Interne und externe Coachings in Unternehmen

When organizations employ coaching as an instrument for personnel development, the question arises whether they should opt to engage internal or external consultants. In a first step, this article identifies the characteristics of internal and external coaches by means of a series of criteria. It then goes on to discuss the factors which influence the suitability of choice between an internal or external coach at the level of the organization, in terms of the coachee and in terms of the coach. It becomes apparent that there is a situational consideration of the advantages and disadvantages. The article concludes with an actual example which demonstrates possibilities to combine the advantages of internal and external coaching.     

Internalized Other Interviewing in Relational Therapy: Three Discursive Approaches to Understanding its Use and Outcomes

For over 20 years, family therapist Karl Tomm has been engaging families and couples with a therapeutic intervention he calls Internalized Other Interviewing (IOI). The IOI (cf. Emmerson‐Whyte, 2010; Hurley, 2006) entails interviewing clients, from the personal experiences of partners and family members as an internalized other. The IOI is based on the idea that through dialogues over time, one can internalize a sense of one's conversational partner responsiveness in reliably anticipated ways. Anyone who has thought in a conversation with a family member or partner, “Oh there s/he goes again,” or anticipates next words before they leave the other's mouth, has a sense of what we are calling an internalized other. For Tomm, the internalized anticipations partners and family members may have offers entry points into new dialogues with therapeutic potential—particularly, when their actual dialogues get stuck in dispreferred patterns.     

Assessing Risk‐Based Upper Limits of Melamine Migration from Food Containers

Melamine contamination of food has become a major food safety issue because of incidents of infant disease caused by exposure to this chemical. This study was aimed at establishing a safety limit in Taiwan for the degree of melamine migration from food containers. Health risk assessment was performed for three exposure groups (preschool children, individuals who dine out, and elderly residents of nursing homes). Selected values of tolerable daily intake (TDI) for melamine were used to calculate the reference migration concentration limit (RMCL) or reference specific migration limit (RSML) for melamine food containers. The only existing values of these limits for international standards today are 1.2 mg/L (0.2 mg/dm²) in China and 30 mg/L (5 mg/dm²) in the European Union. The factors used in the calculations included the specific surface area of food containers, daily food consumption rate, body weight, TDI, and the percentile of the population protected at a given migration concentration limit (MCL). The results indicate that children are indeed at higher risk of melamine exposure at toxic levels than are other groups and that the 95th percentile of MCL (specific surface area = 5) for children aged 1–6 years should be the RMCL (0.07 mg/dm²) for protecting the sensitive and general population.     

ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF THE TIMING OF PREFERENTIAL TRADE AGREEMENT FORMATIONS AND ENLARGEMENTS

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have proliferated over the past 60 years. While a small number of recent studies have examined empirically the economic determinants of the likelihood of a pair of countries having a PTA, this study explains empirically the timing of all PTA formations and enlargements from 1950 through 2006 using duration analysis. Our main and novel goal is to predict (in‐ and out‐of‐sample) a substantive share of these 1,560 PTA events using a parsimonious model with mainly economic variables, taking selection dynamics into account. Our analysis reveals that we can predict correctly in‐sample the actual year of entry into force for 26% of the 1,560 bilateral PTA formations/enlargements in the period 1950–2006 among 10,518 pairings of 146 countries using only a few economic and political variables. Moreover, we can predict correctly in‐sample 57% of these PTA events within a 10‐year window leading up to the event using this model. The model also performs well out‐of‐sample for the near term (82%), but not if the out‐of‐sample period is very long. We conclude with an evaluation of the model's ability to predict the timing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union's formation and enlargements, and the model's ten most likely post‐2006 PTA events. (JEL F14, F15)     

Racial Group Comparisons of Conceptualizations of Rap Music Constructs: A Cross-racial Validity Study of the Rap Music Attitude and Perception Scale

Interpretations and perceptions of the effects and content of rap music lyrics have been given considerable attention in the literature in recent years, yet few assessment tools have been developed that can produce reliable and valid inferences about these views. One exception is the Rap-music Attitude and Perception (RAP) Scale. This study examined the cross-racial effects on attitudes toward and perceptions of rap music using a sample of 1,254 college students. A cross-sectional survey design was used to gather these data. Three specific hypotheses were tested and were supported or partially supported. Alpha reliabilities for the full scale and for each of the three sub-scales were good for black and white students separately. Criterion validity for these groups was also good. Finally, tests of factorial equivalence suggested that the factor structure of the RAP was equivalent across racial groups. The RAP is a tool with strong psychometric properties and can be used by practitioners and researchers working with black and white subgroups. Directions for future research on the utility of the RAP are forwarded.