Anerkennungsgespräche — ein Instrument gesundheitsförderlicher Führung

?Appreciative experience sharing‘ within the scope of appreciation talks is designed as an health-science based instrument for managers. It is a concept for participative monitoring of the social relations at work and the working conditions between employees and managers. At the same time, the appreciation talks show themselves to be a situational-social health resource in enterprises. The exhibited concept was developed and tested, and further developed to a workshop for managers, within the scope of a qualitative study and consulting project in three public urban-transportation companies in Germany. The conception, the results of the project, the workshop concept, and first experiences with ‘appreciative experience sharing’ by managers with direct responsibility for employees are described and discussed.     

The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access

The research access/impact problem arises because journal articles are not accessible to all of their would-be users; hence, they are losing potential research impact. The solution is to make all articles Open Access (OA; i.e., accessible online, free for all). OA articles have significantly higher citation impact than non-OA articles. There are two roads to OA: the “golden” road (publish your article in an OA journal) and the “green” road (publish your article in a non-OA journal but also self-archive it in an OA archive). Only 5% of journals are gold, but over 90% are already green (i.e., they have given their authors the green light to self-archive); yet only about 10–20% of articles have been self-archived. To reach 100% OA, self-archiving needs to be mandated by researchers' employers and funders, as the United Kingdom and the United States have recently recommended, and universities need to implement that mandate.     

Hierarchy or co-operation: labour-management relations in church institutions

Aspects of industrial relations and internal co-ordination have been a major topic of empirical research in the German business enterprise sector. In contrast, there are practically no empirical investigations into labour-management relations in third sector institutions. The largest share of this sector in Germany is represented by the two Christian churches with presently about 900,000 employees. According to the notion of church officials, labour-management relations in these institutions are characterised by a specific normative concept which emphasises a trustful co-operation of all employees in the mission of the church. The major concern of our research project focused on the question whether the specific conditions of employment within church institutions favour more hierarchical or more co-operative forms of co-ordination and how employees and employee representatives perceive the ideal of the community of service (Dienstgemeinschaftsgedanke). The results of our research lead to the conclusion that church labour-management relations are characterised by a remarkable contrast between the participative or co-operative notion of the ideal of the community of service and present forms of hierarchical co-ordination inside church institutions.This article gives a selected overview of Beyer and Nutzinger (1991). The research was supported by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung (Düsseldorf) and the University of Kassel.     

Die Bedeutung der Zinsschranke

The German Corporate Tax Reform Act of 2008 requires an adjustment of classic valuation concepts because it limits interest deduction from taxable income depending on the operating performance of the company. By using time- and state-contingent discount rates in a risk-neutral valuation with predetermined debt levels, a theoretically sound valuation result is obtained. However, a modified APV-concept which assumes deterministic debt over the planning horizon and constant leverage in the terminal value phase also yields consistent valuation results when two types of tax shields with different levels of risk are distinguished.     

The potential of a couples approach to employment assistance: results of a nonexperimental evaluation

We present findings from a nonexperimental evaluation of an employment program in which both partners in young, low-income, primarily African-American couples simultaneously participated. Mothers participating in the couples program had larger immediate gains in employment and earnings and decreases in TANF receipt following their exit from the program relative to mothers who received employment assistance as individuals. Fathers showed similar although weaker results. These immediate benefits appeared to be driven by higher rates of program completion among couples’ participants. Couples in which both partners completed the program experienced the largest quarterly earnings gains, and couples with greater earnings’ gains were more likely to still be together one year after the program ended. Mothers’ earnings gains eroded in the two years following program completion and many reported new pregnancies and problems with child care. We suggest directions for future programs and encourage future studies to consider the range of mechanisms associated with a couples focus, including potential motivational benefits and unintended consequences.

Einf��hrung von Kommunikationsstandards in Unternehmensnetzwerken �C ein gestaltungsorientierter Ansatz bei dezentraler Entscheidungsstruktur

Standards and technologies (e.g. in the area of web services) that are currently discussed in research and practice will strongly change IT-based communication between organizations. However, the decision to standardize is accompanied by the risk of introducing a standard that is not adopted by other organizations afterwards. Hence, the interdependencies among the standardization decisions due to positive network effects result in a coordination problem, which is referred to as ??the standardization problem??. If the standardization decisions are taken by autonomous actors (e.g. legally independent organizations) that do not know the standardization decisions of the other actors in the network, this standardization problem arises for a decentralized decision structure and incomplete information. Thus, actors have to decide under uncertainty on whether to standardize or not. To avoid resulting inefficiencies and wrong decisions, we propose a formal, normative approach. This approach allows an actor within the network to anticipate the standardization decisions of the other actors and the associated network effects. Central to our approach are the consideration of interdependencies among the standardization decisions and the solution of the resulting system of equations.     

Cultural Imperialism Versus Globalization of Culture: Riding the Structure‐Agency Dialectic in Global Communication and Media Studies

This article discusses and analyzes the dialectic between so‐called cultural imperialism and globalization of culture perspectives in global communication and media studies. At an extreme, cultural imperialism is cast as the international extension of the long‐discredited hypodermic needle theory which views cultural consumers as passive automatons. At the other end of the extreme, the globalization of culture perspective is cast as a wildly postmodern standpoint in which free‐floating individuals are said to be able to make an infinite set of localized meanings from cultural products. There has been a growing trend among many global communication and media scholars to locate a productive middle ground between cultural imperialism and globalization of culture. In this author’s view, the most effective melding of the two perspectives would situate local, creative appropriation of cultural objects against the backdrop of larger, hegemonic regional and global macro‐forces. This approach ought also to acknowledge the many complexities that characterize the intersections among globalization, culture, and media, including the ways in which the local, national, regional, and global constitute one another and the ways in which resistance to local hegemony can paradoxically fuel national or global hegemony.