 12 months of social work coverage in Melbourne, Australia. The findings indicate that coverage was not necessarily unfairly critical, but rather relatively absent. Furthermore, the analysis found that existing reporting constructed the profession as being highly diverse in fields, practice methods, and worker demographics. The findings have significant implications for how the professional community understands the relationship, challenging dominant assumptions, but also informing future action and engagement with the news media.     

Developmental Trajectories of Social Justice Values in Adolescence: Relations with Sympathy and Friendship Quality

This study examined developmental trajectories of social justice values (SJV) in a representative sample of Swiss adolescents (N = 1258) at 15 (Time 1), 18 (Time 2), and 21 years of age (Time 3). SJV and friendship quality were measured via self‐reports. Sympathy was assessed via self‐ and mother‐reports. Latent class growth analysis revealed three developmental trajectories of SJV: high‐stable (80 percent), moderate‐decreasing (17 percent), and low‐increasing (3 percent). Adolescents with low levels of self‐ and mother‐reported sympathy were more likely to be members of the low‐increasing than the high‐stable or moderate decreasing trajectory groups. Adolescents who reported low levels of sympathy and friendship quality at 15 years of age were more likely to be members of the moderate‐decreasing trajectory group than the high‐stable trajectory group. Results are discussed with respect to the potential significance of sympathy and friendship quality for understanding the development of SJV during adolescence.     

Multiple Coordination Patterns in Infant and Adult Vocalizations

The study of vocal coordination between infants and adults has led to important insights into the development of social, cognitive, emotional, and linguistic abilities. We used an automatic system to identify vocalizations produced by infants and adults over the course of the day for fifteen infants studied longitudinally during the first 2 years of life. We measured three different types of vocal coordination: coincidence‐based, rate‐based, and cluster‐based. Coincidence‐based coordination and rate‐based coordination are established measures in the developmental literature. Cluster‐based coordination is new and measures the strength of matching in the degree to which vocalization events occur in hierarchically nested clusters. We investigated whether various coordination patterns differ as a function of vocalization type, whether different coordination patterns provide unique information about the dynamics of vocal interaction, and how the various coordination patterns each relate to infant age. All vocal coordination patterns displayed greater coordination for infant speech‐related vocalizations, adults adapted the hierarchical clustering of their vocalizations to match that of infants, and each of the three coordination patterns had unique associations with infant age. Altogether, our results indicate that vocal coordination between infants and adults is multifaceted, suggesting a complex relationship between vocal coordination and the development of vocal communication.     

Strategic Development of Business Models: Implications of the Web 2.0 for Creating Value on the Internet

There is virtually a consensus that, to remain competitive, firms must continuously develop and adapt their business models. However, relatively little is known about how managers can go about achieving this transformation, and how, and to what extent, different types of business models should be adapted. To illustrate the differential effect of environmental changes on different business model types, this article draws from the ‘4C’ Internet business model typology to elaborate on how a recent wave of changes on the Internet – the emergent Web 2.0 phenomenon – is affecting each of its four business model types. We argue that Web 2.0 trends and characteristics are changing the rules of the ‘create and capture value’ game, and thus significantly disrupt the effectiveness of established Internet business models. Since systematic empirical knowledge about Web 2.0 factors is very limited, a comprehensive Web 2.0 framework is developed, which is illustrated with two cases and verified through in-depth interviews with Internet business managers. Strategic recommendations on how to what extent different Web 2.0 aspects affect each business model type are developed. Executives can use the ideas and frameworks presented in the article to benchmark their firm's efforts towards embracing the changes associated with the Web 2.0 into their business model.     

Mindful Leadership: Sind achtsame F��hrungskr?fte leistungsf?higere F��hrungskr?fte?

In the last years, mindfulness became the focus of increasing research interest in the health sciences. More than hundred studies highlight the positive impact of mindfulness based interventions on a variety of health relevant parameters. Mindfulness became a well-established intervention in clinical and non-clinical contexts such as stress prevention, substance abuse treatment or relationship counselling in couples. The concept has until now not received much attention in business contexts; implications and applications in this field are highlighted in this article. In particular, it is described how mindfulness may help leaders and managers to perform their tasks more successfully and in a much more relaxed way.     

Exploring Differences in National and International Poverty Estimates: Is Uganda on Track to Halve Poverty by 2015?

This paper explores causes of differences in estimates of poverty incidence in Uganda since the early 1990s as measured by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics and the World Bank. While both sets of estimates from the two organisations show a declining trend in poverty incidence there are important differences in the levels of poverty, the speed of the decline and the direction of change in the early 2000s. Methodological differences linked to the determination of the poverty line and adjustments for household composition are found to play a role. Assessing the effect of other potential causes is complicated by limitations in the World Bank’s meta-data.     

Economic Growth and Child Undernutrition in sub‐Saharan Africa

Despite recent improvements in economic performance, undernutrition rates in sub‐Saharan Africa appear to have improved much less and rather inconsistently across the continent. We examine to what extent there is an empirical linkage between income growth and reductions of child undernutrition in Africa. We pool all DHS surveys for African countries, control for other correlates of undernutrition, and add country‐level GDP per capita. We find that a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with 1.5 to 1.7 percent lower odds of being stunted, 2.8 to 3.0 percent lower odds of being underweight, and 3.5 to 4.0 percent lower odds of being wasted. Other drivers of undernutrition, including relative socioeconomic status and mother's education and her nutritional status, are quantitatively more important. This suggests that further increases in GDP will have only a modest impact on undernutrition and broader interventions are required to accelerate progress.     

Eastern Donors and Western Soft Law: Towards a DAC Donor Peer Review of China and India?

The international system is still governed by a normative framework designed mainly by OECD countries, especially with regard to soft‐law standards in the field of development co‐operation. However, the growing relevance of ‘Eastern donors’ is weakening its efficiency and raises the question of how compliance with these standards can be assured in a changing donor landscape. Despite efforts to integrate emerging countries into the traditional approach of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) to monitoring compliance through peer reviews, the aid architecture of the future might turn out to be a synthesis of established and new approaches.