Neue Perspektiven in der Führungsentwicklung

The article presents a new model for leadership development: the leadership holarchy. The leadership holarchy can provide orientation in the developmental process and can sharpen the awareness of the coach for challenges and limits in the development of a leader. The model can be used as a diagnostic instrument in consulting and research and for the planning of trainings and seminars. Based on recent literature from personal development in adulthood, different stages of leadership development are described. In addition to the leadership holarchy, the article depicts the points of reference in developmental theory and theory of leadership. The author holds the view that an explicit development-based approach on leadership opens up new perspectives for coaching and consulting.     

Using Prior Risk‐Related Knowledge to Support Risk Management Decisions: Lessons Learnt from a Tunneling Project

The authors of this article have developed six probabilistic causal models for critical risks in tunnel works. The details of the models' development and evaluation were reported in two earlier publications of this journal. Accordingly, as a remaining step, this article is focused on the investigation into the use of these models in a real case study project. The use of the models is challenging given the need to provide information on risks that usually are both project and context dependent. The latter is of particular concern in underground construction projects. Tunnel risks are the consequences of interactions between site‐ and project‐ specific factors. Large variations and uncertainties in ground conditions as well as project singularities give rise to particular risk factors with very specific impacts. These circumstances mean that existing risk information, gathered from previous projects, is extremely difficult to use in other projects. This article considers these issues and addresses the extent to which prior risk‐related knowledge, in the form of causal models, as the models developed for the investigation, can be used to provide useful risk information for the case study project. The identification and characterization of the causes and conditions that lead to failures and their interactions as well as their associated probabilistic information is assumed to be risk‐related knowledge in this article. It is shown that, irrespective of existing constraints on using information and knowledge from past experiences, construction risk‐related knowledge can be transferred and used from project to project in the form of comprehensive models based on probabilistic‐causal relationships. The article also shows that the developed models provide guidance as to the use of specific remedial measures by means of the identification of critical risk factors, and therefore they support risk management decisions. Similarly, a number of limitations of the models are discussed.     

Facilitators and barriers to pregnant women’s participation in research: A systematic review

Background

Although there is consensus among many that exclusion of pregnant women from clinical research should be justified, there is uncertainty as to whether and why pregnant women themselves would be willing to participate even if they were found to be eligible. The objective was to identify the reasons why pregnant women participate in clinical research and thereby to distinguish between facilitators and barriers.

Measuring Well-being Across Europe: Description of the ESS Well-being Module and Preliminary Findings

It has become customary to judge the success of a society through the use of objective indicators, predominantly economic and social ones. Yet in most developed nations, increases in income, education and health have arguably not produced comparable increases in happiness or life satisfaction. While much has been learned from the introduction of subjective measures of global happiness or life satisfaction into surveys, significant recent progress in the development of high-quality subjective measures of personal and social well-being has not been fully exploited. This article describes the development of a set of well-being indicators which were included in Round 3 of the European Social Survey. This Well-being Module seeks to evaluate the success of European countries in promoting the personal and social well-being of their citizens. In addition to providing a better understanding of domain-specific measures, such as those relating to family, work and income, the design of the Well-being Module recognises that advancement in the field requires us to look beyond measures which focus on how people feel (happiness, pleasure, satisfaction) to measures which are more concerned with how well they function. This also shifts the emphasis from relatively transient states of well-being to measures of more sustainable well-being. The ESS Well-being Module represents one of the first systematic attempts to create a set of policy-relevant national well-being accounts.

Generationenbeziehungen

The different persons involved in social relationships perceive the same relationship quite differently. This assumption, called the ?intergenerational stake hypothesis“ in intergenerational relations research, is tested by an investigation of emotional closeness, perception of conflicts, and the exchange of support among familial generations. In these data, parents tend to perceive greater emotional closeness and less conflict than their children. In the perception of exchanges of support, however, both parents and children impute greater weight to support received than to support given. Given that some differences among generations are observable, the fact that both parties of the same relationship are rarely captured in survey data presents a potential problem for empirical social research. What kinds of skewing or bias can be expected when not all perspectives are accounted for? The constructed models indicate that the bias so produced is marginal, thus the current practice of surveying only one side of the relationship would appear to be adequate.     

A global risk assessment model for civil wars

In this study, we construct a multivariate model that assesses the risk of an outbreak of civil war in a country over a period of 5 years into the future. In addition to structural factors of state weakness, which have dominated the literature on civil war onset, this model includes repression of basic human rights to personal integrity – an important harbinger of wars to come – as an aspect of state behavior. Our aim is not to explore the causal factors of civil war onset, but to build a model that includes indicators that correlate with civil war outbreak and may be used to predict it. Based on two versions of the model – logit and neural network – out-of-sample risk assessments for three different time periods are generated and compared to the historical record of civil war outbreak during those years. In addition, the model’s ability to produce in-sample risk assessments over a 5-year period is tested. Finally, we compute truly predictive civil war risk assessments for all countries for which data are available, for the years 2008–2012. The analyses show that with a relatively simple model and based on publicly available data sources, meaningful civil war risk assessments can be computed. The quality of the predictions exceeds that of prominent studies, in which the risk of interstate war is assessed.     

A nuclear medicine patient/instrument scheduling model

The problem of scheduling patients and clinical instruments for each physician-requested Nuclear Medicine study, in a clinical environment, is resolved through the development of a computerized heuristic model. The study schedule was determined by minimizing such factors as elapsed instrument time, instrument idle time, and maximizing instrument utilization. The heuristic scheduling procedure was developed and evaluated for scheduling thirteen different Nuclear Medicine study types on a daily basis. The analysis showed that this heuristic can be utilized to provide a good basic schedule for use in Clinical Nuclear Medicine.     

Symbolic Interaction and Transformation of Class Structure: The Case of China

So far, research on the shaping and change of class stratification has remained a territory for Marxist and Weberian scholars and, to a lesser degree, for functionalist scholars. The outcome in the explanatory domain is the production of a tremendous amount of knowledge concerning the relevance of structural conditions and power. Unfortunately, however, the significance of meaning as an independent explanatory variable has been neglected. This article attempts to tackle the neglected dimension empirically, using a revised macro‐level symbolic interactionist approach. Its objectives are twofold: to reveal the crucial impact of meaning on the radical change of class structure in the context of China's economic reform and to demonstrate the potential of symbolic interactionism for studying macro‐level sociological phenomena such as class stratification.