The Premise and Promise of Citizenship and Civil Society for Renewing Democracies and Empowering Sustainable Communities

State regimes have launched policies to "reinvent" government and "regenerate" communities in peripheral impoverished rural and urban areas to build sustainable communities and reduce poverty. We investigate the impact of policy concepts–the empowerment paradigm, citizenship as citizen participation and inclusion, and associations between the state and civil society–on local areas' success in leveraging dollars to foster sustainable economic and community development in persistently poor rural areas of the U.S. The thirty-three rural sites of the Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Communities Initiative of the Clinton-Gore Administration comprise our database. We find that empowering area-based, low-income residents through the election mechanism to choose their representatives on the local sites' governing board is strongly and significantly related to both inclusion and citizen participation. Also, the presence of elected citizens with connections to civil society on the governing body contributes strongly to later success in leveraging dollars.     

Product Modularity,Process Modularity,and New Product Introduction Performance: Does Complexity Matter?

Modularity has the potential to impact various facets of new product introduction performance including product development lead time, frequency of new product introduction, on time introduction and product innovation. The impact of modularity on new product introduction performance, however, may vary for different levels of product and process complexity. This study empirically investigates relationships between perceptual measures of product modularity, process modularity, and new product introduction performance and explores whether an objective product/process complexity measure moderates these relationships. Using survey‐based methodology we probe both manufacturers of technically simple products and technically complex products. Hierarchical regression models are used to test hypotheses concerning the main effects of product and process modularity and the effects of their interactions with complexity on new product introduction performance. The results show that the main effect of product modularity was positive and its interaction with complexity was disordinal and negative, suggesting that the positive effect of product modularity on new product introduction performance is dampened when complexity is high. For process modularity, only the interaction effect (positive) was statistically significant and it was also disordinal in nature. Thus, the effect of process modularity on new product introduction performance is heightened when complexity is high. The implications of these findings are discussed and more specific theoretical and managerial implications are delineated by examining the impacts of these main and interaction effects on individual measures of new product introduction performance (frequency of new product introduction, product development lead times, product innovation, and on‐time product launch).     

Hauptschule, Realschule oder Gymnasium?

The article studies the educational placement of different ethnic groups in the German school system. Using a data set that was collected at six elementary schools in Baden-Württemberg the transition from primary to secondary schooling for immigrant and German families is analyzed. Regarding the extent of ethnic differentiation in the German school system, the paper addresses the question whether the observed differences in the transition rates between different ethnic groups continue to exist once the children’s educational performance is taken into account. The findings reveal that school marks are the central determinant of the transition. However, also after having controlled for school performance ethnic differences persist. Especially Turkish and Italian children show a considerably lower chance to get into one of the higher educational tracks. This ethnic disadvantage can only be observed with regard to the question whether a child attends the Hauptschule or not. Moreover, the impact of the average achievment level and the immigrant concentration in the classroom on the transition rates is analyzed. The results reveal no important effect for the average achievement level. In contrast, the analyses for the immigrant concentration show that with increasing percentages of immigrant children in the classroom the chances to attend one of the higher educational branches are considerably reduced. After controlling for immigrant concentration no significant ethnic differences persist.     

The Total Marital Fertility Rate and Its Extensions

What we will call the age-based TMFR is computed conventionally by adding up age-specific marital fertility rates in the hope of estimating the number of children ever born to a woman who is married throughout her childbearing years. Demographers have long been strongly skeptical about this quantity because it normally indicates implausibly many children. Our analysis of data from the Romanian GGS confirms this finding, and we propose an alternative duration-based TMFR computed in the spirit of parity-progression ratios. At the same time, we extend the method to cover any type of living arrangement (cohabitation, marriage, non-partnered arrangement, and so on). Because each resulting total union-type fertility rate (TUFR) explicitly accounts for the living arrangement, it improves on the conventional total fertility rate (TFR), which does not. We embed the investigation in an event-history analysis with fixed and time-varying control covariates and find patterns of relative risks for such variables that reveal interesting features of childbearing behavior in the Romanian data, which we use to illustrate the method. In most cases, these patterns are quite robust against model re-specification, including the shift from the age-based to the duration-based approach. Since, the number of female respondents is ??only?? about 6,000 (minus records that cannot be used for the current purpose) in a normal single-round GGS, there is considerable inherent random variation in the data set, but we show that simple few-term moving average graduation suffices to overcome this problem.     

Gruppenbedrohung oder Kontakt?

International-comparative research shows a positive relationship between the proportion of ??culturally distant?? foreigners and the extent of prejudice in countries. Contrary to these international results, there seems to be no positive relationship between the percentage of foreigners and prejudice in German districts. However, German studies do not discriminate between countries of origin to capture the relative size of culturally distant foreigners though this has shown to be important in international research. Additionally, the impact of the economic situation in a district has not yet been analyzed. This article considers the relative size of the culturally distant minority as well as economic indicators at the district level. Multilevel analyses are performed using the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) and official statistics on the size of non-EU 15-nationals and the unemployment rate at level of districts. The analyses show that 1) prejudice diminishes with the relative size of non-EU 15-nationals and only increases after the relative size exceeds a high level, 2) the unemployment share has no effect on prejudice, 3) the impact of the relative size of non-EU 15-foreigners is mediated by interethnic contact, which in turn reduces prejudice, 4) the higher extent of prejudice in East Germany results from lower interethnic contacts and not from the higher unemployment share. The results of the analyses support contact theory and are not in line with group threat theories favoured by international comparative studies.     

A family of methods for statistical disclosure control

Statistical disclosure control (SDC) is a balancing act between mandatory data protection and the comprehensible demand from researchers for access to original data. In this paper, a family of methods is defined to ‘mask’ sensitive variables before data files can be released. In the first step, the variable to be masked is ‘cloned’ (C). Then, the duplicated variable as a whole or just a part of it is ‘suppressed’ (S). The masking procedure's third step ‘imputes’ (I) data for these artificial missings. Then, the original variable can be deleted and its masked substitute has to serve as the basis for the analysis of data. The idea of this general ‘CSI framework’ is to open the wide field of imputation methods for SDC. The method applied in the I-step can make use of available auxiliary variables including the original variable. Different members of this family of methods delivering variance estimators are discussed in some detail. Furthermore, a simulation study analyzes various methods belonging to the family with respect to both, the quality of parameter estimation and privacy protection. Based on the results obtained, recommendations are formulated for different estimation tasks.     

Quality‐related Action Programs: Their Impact on Quality Performance and Firm Performance

From analyses of the direct effects of 10 quality action programs on six firm performance outcomes, as well as their indirect effects through eight quality performance dimensions, two routes from action programs through quality performance to firm performance in the automotive supply industry are identified. The first is the product quality route, whose landmarks are superior quality performance on Conformance and Design Quality dimensions; the second is the relationship quality route, with superior Customer Responsiveness and Service. Both the product quality and the relationship quality routes lead to superior ROI; the former also leads to enhanced ROA, and the latter to enhanced market share performance. Associated key action programs are Committed Leadership, Cross‐Functional Quality Teams, Employee Empowerment, Supplier Development, and Closer Customer Relationships. The first three are internally focused, while the latter two are boundary‐spanning supply chain programs.     

Does Knowledge Mediate the Effect of Context on Performance? Some Initial Evidence

This research examines the links among four firm context variables, knowledge, and financial performance. Adopting a knowledge‐based, contingency view of the firm and assuming that strategy's locus is knowledge creation and application, we hypothesize that knowledge completely mediates the effects of context on performance. The results from analyzing 208 manufacturers found a positive relationship between applied knowledge and financial performance, but none between knowledge creation and performance. As for context, production technology routineness and low demand unpredictability were positively related only to greater applied knowledge; high technological turbulence was positively related to both knowledge creation and knowledge application; and firm size had no effect on either knowledge construct. No direct context‐performance relationships were found (i.e., all effects were indirect): knowledge, in particular applied knowledge, completely mediated the impact of context on performance.