Kognitive Balance und Arbeitsplatzwechsel. Der Einfluss informeller Sozialbeziehungen auf Vertrauensverluste und Anschlusskündigungen kritisch-loyaler Mitarbeiter

This article uses a concrete example of an employee–s notice of employment termination which lead to another notice of termination of his colleague, to explore the factors which lead to such extremely un-satisfactory working conditions. The balance theory of Fritz Heider is used as an explanatory basis. Using a model, the effects of a resignation of an employee on the attitude and behavior of a colleague, with whom a positive emotional relation exists, are described. This colleague resigned after a while although he had a normal relationship to the company and although the company did not in any way violate his existing contract. Modeling this situation we can show that an imbalanced relationship structure between the two colleagues and the company can entail a notice of termination given by a loyal and well-educated employee, who has no direct conflicts with his company.     

The crisis of westernization in Turkey: Islamism versus nationalism

This article investigates the rise of the Islamist political movement in Turkey which it argues is a product of the frustration of the promises of Westernist modernization and, thus, represents a crisis of the Kemalist ideology and a critique of modernism. The Kemalist revolution transformed the Ottoman empire from an Islamic empire to a national state, and its legimitizing ideology from Islam to nationalism. Soon after the creation of the Republic the Kemalist project came to be identified with nationalist‐statist developmentalism. But when this development model exhausted its initial rapid‐growth capability, a radical restructuring was imposed. With the help of a military regime installed in 1980, the Turkish development trajectory turned from a nationalist‐statist strategy to a transnational and market‐oriented one. The decline of nationalist and statist policy also brought about a crisis in the popular ideology which supported nationalist‐statist developmentalism. The state could no longer claim the loyalty of its people. Secularist legitimation was undermined together with the collapse of the conviction that the state would deliver and that the common national interest of development would be protected. The Islamist movement came as a response to the crisis of dependent modernization in Turkey. In the eighties, a large marginalized and dispossessed segment in the metropolitan centres joined the petite bourgeoisie of provincial towns in support of Islamist politics. In addition to these social classes, there is also a new social segment in the leadership position of the current religious radicalism: university students and upwardly mobile young professionals. In this connection, it has to be emphasized that the Islamist critique coincides with the post‐modernist critique of Western culture, but, unlike the latter, offers a concrete political project.     

Two remarks on order statistics

Let X₍₁₎,…,X_(n) be the order statistics of n iid distributed random variables. We prove that (X_(i)) have a certain Markov property for general distributions and secondly that the order statistics have monotone conditional regression dependence. Both properties are well known in the case of continuous distributions.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Jürgen H.P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik</Emphasis> und <Emphasis Type="Italic">Christof Wolf:</Emphasis> Advances in cross-national comparison. A European working book for demographic and socio-economic variables

Ohne Zusammenfassung

---

Jürgen H.P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik und Christof Wolf: Advances in cross-national comparison. A European working book for demographic and socio-economic variables New York/Boston/Dordrecht/London/Moscow: Kluwer academic/plenum publishers 2003. 413 Seiten. ISBN 0-306-47731-9. Preis: € 153,-

     

Gambling as a function of gender and Sensation Seeking

This study examined the relation of gender and Sensation Seeking (SS) Scale scores to undergraduates' ratings of their past/present and expected future participation in four leisure activities that usually involve betting money. Subjects completed McKeachnie's (1975) Leisure Activities Blank (LAB), which included the gambling items, and Zuckerman's (1979) SS Scale. Men reported significantly more past/present leisure gambling than women; gender differences were insignificant in ratings of expected future gambling. No significant differences in reported past/present gambling related to any SS scale score. However, expected future gambling ratings were associated with scores on two SS subscales: Disinhibition (DIS) and Boredom Susceptibility (BS). Both male and female subjects with high DIS scores rated the frequency of expected future gambling higher than did subjects with low DIS scores. High BS scores were associated with high ratings of expected future gambling in the data for women subjects only. These results suggest that personality factors, among them SS, are more influential than early experience or sex-role socialization in determining a young adult's interest in gambling.     

Die „Zweite Moderne“: Realität oder Fiktion?

Ulrich Beck’s theory of reflexive modernization is based upon the assumption of an epochal change taking place since the 1970s, from the “First” toward the “Second Modernity”, and tries to explain this epochal change with the development dynamics of unbounding. The “linear” modernization of the “First Modernity” is replaced with the “reflexive” modernization of the “Second Modernity”. This essay keeps a systematic and critical view to the fundamental assumptions of the theory of reflexive modernization in view of its empirical strength. In particular, the question is being dealt with as to whether time diagnosis is suitable as a foundation of modernization theory, whether the “Second Modernity” differs in fact from the “First Modernity” by an increased risk production, namely as regards science, technology and private life, whether the “Second Modernity” is distinguished by an increased risk awareness and an increase in plurality, whether unbounding is the cause of the afore established epochal change, and whether a reliable risk control is possible on the paths of modernization or whether it requires, instead, an epochal change of institutions.