A concise genealogy and anatomy of habitus

Retracing the philosophical origins and initial usage of habitus by Bourdieu to account for the historical disjuncture wrought by the Algerian war of national liberation and the postwar modernization of the French countryside allows us to clear up four recurrent misunderstandings about the concept: (1) habitus is never the replica of a single social structure but a dynamic, multiscalar, and multilayered set of schemata subject to ‘permanent revision’ in practice; (2) habitus is not necessarily coherent and unified but displays varying degrees of integration and tension; (3) because it is not always congruent with the cosmos in which it evolves, habitus is suited to analysing crisis and change no less than cohesion and perpetuation; but (4) it is not a self‐sufficient mechanism for the generation of action: the dissection of dispositions must always proceed in close connection with the mapping of the system of positions that alternately excite, suppress, or redirect the socially constituted capacities and inclinations of the agent. Crucially, in Bourdieu's hands, habitus is not an abstract concept issued from and aimed at theoretical disquisition, but a stenographic manner of designating a research posture that puts the genetic mode of thinking at the heart of social analysis.     

Entscheidungsunterstützung unter Berücksichtigung der Anforderungen von Entscheidungsträgern am Beispiel der Gestaltung von optionalen Girokonto-Tarifen

Quantitative decision models are used only if managers’ implementation conditions are met. Decision makers want tools that offer a set of good solutions so that they can evaluate different solutions according to various objectives without being forced to make their trade-offs explicit in a functional form. This also allows taking into account strategic aspects that cannot be modeled otherwise. In such situations, heuristics are needed which derive solutions from the structure and not so much from the mathematical properties. We present such a decision support tool for the problem of determining a menu of optional tariffs for checking accounts. The heuristic is based on the idea that for reasonably separable preferences across segments it is the best to offer for each segment the most preferred product. We use latent class choice-based conjoint analysis to estimate customer preferences and develop a customized choice-based conjoint design to take differences in individual demand into account. The proposed heuristic was used to support an actual decision problem for which the profit contribution has been increased substantially without having faced a considerable loss of customers.     

Gruppen leiten und beraten

Coaching and leading of groups is on one hand a basal competence in higher education, on the other hand it makes high demands to academic developers, who as ??new professionals?? support the development of this competence. The following contribution is concerned with a continuous education for professional academic developers, which places with this objective coaching as consultation format and methodology for leading groups in the center. This program, conceptualized by the authors, is the first of its kind in Germany. It started at the center for higher education of the Technical University Dortmund in April 2011 and will be completed in June 2012.     

The Body,the Ghetto and the Penal State

This article dissects the author’s approach to ethnography, social theory, and the politics of knowledge through a dialogue retracing his intellectual trajectory and the analytic linkages between his inquiries into embodiment, comparative urban marginality and the penal state. It draws out the practical connections and epistemological rationale behind his main research projects, explicates the distinctive ways in which he deploys observational fieldwork in each of them, and examines the roles of intellectuals in advanced society in the era of hegemonic neoliberalism. Rejecting both Humean empiricism and neo-Kantian cognitivism, the author argues for the use of ethnography as an instrument of rupture and construction, the potency of carnal knowledge, the imperative of epistemic reflexivity, and the need to expand textual genres and styles so as to better capture the taste and ache of social action. In the public sphere, he proposes that social science can act as a solvent of doxa and a beacon casting light on latent properties and unnoticed trends in social transformations so as to disrupt and broaden civic debate.     

Entscheidungsfreiheit als Grundlage wirtschaftswissenschaftlicher Forschung – Bezüge zwischen Betriebswirtschaftslehre, Ethik und Neurobiologie

This paper analyses whether freedom of decision as a crucial precondition of normative decision theory is questioned by ethics and neurobiology. It argues for an understanding of business ethics which sees the economic agents’ freedom of decision as the necessary basis for handling ethical questions in business practice, rather than as a limitation to this end. Analysing free will as a main object of scrutiny in neurobiology, it is hypothesised that acting in reality lies between plain determination on the one extreme and complete autonomy on the other. It supports the proposition in decision theory that managerial decisions are taken within the conditions of a certain framework. However, in the light of the recent developments in behavioural economics, ethics and neurobiology, it argues for the extension of this concept by consciously or unknowingly anchored norms.     

Research on Health Status and Health Care of the Elderly in China

The issue of health status and care for the elderly in urban and rural areas is becoming increasingly serious in the rapid context of population aging in China.The paper analyzed the health status of urban and rural elderly in China in the two-week morbidity rate,prevalence rate of chronic diseases, disability status,self-rated health and healthy life expectancy of the elderly using the data from the 2006 Sampling Survey on the Status of Urban/ Rural Aged Population in China,the Fourth National Health Service Survey and the 2006 Second China National Sample Survey on Disability,to explore the current provision of sources of care for the elderly and try to make some policy recommendations about to improve the health and care for the elderly population facing the crisis of population aging.     

On some moving-average processes with exponentially distributed innovations

Summary In this paper we discusse the stationary sequence of random variables which are formed from an independent identically distributed sequence, according to the moving-average model of ordern. Some properties of the process are considered. The joint bivariate exponential distribution is given, as well as the distribution of the sum.