The communication industry in economic integration: The case of West Germany

National economies can be viewed as networks of interdependent relations among the firms, industries and sectors that make up the total economic system. Within this economic system. The communication industry plays a central role by providing message and media products and services, i.e. the linking and coordinating infrastructure.Some limited research has been conducted on the nature and importance of the communication industry in the total economic network of a nation. The study reported here, however, represents the first application of currently existing network analysis techniques to this problem on a large-scale basis. The data used for this study represent the interorganizational relationships among 365 West German firms, with a 1970-based stock value of $333,000 or more. Interorganizational linkages are a function of (1) direction of ownership, and (2) magnitude of ownership (percentage of stock owned weighted by the value of the owned firm).The data analysis reveals that there are a number of dominating industrial groups, including a communication industry. The inter-firm relationships of the communication industry have been mapped and measured. The analysis demonstrates that there is relatively little dominance in and widespread integration with other major economic clusters of the economy. These findings are considered as being preliminary since only publically reported data were available, i.e. privately controlled firms are not included in the analysis. A number of measures for connectedness and integrativeness are presented that suggest themselves in addition to the technique of network analysis per se as potential alternative measures. Media scholars as well as economists may want to utilize network analysis as a method to study various forms of economic concentration and ownership in national industries.     

Adolescent Immigrants' Well-Being: The Case of Ethnic German Immigrants in Germany

About 3.5 million citizens in Germany are so-called Aussiedler.This is a group of ethnic Germans whose ancestors used to live in various countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The political changes in the post-Soviet nations resulted in a steady influx of ethnic Germans, who in most regards resemble immigrants but, due to particularities of German laws, are eligible for immediate citizenship in contrast to about 8 million former guest workers and their families who are treated as aliens. In this article, we report a study on 220 adolescent Aussiedler and their parents. In a four-wave longitudinal design, the course of well-being after immigration and some predictors of individual differences in their adaptation were investigated for a group of novices (0 to 18 months of residence in Germany) and a group of experienced Aussiedler (19–36 months of residence), both on average 13.5 years of age. Results showed, first, that in line with previous research on immigrants in other cultures, well-being gradually improved from rather low levels soon after immigration. Second, the predictors of inter-individual differences were distinguished by length of residence. Among the experienced group, more improved levels of well-being were observed at the final assessment, if the adolescents shared their families' decision to emigrate, were given more leeway for their own decisions, came from families with higher cohesion, and engaged in leisure activities with local age-mates. In contrast, newcomers were better off affectively if their parents shared less collectivist value orientations and if they entertained fewer contacts with local peers. These distinct patterns were interpreted against the backdrop of social comparison processes with local German age-mates. The article concludes with some informed speculations about differences from other groups of immigrants in Germany.     

Candidates on Television: The 1972 Electoral Debates in West Germany

This article explores the nature and effects of the campaigndebates held in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1972. Thefindings indicate that the debates were bruising personal battlesthat emphasized issues and ethics. While they did not have anydirect effects on either candidate perceptions or issue salience,there is evidence that the debates may have had some importantindirect effects on the electorate's ultimate voting choices.     

The Delay of Grandparenthood: A Cohort Comparison in East and West Germany

This research explored the delay of grandparenthood in East and West Germany, investigating how the timing and life‐course context of this transition have changed across cohorts. The authors estimated the timing of passages into the grandparent role as well as demographic overlap with worker, parent, and filial roles. Data from the German Aging Survey (N = 3,628) revealed a rise of 3 months per birth cohort (1929–1958) in the median age at grandparenthood. As a result, the grandparent role decoupled almost entirely from active parenthood. Overlap with worker and filial roles was frequent and remained stable across cohorts. The findings direct attention to a neglected demographic trend that is striking in scope and precipitates change not only in the grandparent role but also in kinship structure.     

Out-of-partnership births in East and West Germany

Review of Economics of the Household - Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we show that single women in East Germany are significantly more likely to give birth to a child than...     

Teenage boys and girls in West Germany

In 1970 the Institute for Sex Research at the University of Hamburg conducted a study of 302 males and 300 females aged 16-17. By age 16, 92% of the boys and 50% of the girls had experienced masturbation, 35% of the boys and 30% of the girls had experienced coitus. In the year before the study, 50% of the girls had an orgasm often or always during coitus. Boys achieved 80% of their orgasms through masturbation, 6% through petting, and 14% through coitus. The girls achieve 1/3 of their orgasms through each of these patterns. 18% of the boys and 6% of the girls had had at least 1 homosexual experience. About 70% of the respondents used contraception regularly. 40% to 50% used oral contraceptives and 20%-30% used condoms. The attitudes towards premarital coitus have become more permissive in the last 10 years, but the majority are still in favor of love and fidelity, and are oriented towards marriage.     

Violent pasts: collective memory and football hooliganism

Since the 1970s, the sociological analysis of football hooliganism has focused on the processes which lead to violence between fans. This has been a reasonable research strategy since the incidence of violence is a striking phenomenon and violent fans themselves look upon violence as the objective. However, this focus on the causes of violence has cast other important aspects of football violence into the shade. In particular, there has been a lack of consideration of the way in which violence has been used as a resource by violent fans for the creation and re‐creation of their hooligan gangs. In particular, there has been no discussion of the way in which the collective memory of violence, established in discussions between group members, affirms the solidarity of these groups. In exploring the way that shared memory is employed by violent fans to sustain their relations with each other, this article widens the focus of the sociological study of hooliganism but also makes a contribution to the understanding of how social groups are constituted more generally through the empirical example of hooliganism.     

The effect of violent crime on female decision-making within the household: evidence from the Mexican war on drugs

Review of Economics of the Household - This paper uses the surge in drug-related violence in Mexico to study the effect of violent crime on married women’s decision-making. Using a...     

Assimilation of Foreigners in Former West Germany

Migration movements to industrialized countries have grown in number and size, and the presence of large numbers of immigrants has raised concerns about their integration and assimilation into host societies. This article is an empirical study of assimilation of foreign nationals in Germany. Their experience may hold lessons for other relatively recent immigration destinations. As expected, language is one of the most critical factors for determining integration and assimilation at the workplace and in society. Our results indicate uneven success in these two areas, and suggest that greater language skills may be required for social assimilation, compared to economic assimilation. Among the most important findings of our study are the strong and statistically significant effects of the attitudes by Germans toward immigrants, the significant influence of the region of residence, and the ambivalence of German‐born foreign residents toward naturalization and continued stay. This signals the failure of past integration and assimilation policies. The results show that negative attitudes by ethnic Germans against others at work or in society, in general, reduce interest in integration and assimilation. This is neither new nor surprising and this research does not contribute new theoretical insights, but it demonstrates the magnitude and significance of the effects. The question of why different locations seemed to have different impacts on citizenship aspirations is beyond the scope of this article. The data do not provide information to pursue this question and we suspect that the causes are too complex for a short answer. As expected, non‐EU citizens showed greater interest in acquiring German citizenship than EU citizens. Finally, the results also indicate that the immediate post‐World War II notion of “guest workers” was not completely false. There has been significant return migration and a significant number of respondents to the survey say that they intend to return.     

Policy, Preferences, and Patriarchy: The Division of Domestic Labor in East Germany, West Germany, and the United States

Individual agency observed in the gendered division of laboris shaped by structural factors, but only recently has evidenceemerged that the effect of women’s resources varies systematicallyin its sociopolitical context. Here we use the 1994 InternationalSocial Survey Program to assess whether the relative effectof a proxy for women’s and men’s preferences—hallmarkof individual choice—varies as well across three countrieswith divergent historical policy approaches regarding the privatesphere. East German socialist policies required and supportedwomen’s employment; West German policy promulgated a malebreadwinner model, and U.S. policy primarily remains silenton the private sphere. The division of domestic tasks and relativestrength of individual preferences on shifting it vary by region.In the former East Germany the division of domestic labor ismore egalitarian and the effect of preferences is small butequal for the genders. In West Germany the division is moretraditional and preference effects are greater, but gender differencesin these are insignificant. The U.S. division of domestic taskfalls between the two German regions, and the gender differencein preference effects is the greatest, with U.S. men’spreferences predicting significantly more variance than do U.S.women’s. Consequently, allowing the market to dominatedoes not yield equal strength of preferences in the individual-levelmodels used to predict the division of domestic tasks. Thissupports the dual-system feminist claims that capitalism canexacerbate nonmarket patriarchal hierarchies.     

Participation in ethnic associations: the case of immigrants in West Germany

This paper gives the results of a 1981-1982 study of Greek, Italian, and Turkish immigrants in West Germany. Ethnic organizations such as those that presently exist in large numbers in West Germany are often viewed as indicating a lack of social integration and participation by immigrants in the host society. Whether these organizations segregate the immigrants and make their assimilation more difficult, as research on minority groups often claims, or whether they serve as mediating institutions to help integrate and assimilate the newcomers, as other theories would lead one to expect, will depend on the basic orientation of the ethnic organization itself toward the host country. Results indicate the distinctive characteristics of the organizations serving each of these 3 different groups, the extent to which persons of each nationality participate in these associations, the reasons they give for their participation, and the ways in which participation in organizations with different organizations affects the social integration and assimilation of the individual immigrants. Efforts to increase and support the political activities of minority groups at the local level will have positive consequences; this would be 1 modest but decisive step toward eliminating the mutual prejudices of minority and majority group members. As long as immigrants have a clear right to remain in their host country, a secure means of existence, and recognition and acceptance as members of an ethnic minority, their heritage and pride should not be seen as an indication of any lack of identification with the dominant society.