Leisure Time in Modern Societies: A New Source of Boredom and Stress?

The increase in leisure time over the last century is well documented. We know much less, however, about the quality of the use of leisure time. Quite divergent predictions exist in this regard: Some authors have argued that the new, extensive free time will lead to new forms of time pressure and stress; others have foreseen an expansion of boredom. This is the first paper that systematically investigates the quality of leisure time in 36 countries around the world. It uses the 2007 ISSP-survey “Leisure Time and Sport”. We investigate stress and boredom during leisure time by making use of four general theories about international and intercultural differences. The theories relate to the level of socio-economic development, religious–cultural systems, types of welfare states, and to the emergence of specific “time regimes”. In addition, we control for the effect of relevant individual level variables. At the macro level, significant differences emerge concerning the level of development, the dominant religion, and the extent of welfare benefits. The most interesting finding, however, was that a typology of leisure time regimes is the most suited to explain the considerable differences between the 36 countries compared. Implications of this finding for time policy and further research are discussed in the concluding section.     

Conflict in foreign subsidiaries of Japanese and western multinational corporations: The impact of cultural distance and differences in home-host country combinations

This article investigates the degree of conflict between different groups of employees in MNC subsidiaries in relation to different home-host country combinations. More specifically, we compared the degree of conflict of Western subsidiaries in Japan and Japanese subsidiaries in the West. We based our comprehensive investigation on data from 617 US and German subsidiaries in Japan as well as Japanese subsidiaries in the USA and Germany (and, for comparative reasons, US subsidiaries in Germany and German subsidiaries in the US). Possibly rather surprisingly, our results indicate that different degrees of cultural distance between home and host country do not lead to different degrees of conflict in MNC subsidiaries. We suggest that expected conflicts, due to substantial cultural differences, induce employees to actively counteract such problems, leading ultimately to a reduction of real conflicts. Furthermore, while previous literature suggested that in particular Japanese subsidiaries in the West are prone to a high degree of conflicts, our findings suggest that Western subsidiaries in Japan are even more conflict-laden. This should caution Western companies against complacency when operating in Japan.     

Internationale Mobilit?t und soziale Selektivit?t: Ausma?, Mechanismen und Entwicklung herkunftsspezifischer Unterschiede zwischen 1990 und 2005

In the course of educational expansion social inequalities in access to upper secondary education declined, while the differences in transition to tertiary education increased. In the light of these changes the assumption arises, that the patterns of social selectivity in access to higher education have changed. While in the past status maintenance was mainly due to differences in access to higher education, today it is to a greater extent a question of kind and place of study. Because of the growing importance of international experience for labour market success, students of privileged classes might increasingly opt to study abroad in order to preserve their privileged position. Drawing on a series of panel-datasets of upper secondary graduates in Germany, we estimate the extent and development of social differences in international mobility behaviour between 1990 and 2005, and apply a decomposition method in order to single out the underlying processes and mechanisms. We find remarkable social differences in the intention as well as in the decision to study at a foreign university. Students from privileged classes more often decide to study abroad, while students from underprivileged classes stay close to their hometown. These differences can partly be explained by school performance, language skills, social costs and institutional differences. Furthermore we find that these differences have rather increased than decreased.     

A new monotonic, clone-independent, reversal symmetric, and condorcet-consistent single-winner election method

In recent years, the Pirate Party of Sweden, the Wikimedia Foundation, the Debian project, the “Software in the Public Interest” project, the Gentoo project, and many other private organizations adopted a new single-winner election method for internal elections and referendums. In this article, we will introduce this method, demonstrate that it satisfies, e.g., resolvability, Condorcet, Pareto, reversal symmetry, monotonicity, and independence of clones and present an O(C^3) algorithm to calculate the winner, where C is the number of alternatives.     

Uncertainty,pluralism, and the knowledge-based theory of the firm: From J.-C. Spender’s contribution to a socio-cognitive approach

J.-C. Spender’s award-winning, knowledge-based theory of the firm is based on four premises: (1) The firm can be sufficiently understood as a system of knowledge, (2) explicit and implicit knowing can be clearly dissociated, (3) organizations are conceived as cognizing entities, and (4) intuition shaped by shared cultural practices is a superior source of managerial knowledge. This line of reasoning represents a social constructionist view of the enactment, transfer, and storage of knowledge according to which managerial knowledge is largely tacitly shaped by industry recipes and the firm’s socio-cultural conventions and other social processes. Although comprehensive in scope, we argue that a knowledge-based theory of the firm needs to integrate a cognitivist approach that includes the synergetic production of tacit and explicit knowledge, the role of reflective thinking in resolving strategic uncertainties, and the interaction between the individual and the social. This socio-cognitive theory of the firm posits that sustained competitive advantage of a firm is founded on the ability to align knowledge internally within the firm as well as externally with its stakeholders through the individual sense-making of feedback from other individuals.     

Teacher shortages, teacher contracts and their effect on education in Africa

Summary.  To enhance primary enrolment rates, many African countries have launched large teacher recruitment programmes in recent years. Given tight budgetary constraints, teachers are no longer employed in civil service positions, but on the basis of (fixed term) contracts typically implying considerably lower salaries and a sharply reduced amount of professional training. We analyse the effect of this change on educational quality in Niger, Togo and Mali, on the basis of very informative data, which are comparable across these countries. We use a variety of estimation techniques, including a non-parametric estimation of quantile treatment effects. Our results demonstrate that contract teachers tend to reduce inequalities in student outcomes. Overall, the effects are positive in Mali, somewhat mixed in Togo and negative in Niger. This ordering is consistent with theoretical expectations related to the manner in which contract teacher programmes were implemented differently in each of the three countries under study.     

Labor Schweiz: Vergleichende Wahlbeteiligungsforschung bei Kantonalen Parlamentswahlen

How to explain different levels in voting turnout among the Swiss sub-national units? To answer this question, this study presents the first comparative and macro-quantitative investigation of the voting participation in parliamentary elections of the Swiss Cantons between 1982 und 2004. The paper evaluates political institutions, socio-economic factors, and cultural foundations. According to our statistical inquiry we present four main determinants of cross-cantonal variance in voting turnout: mandatory voting laws, electoral thresholds, the coverage of partisan membership, and a culture of Catholicism. Moreover, the estimations reveal that there is no systematic influence of patterns of direct democracy on the voting participation in parliamentary cantonal elections.     

Does Fundraising Professionalization Pay?

Although fundraising organizations in the third sector have gone through a progressive professionalization process, it remains unclear whether this development has led to any financial benefits. This article focuses on the question of whether or not it pays off for fundraising organizations to invest in professionalization. The data for this study come from 165 organizations representing 45 percent of the Swiss fundraising market. We first propose the term “organizational fundraising capability” as a new construct for measuring the degree of professionalization and rationalization in fundraising management. We then analyze its relationship to overall net revenue from donations as well as the growth of net revenue from donations. Our analysis indicates that, in addition to organizational size measured by total revenue, revenue share from donations, and expansion strategy, fundraising capability makes an important contribution to explaining both an institution's net revenue from fundraising and the level of increase in net donations. The consequences for the development of professionalization and rationalization in fundraising are discussed.