Strukturelle Kränkungen als Thema im Coaching

In this article hurts in the workplace are discussed, which are not aggressions of one person against another person. Rather they are effects of structural conditions in organizations or effects of legal processes in societies. The author presents three case studies with examples of such hurts and she postulates, that the Coach has to reflect political conditions in his work.     

Beratungsforschung mit,für oder ohne die Praxis?

This article deals with the extent to which consulting research and consulting practice are pulling in the same direction or whether the gap between them still seems insurmountable. Therefore we examine the literature on consulting research, report what kind of research coaching practitioners would consider beneficial and introduce first findings from an empirical survey in which coaching practitioners were asked about their motivation for—or against—taking part in coaching research.     

Beate Krais (Hg.): An der Spitze. Von Eliten und herrschenden Klassen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Anmerkungen zur Publikation „Möglichkeiten und Probleme des Einsatzes postalischer Befragungen“ von Karl-Heinz Reuband in der Kzfss 2001, 2, S. 307–333

Reuband’s article purports to report empirical results that seem to contradict the widely held view of mail surveys. This assertion is made possible only by an unclear statement of hypotheses and a selective perception of the literature. The data analysis is based on techniques from the 1960s and 1970s; modern methods are not even mentioned. Although all the results reported in the article are based on local surveys conducted by a university institute, these are generalized to national surveys in general. The main points of this critique are methodological: careless literature review, lack of concrete hypotheses, inefficient data analysis and generalizations without empirical foundation.     

Gruppenprozesse und destruktive Gewalt

The main thesis of this work is that it is worth to transmit structures, models and results of group research to larger destructive events. This applies primarily to consultancy and decision making processes of higher management positions, for group processes when applying destructive power as well as for the emergence and escalation of destructive power in autochthonous group processes. Some of the essential ways of diminishing or even preventing destructive power are shown using a dozen of constructive suggestions.     

Modernisierung und Demokratisierung

Most social scientists agree that democracy is essentially a product of modernity: As soon as a society follows the path of modernization, especially by implementing economic reforms, a democratic transition seems inevitable. As the complexity of society increases, the demands on the governmental performance of the state rise. Accordingly, authoritarian developmental regimes will be replaced in the long term by liberal democracies. But the causes and mechanisms between modernization and democratization are still unclear. While most studies are based on functionalist concepts, this article explores the subject from a constitution theoretical perspective. The argument is developed in four steps: In the first step, I will discuss the contributions of Parsons and Luhmann to the explanation of democratization processes. In the second step, I will give an overview of recent non-functionalist concepts for the analysis of differentiation processes. In the third step, these concepts are used in order to investigate the relation between modernization and democratization on the case of South Korea (1979–1987). This empirical study focuses on structures of inequality in the social subsystems, the carriers and motives of pro-democratic protests, and finally the temporal patterns of interaction between the South Korean democratization movement and the authoritarian regime. In the fourth step, the explanatory potential of non-functional differentiation theories for the analysis of democratization processes will be discussed.     

Drittmittel als Performanzindikator der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

Resources within and between higher education and research institutions are increasingly allocated according to scientific performance. Evaluation exercises and the measurement of research performance take on a new role in this context. Third party research income is a performance indicator which is rather easy to measure and is used in most of the new performance-based evaluation procedures. This paper sets out to scrutinize the meaning and validity of third party research income. We studied research teams from three different research fields with a mixed quantitative / qualitative approach. The focus is on the causal relations between institutional / input indicators, third party research income as another input indicator, and a variety of output indicators of scientific production. An important result is that third party money has a positive effect on performance only below a certain and discipline-specific threshold. Further analysis shows that output performance is to a great extent field-specific. The context conditions for scientific production differ greatly, so that comparative performance assessments are only valid within homogeneous research fields. Another important result is that output performance is multidimensional and cannot be measured by bibliometric indicators only. These findings have implications for the rationality of the evaluation assessment exercises as well as for the funding decisions of science foundations, ministries of science and — increasingly, the heads of universities and departments. These topics are discussed in the last chapter as well as the implications for further research.     

Keines für alle!

The article is an answer to Hartmut Esser’s “One for All? The Weber Paradigm, the Moderate Methodological Holism Concept and the Sociological Explanation Model”, published earlier in this journal (KZfSS 58: 352–363). It explicates the differences between Essers sociological explanation model and the alternative model of moderate methodological holism. It analyses Esser’s misunderstandings and shows that his model — contrary to Esser’s “official” announcement — doesn’t entail the concept of macrodetermination, which is rightly so, because it doesn’t fit with Essers reductionist approach. The ontological and anthropological conceptions underlying the two explanation models are very different and lead to different methodologies.