Instrumentarien zur Vermeidung und Lösung von Gesellschafterkonflikten in Familienunternehmen

A resolution to conflicts between the participators of family businesses can hardly be achieved by implementing the common judicial methods of conflict resolution. The duplicity of the relationships between the persons involved necessitates modifications of the instruments of conflict resolution. This paper gives a review of methods suitable for avoiding and resolving conflicts between the participators of family businesses.     

Helping and Cooperation at 14 Months of Age

Two experiments investigated the proclivity of 14‐month‐old infants (a) to altruistically help others toward individual goals, and (b) to cooperate toward a shared goal. The infants helped another person by handing over objects the other person was unsuccessfully reaching for, but did not help reliably in situations involving more complex goals. When a programmed adult partner interrupted a joint cooperative activity at specific moments, infants sometimes tried to reengage the adult, perhaps indicating that they understood the interdependency of actions toward a shared goal. However, as compared to 18‐ and 24‐month‐olds, their skills in behaviorally coordinating their actions with a social partner remained rudimentary. Results are integrated into a model of cooperative activities as they develop over the 2nd year of life.     

Sektion Wissenssoziologie

Ohne Zusammenfassung unter Mithilfe von Jule Lorenzen, Sabine Petschke, Lisa-Marian Schmidt und René Tuma     

Scientific Norms and Research Publication Issues and Professional Ethics*

This paper addresses the standards of scientific behavior and research within the context of academic scholarship. Factors which lead some researchers to transgress the ethical boundaries associated with the publication process are presented and discussed. Included is an examination of the central issues related to the “publish or perish” syndrome. It is argued that the intense pressure to get one's work into print often distorts the serious pursuit of knowledge. Linking tenure and promotion primarily to publications has led to emphasizing the length of the scholarly record rather than its quality. To avoid such outcomes, the academic/scientific communities are urged to develop policies which on the one hand protect the integrity of the scientific enterprise, and on the other strike a reasonable balance of expectations and performance regarding teaching, research, and service.     

Sociolinguistics and modes of social class signalling: African perspectives

The paper evaluates spatial, behavioural, and material signalling of social class in African contexts, focusing on Kenya and Zambia. In particular, it draws on notions of mode of class signalling and intersectionality and a vignette of an interaction between urban‐based Western educated development agents and local participants in rural Kenya to illustrate how social class is implicated in interactions. The paper shows how significant features of class and dimensions of social inequality may be perceived intersectionally so that positionalities in class structures are negotiated in contexts of interaction, thus illustrating how structural conditions of class may be challenged and questioned. The paper concludes that sociolinguistics needs to identify the various ways in which the marginalized challenge social structures of inequality. Otherwise there is a risk that sociolinguistics will work to validate inequalities as permanent and fixed, and victims of unequal treatment as permanently condemned and never able to rise against oppressive social structures that tyrannize them.     

Capitalizing the Crisis? Explanatory Factors for the Design of Short‐time Work across Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development Countries

This article looks at the financial and economic crisis 2008–10 in 18 Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development states and seeks to investigate explanatory paths for the subsidization of further education within short‐time work programmes. Several hypotheses are put to the test: first, a classical partisan difference argument; second, a varieties of capitalism approach proposing a successful joint rallying of employers and employees for subsidization in coordinated market economies; and, lastly, the merged hypothesis that right‐wing parties in a coordinated economic context might subsidize feeling the pressure to overcompensate an ‘issue ownership’ of left parties in the field of employee‐friendly policies. We identify four explanatory paths: coordinated economies in the sample subsidized when they were economically closed or highly indebted. The results also support our combined hypothesis, that New Zealand – a left‐governed liberal market economy – and right‐governed coordinated market economies of the non‐Scandinavian type subsidized.     

A statistical test for detecting discordance in rankings between k groups

In several research areas such as psychology, social science, and medicine, studies are conducted in which objects should be ranked by different judges/raters and the concordance of the different rankings is then analyzed. In such studies, it is also frequently of interest to compare the rankings between different groups of judges, e.g. female vs. male judges or judges from different professions. In the two-group case, the two-group concordance test of Schucany & Frawley can be employed for such a comparison. In this article, we propose an extension of this test enabling the comparison of rankings from more than two groups of judges. This test aims to detect disagreement in the average rankings of the objects between k groups with an at least moderate intra-group concordance. We evaluate this test in an extensive simulation study and in an application to data from an aesthetics study. This simulation study shows that the proposed test is able to detect differences between average rankings and performs well even in situations in which the disagreement is comparably small or the intra-group concordance is inhomogeneous.     

A counterexample to a conjecture of Schwartz

In 1990, motivated by applications in the social sciences, Thomas Schwartz made a conjecture about tournaments which would have had numerous attractive consequences. In particular, it implied that there is no tournament with a partition A, B of its vertex set, such that every transitive subset of A is in the out-neighbour set of some vertex in B, and vice versa. But in fact there is such a tournament, as we show in this article, and so Schwartz’ conjecture is false. Our proof is non-constructive and uses the probabilistic method.     

The Effects of Nonprofit Reputation on Charitable Giving: A Survey Experiment

A nonprofit’s reputation is a crucial intangible asset that can bring significant benefits to the organization. Using a multidimensional framework, this study tested the effects of three dimensions of nonprofit reputation—financial efficiency, media visibility, accreditation status—on charitable giving behavior. The findings of this 2 × 2 × 2 full-factorial survey experiment show that each of the reputation dimensions has a significant individual effect on giving behavior. Furthermore, financial efficiency and accreditation status have an interaction effect on giving behavior. The findings also demonstrate the cross-level interaction between financial efficiency and the real-life giving behavior of individuals and between accreditation and the real-life volunteering behavior. This study provides implications for our understanding of the components of nonprofit reputation and their impact on charitable giving.