Tagungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Soziologie und soziale Ontologie

Recent philosophical work attempts to describe social phenomena in general categories, an approach also interesting for sociologists. The questions as of what constitutes social objects or facts and whether there is a common structure of social phenomena are mostly neglected in sociology. This neglect is problematic because basic questions about conceptualisation and explanation in sociology cannot be pursued without a clear understanding of social phenomena. The philosophical discussions take place vis-à-vis the doctrine of ontological individualism which means that social phenomena are shadow phenomena without reality. Only the actions of individuals and the mental processes being constitutive elements of the actions are real. In opposition to this dogma, Gilbert, Searle and Ruben argue that social phenomena cannot be reduced to actions. Quite the contrary, actions can only be understood if the existence of the phenomena is presupposed. From a sociological point of view there are three remarkable aspects: First, all three authors offer good arguments against ontological individualism. Second, their arguments are based on the reconstruction of the use of everyday concepts referring to social phenomena and are therefore comprehensible. Third, the understanding of social phenomena merely as collective subjects, intentions or systems of interlocking beliefs is too restrictive. Despite this failure these theories show a way to gain a more realistic understanding of social phenomena.     

Hermeneutic Institutionalism: Towards a New Synthesis

The deep methodological and substantive fragmentation of the social sciences has led to the development of theories that can think larger social wholes only at the cost of disfiguring reductionism. Any effort at creating new synthesizing frameworks must be able to integrate advances made in a wide variety of subfields, and therefore needs to reconsider the ontology of social life as a unifying basis. Given post-structuralist critiques, this has to happen in a critical fashion. Due to its anti-reductionist stance, the social hermeneutics of Vico and Herder offers a good starting point for an ontological re-orientation. However, since their work has also inspired highly problematic essentializations of culture/people as the principal way to connect everyday interaction and large-scale phenomena, a move that has been criticized for very good reasons, their social hermeneutics must be adjusted to the needs of our time. This paper proposes a renewed social hermeneutics that analyzes social life as a dense thicket of action-reaction effect flows mediated by discursive, emotive and sensory understandings. Wherever action-reaction effect flows are replicated in self-similar forms, institutions emerge. Since replication is contingent on stabilized understandings the question arises how understanding, a process, can come to be objectified as a transposable form. The answer provided here is that repeated validations in action, in comparison with other persons, and in mnemonic invocations pick out and actualize understandings as interpretative devices. But this means that the work of stabilization is deferred to another level, because stabilized understandings require enduring validation, which can only issue from institutionalized social environments. The enduring features of social life must therefore be thought of as the result of a process of institutiosis, in which institutionalized forms buttress each other. Features of institutiosis are identified, which lead to more or less stable arrangements.     

Urban ecosystems and sustainable urban development—analysing and assessing interacting systems in the Stockholm region

In order to build competence for sustainability analysis and assessment of urban systems, it is seen as essential to build on models representing urban form, landuse and transportation, urban metabolism, as well as ecological processes. This type of analysis of interacting sub-systems requires an advanced model integration platform, yet open for learning and for further development. Moreover, since the aim is to increase urban experience with ecosystem management in the wide sense, the platform needs to be open and easily available, with high visualisation capacity. For this purpose, the LEAM model was applied to the Stockholm Region and two potential future scenarios were developed, resulting from alternative policies. The scenarios differed widely and the dense urban development of Scenario Compact could be visualised, destroying much of the Greenstructure of Stockholm, while Scenario Urban Nature steered the development more to outer suburbs and some sprawl. For demonstration of the need for further development of biodiversity assessment models, a network model tied to a prioritised ecological profile was applied and altered by the scenarios. It could be shown that the Greenstructure did not support this profile very well. Thus, there is a need for dynamic models for negotiations, finding alternative solutions and interacting with other models. The LEAM Stockholm case study is planned to be further developed, to interact with more advanced transport and land use models, as well as analysing energy systems and urban water issues. This will enable integrated sustainability analysis and assessment of complex urban systems, for integration in the planning process in Stockholm as well as for comparative sustainability studies between different cities, with the goal to build more sustainable urban systems and to increase urban experiences in ecosystem management.     

Bewerbermanagementsysteme in deutschen Großunternehmen

Due to a talent shortage, German large-scale corporations and their recruiting departments go at the moment through rough times but recruiting systems could offer valuable support in the hunt for new employees. To analyze the value contribution of the IT support of these systems, HR executives of the largest 1,000 German companies were surveyed. Based on the results of this representative survey, the following implications for the value contribution of applicant tracking systems as part of operating and management services can be made. Predominately, reductions in terms of process time and process cost in recruiting can be realized by using these applicant tracking systems. However, an improvement in process quality (e.g. higher number of successfully hired ideal candidates) cannot be evaluated. For all results there is no difference between the value contribution for the operating and management system. The value contribution of these applicant tracking systems is not influenced by the size of the observed enterprises.     

A new approach to choose acceptance cutoff for approximate Bayesian computation

The approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) algorithm is used to estimate parameters from complicated phenomena, where likelihood is intractable. Here, we report the development of an algorithm to choose the tolerance level for ABC. We have illustrated the performance of our proposed method by simulating the estimation of scaled mutation and recombination rates. The result shows that the proposed algorithm performs well.