Sektion Kultursoziologie

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

„...ja, was willst du viel mitbestimmen?” — Partizipationschancen im entgrenzten Arbeitsfeld mobile Pflege

Based on empirical research on mobile care services in Vienna, the article discusses the issue of participation and democracy at work. More precisely, it explores the impact that work place characteristics such as field work, flexible working hours or the utilisation of subjectivity have on participation, i. e. the worker’s chance to co-determine working conditions. According to the findings presented in the paper workers actually have little chance to exert any influence on the temporal, economic and organisational conditions of their jobs, due to growing pressure as a result of cost-cutting measures.     

“The waiting and not knowing can be agonizing”: tracing the power of emotions in a prolonged conflict in the South Caucasus

Moving beyond the usual strategic and national issues of war in international relations, feminist theorizing on aspects of war has stressed the pressing need to depict it as something experienced by individuals. This study addresses this need by considering the critical case of the protracted conflict over the Nagorny Karabakh region in the South Caucasus. Despite the 1994 ceasefire, no satisfactory settlement for all the parties involved in the conflict has yet been reached. In fact, since the four-day war in April 2016, the situation has become even more tense, with an increased risk of renewed hostilities. This article uses empirical research with women in Nagorny Karabakh to examine the impact of this protracted conflict through an analysis of emotions in their everyday lives. It argues that fear, grief and trauma not only affect individual women but also create a collective identity amongst them that is defined by compliance with the heightened militarization of society in this region. In this way, this study shows that emotions feed into the persistence of patriarchal relations. By exploring women’s emotions, this article contributes to the growing literature in international relations that examines war as lived experience.     

Functional Parallelism of Detailed and Rough Speech Processing at the End of Infancy

Although realization of the same speech sound is far from being consistent across different contexts, speech recognition has to rely on phonetic detail in order to detect words. So far, it appeared that young infants cannot avoid noticing subtle speech sound variation whenever it occurs. Only later on, they are able to tolerate speech sound variation in some word recognition tasks. Here, we test whether this ability is associated with the time infants start storing their first word forms. We recorded event‐related potentials (ERPs) in a priming paradigm. German words (targets) followed syllables (primes) with a different amount of phoneme overlap. We tested infants at three, six, and nine months after birth. ERPs reflected sensitivity to prime‐target variation in a single phoneme in three‐month‐olds, tolerance to this in six‐month‐olds, and both processing aspects in nine‐month‐olds. Our findings reveal individual developmental priorities for different aspects of speech processing, with very detailed speech processing dominating at around 3 months, rough processing dominating at around half a year after birth, and an architecture of parallel rough and detailed processing at around 9 months. Functional parallelism at the end of infancy might explain the heterogeneous pattern of results regarding the degree of acoustic detail that toddlers appear to consider at different ages and across different paradigms.     

Optimal design for discrete choice experiments

In this paper we derive locally optimal designs for discrete choice experiments. As in Kanninen (2002) we consider a multinomial logistic model, which contains various qualitative attributes as well as a quantitative one, which may range over a sufficiently large interval. The derived optimal designs improve upon those given in the literature, but have the feature that every choice set contains alternatives, which coincide in all but the quantitative attributes. The multinomial logistic model will then lead to a response behavior, which is apparently unrealistic.     

The Scarring Effect of the 2008 Economic Crisis: Growth and Growth Decline in Austria’s Nonprofit Social Services Sector

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Since the 2008 economic crisis, social service providers worldwide have reported funding cuts, while the need for some...     

Doubled Homes — Doubled Social Ties? Children's Relationships in Post‐Divorce Shared Residence Arrangements

Although an increasing number of children live in shared residence arrangements after parental divorce, studies on their social relationships are rare. We address this research gap by relying on configurational approaches, social capital and social networks. Building on qualitative case studies (ego‐centred networks, interviews) with 14 children aged 10–14, results show that respondents constructed social ties based on two key categories: emotional closeness and constancy. Having two places of residence did not multiply close relations, and relations that entered the network after parental divorce (e.g. step kin) were particularly distant. Children's networks at both homes had limited interconnections.     

Virtuelle Arbeitsstrukturen durch Vertrauen,Zeitkompetenz und Prozessfeedback fördern

The article in the journal Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation (GIO) deals with challenges of virtual structures of cooperation and of the team. It focuses especially on effects of personal characteristics, individual competence and team competence on team work and team performance in particular. Apparently, trust emerges in a different way in virtual working structures than in face-to-face teams. The discussion of the term ?trust‘ leads to a broader understanding of the development of trust and its importance, which helps to classify it in a process. Time competence is classified as particularly relevant to the emergence of trust, as teamwork becomes more flexible and team members take higher responsibilities than in face-to-face-teams. Control and responsibility move towards the members of the team, which in turn corresponds with a necessity for trust. Consequently, process feedback and transformational leadership can be identified as recommendable instruments for the enhancement of time competence and trust, which can lead to better team play. When taking a closer look at the role of leaders and team members in virtual environments, it becomes clear that reciprocity cannot be taken for granted in virtual teams. Differences in team structure as well as differing priorities in team goals throughout the team are similarly important as the frequency of contacts, the availability and reliability, or trustworthiness, of the individual team members.     

Forward-looking activities: incorporating citizens’ visions

Looking back on the many prophets who tried to predict the future as if it were predetermined, at first sight any forward-looking activity is reminiscent of making predictions with a crystal ball. In contrast to fortune tellers, today??s exercises do not predict, but try to show different paths that an open future could take. A key motivation to undertake forward-looking activities is broadening the information basis for decision-makers to help them actively shape the future in a desired way. Experts, laypeople, or stakeholders may have different sets of values and priorities with regard to pending decisions on any issue related to the future. Therefore, considering and incorporating their views can, in the best case scenario, lead to more robust decisions and strategies. However, transferring this plurality into a form that decision-makers can consider is a challenge in terms of both design and facilitation of participatory processes. In this paper, we will introduce and critically assess a new qualitative method for forward-looking activities, namely CIVISTI (Citizen Visions on Science, Technology and Innovation; www.civisti.org), which was developed during an EU project of the same name. Focussing strongly on participation, with clear roles for citizens and experts, the method combines expert, stakeholder and lay knowledge to elaborate recommendations for decision-making in issues related to today??s and tomorrow??s science, technology and innovation. Consisting of three steps, the process starts with citizens?? visions of a future 30?C40?years from now. Experts then translate these visions into practical recommendations which the same citizens then validate and prioritise to produce a final product. The following paper will highlight the added value as well as limits of the CIVISTI method and will illustrate potential for the improvement of future processes.     

Approximate and exact optimal designs for paired comparisons of partial profiles when there are two groups of factors

For paired comparison experiments involving pairs of multifactor options differing in a specified number of factors the problem of finding optimal designs is considered, when only main effects are to be estimated. It is presumed that the set of factors can be partitioned into two groups such that the number of levels is constant within each group. The optimal designs for this frequently encountered case are also optimal for the corresponding choice experiments under the hypothesis that the parameters in the multinomial logit model are equal to zero.