Modernisierung und Demokratisierung

Most social scientists agree that democracy is essentially a product of modernity: As soon as a society follows the path of modernization, especially by implementing economic reforms, a democratic transition seems inevitable. As the complexity of society increases, the demands on the governmental performance of the state rise. Accordingly, authoritarian developmental regimes will be replaced in the long term by liberal democracies. But the causes and mechanisms between modernization and democratization are still unclear. While most studies are based on functionalist concepts, this article explores the subject from a constitution theoretical perspective. The argument is developed in four steps: In the first step, I will discuss the contributions of Parsons and Luhmann to the explanation of democratization processes. In the second step, I will give an overview of recent non-functionalist concepts for the analysis of differentiation processes. In the third step, these concepts are used in order to investigate the relation between modernization and democratization on the case of South Korea (1979–1987). This empirical study focuses on structures of inequality in the social subsystems, the carriers and motives of pro-democratic protests, and finally the temporal patterns of interaction between the South Korean democratization movement and the authoritarian regime. In the fourth step, the explanatory potential of non-functional differentiation theories for the analysis of democratization processes will be discussed.     

Drittmittel als Performanzindikator der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

Resources within and between higher education and research institutions are increasingly allocated according to scientific performance. Evaluation exercises and the measurement of research performance take on a new role in this context. Third party research income is a performance indicator which is rather easy to measure and is used in most of the new performance-based evaluation procedures. This paper sets out to scrutinize the meaning and validity of third party research income. We studied research teams from three different research fields with a mixed quantitative / qualitative approach. The focus is on the causal relations between institutional / input indicators, third party research income as another input indicator, and a variety of output indicators of scientific production. An important result is that third party money has a positive effect on performance only below a certain and discipline-specific threshold. Further analysis shows that output performance is to a great extent field-specific. The context conditions for scientific production differ greatly, so that comparative performance assessments are only valid within homogeneous research fields. Another important result is that output performance is multidimensional and cannot be measured by bibliometric indicators only. These findings have implications for the rationality of the evaluation assessment exercises as well as for the funding decisions of science foundations, ministries of science and — increasingly, the heads of universities and departments. These topics are discussed in the last chapter as well as the implications for further research.     

Researching the history of social work: exposition of a history of the present approach

This paper provides an exposition of Michel Foucault's ‘history of the present’ in order to make the case for its relevance to the study of social work history. It sets out the general principles underpinning this practice and considers its application to a particular research question relating to history of child welfare and protection social work in the Republic of Ireland. The paper seeks to highlight the challenges involved in its use and illuminate its potential value as an approach for researching the history of social work. It is concluded that this exposition offers one appropriate approach that could be employed within the growing field of social work history research across Europe.     

Kostenstruktur und Ästhetisierung?

Life style research has become an independent branch of social structure analysis, that systematically complements classical research on social inequality in the explanation of social action and of attitudes. However, there are important theoretical gaps in life style research: firstly, there is a lack of theoretical proposals to explain the statistical connection between life styles on the one hand and social action and attitudes on the other hand. Secondly, it remains unclear, why life styles sometimes are very good predictors of social action and at other times they are not. In a first step this article puts forward an action theoretic framework as foundation for life style research, that implies a conceptual shift from life styles to cultural preferences. In a second step I develop three theses, that state relatively precisely the conditions for a high or low explanatory power of cultural preferences. They are empirically tested in a secondary data analysis, that supports the applicability of the theoretical ideas developed in the paper.     

Gruppenprozesse und destruktive Gewalt

The main thesis of this work is that it is worth to transmit structures, models and results of group research to larger destructive events. This applies primarily to consultancy and decision making processes of higher management positions, for group processes when applying destructive power as well as for the emergence and escalation of destructive power in autochthonous group processes. Some of the essential ways of diminishing or even preventing destructive power are shown using a dozen of constructive suggestions.