Hidden Agendas in Beratungs-und Veränderungsprozessen

Consulting and organization development claim to boost the client organization’s efficiency — this official goal is frequently foiled by hidden agendas which are not officially communicated. Hidden functions of consulting are to prove to the management’s legitimacy, to explain the failure of change processes, to strengthen the initator’s position in internal power struggles or to relieve the system from conflict. On the consultants’ side there is a tension between professionalism on one side and the necessity to secure follow-up projects and to sell standard products on the other side. The authors present possible interpretations for such hidden agendas and illustrate them with case studies from their practical experience as consultants.     

Missing in Action: Strategic Human Resource Management in German Nonprofits

Human resource (HR) management is important for human service nonprofits because they rely on the quality of their employees for the provision of their services. Using a typology of nonprofit HR architecture developed by Ridder and McCandless (Nonprofit Volunt Sect Q 29(1):124–141, 2010), we attempt to unpack the black box between performance and HR practices. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with HR managers and young employees to investigate their perceptions of HR practices in their nonprofit organizations. Based on the findings, we extend the research on HR management in nonprofit organizations and caution that success or failure of implementing HR practices may be directly influenced by the external environment.     

Schade,es war mal wieder keine Zeit zur Diskussion. Persönliche Eindrücke vom Kongress

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Black Caribbean Empowerment and Early Eighteenth-Century Moravian Missions Documents

The article suggests a new reading of the documents related to the early period of eighteenth-century Moravians' missionary activities in the Danish West Indies that started in 1732. The early period of Moravian missionary presence – between the 1730s and 1760s – differed from subsequent periods because later periods lost the original attempts to establish spiritual equality. A close reading of the various documents allows one to detect forms of active protest and creative agency on the part of enslaved people that were fostered, wittingly or unwittingly, by the Moravian missionaries. The article claims that the early Moravian missionaries to the Danish West Indies laid a spiritual foundation that provided a great deal more encouragement and secular empowerment to the thousands of slaves with whom they came into contact than has been considered so far in the scholarship.     

The shadow of the past: how experience affects behavior in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma experiment

We study the development of cooperation in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiment with teams as players, unknown length and unknown continuation probability as it could happen between traders regularly. To characterize real-world frictions our players are rematched with a new team twice. In such a situation—often found outside the laboratory—agents can get an idea on the likely duration of future interactions by relying on prior experience. Our main finding is that participants apparently transform the infinite-horizon situation into a finite-horizon situation. Not only do we observe decay in cooperation but also unraveling towards the end of a matching. We found a pronounced restart effect of cooperation that induces a steady rise in average cooperation over matchings. Such an effect is not observed after the unexpected continuation of the third match. Stable cooperation paths of considerable length are induced when both players start the matching with joint cooperative moves. We can draw some interesting conclusions from the behavior of the partners for commercial market situations.     

I'm going back to work: back injured clients' perceptions and experiences of their worker roles

This study aimed to elicit perceptions and experiences of facilitators and barriers that affected individuals who received back rehabilitation and their ability to resume their worker roles. Qualitative research methods were used in order to explore the research question. Participants were selected by means of simple random sampling and the data were collected by means of semi-structured focus groups. Some factors that were seen as facilitatory in maintaining the worker role of an individual who received back rehabilitation included injury management strategies, a positive work culture and having meaningful/satisfactory work experiences. Factors or barriers that prevented individuals from resuming their worker roles included physical and psychosocial stressors of the job, a lack of education by the employer and inadequate workplace policy. The results indicated that occupational therapists need to reassess their role within the wider context of the helping professions where they should become more involved in on-the-job evaluations, work placements and training of individuals who received back rehabilitation.