MEASURING THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF MULTINATIONAL FIRMS' FOREIGN INVESTMENTS

Earlier work found evidence for geographic linkages of aggregate foreign direct investment across countries and country‐pairs. From a theoretical point of view, such linkages at the macroeconomic level may root in between‐firm as well as within‐firm linkages and originate from information spillovers across or within firms in exploring unknown markets, and vertical linkages between production plants across different locations within the firm. We use data on the universe of German multinational enterprises (MNEs) to empirically explore how marginal investments at one foreign affiliate depend on investments at other affiliates within the same MNE. The empirical approach employs two channels or modes of cross‐affiliate interdependence: mere geography (capturing horizontal linkages through correlated learning and horizontal competition within the firm) and input–output relationships within or across industries (which capture vertical linkages). Adding to earlier findings at the aggregate level, we find evidence of a significant interdependence of investments within the firm. In the firm‐level data at hand, vertical linkages appear to be more important than horizontal ones. Investments at one location tend to stimulate investments at other locations of the same MNE, particularly if input linkages are strong. The opposite seems to be true for output linkages. Beyond vertical linkages, mere geographic proximity matters only to a minor extent. This suggests that evidence of linkages through geographic closeness at aggregate data levels accrue mainly to reasons of vertical linkages within networks of affiliates. (JEL C31, D22, F21, F23, F68, G31, H32)     

The Presentation of Avatars in Second Life: Self and Interaction in Social Virtual Spaces

What do interactions in virtual spaces suggest about everyday life in the digital age? How do interactions in virtual spaces shape everyday life in the digital age? Guided by hypermodern theory, I conduct participant observation in the social virtual world Second Life to provide tentative answers to those questions. I suggest that Second Life is both a social psychological playground where participants enjoy individualistic fantasies and a virtual community where they collaborate on collective projects. When people define the virtual as real, it is real in its consequences. Accordingly, social virtual spaces such as Second Life offer sociologists unique opportunities for research, education, intervention, and hence the development of a virtual imagination.     

Structural holes and managerial performance: Identifying the underlying mechanisms

Structural holes theory suggests a variety of possible explanations for the empirically observed relationship between structural holes and individual managerial performance. However, little has been done to disentangle one mechanism from another. This paper empirically tests a mediated moderation model that distinguishes between the five different theoretical mechanisms: autonomy, competition, information brokering, opportunity recognition and innovativeness. The findings suggest that of these five theoretical causal motors, innovativeness plays a key role in linking network structure and network content to performance.     

Using Generational Intelligence to Examine Community Care Work between Younger and Older Adults

Exploring the factors that contribute to sustainable forms of an intergenerational relationship is becoming an important conceptual and practical challenge, not least because of the growing need for an aged care workforce that is both motivated and suitably trained. Generational intelligence is a means of examining interaction between younger and older people which has been applied to community care settings. Dimensions of generational intelligence include recognising and valuing generational differences, finding common ground, plus negotiating social and practical outcomes from the situation. A case study plus a series of qualitative interviews are used to examine the value of this approach both as a means of exploring the processes involved in generational exchange and in providing recommendations for work preparation and training. It is suggested that intergenerational relations have been a missing factor in the understanding of sustainable care and that in future, service delivery should not simply be analysed as comprising professional and lay perspectives but also as containing generationally distinctive perspectives that require negotiation.     

The Social Backgrounds of Nazi Leaders: A Statistical Analysis of Political Elites in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933

This article compares the social backgrounds of Nazi leaders and representatives of democratic parties in the Weimar Republic. It does not advance any overarching new narrative on Nazism’s social origins, but rather aims to present a nuanced statistical picture of Weimar’s political elites. The results of this analysis are derived from an index of German members of parliament and from a new dataset, which has recently been collected from the Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), Germany’s largest biographical encyclopaedia. Together, these two samples cover more than 2000 German politicians, industrialists, diplomats, political writers, academics, high state officials, and important journalists. This article reveals sociological differences between the politicians who led the Nazi party in parliament and those elites that promoted Nazism in the media, in academia, or within the German civil service. While Nazi politicians in the Reichstag were recruited from a variety of social classes, ranging from industrial workers to members of the aristocracy, National Socialist elites outside the parliament typically belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum and sociologically resembled the highly educated members of democratic and liberal parties. Overall, the picture of a generation of Nazi leaders emerges that was sociologically far more heterogeneous than is often recognized by historians.     

Storifying routines and routinising stories: A dualistic subject positioning analysis of controversies about constraints on patient autonomy

This paper uses subject positioning theory to explore how conflicts between autonomy and protection are managed in the justification of controversial care arrangements for patients with mental/neurological illness. Its basic argument is twofold: firstly, to justify or propose care arrangements at strategic or contentious moments, actors position illness as an actant and make it present in talk‐in‐interaction, exploiting alignments and misalignments between the there and then of reported events and the above and beyond of shared societal discourses to say what matters and what's to be done here and now; secondly, the introduction of authoritative voices from elsewhere involves imbricating narrative and routine sequences in order to prioritise different subjectivities. Dilemmas opposing autonomy and protection may seem less intractable if we adopt a corresponding perspective interplay between narrative and routine situational readings.     

Letters to the editor

Relatively little attention has been paid to the use and importance of labels used by men who have sex with men to describe insertive or receptive sexual behavior during intercourse. This study examines sexual self‐labels, sexual behavior, HIV transmission risk, and psychological functioning among 205 HIV‐seropositive men who have sex with men. The majority of participants (88%) identified as a “top, “ a “bottom, “ or “versatile. “ Tops were more likely to engage in insertive anal intercourse than bottoms, and bottoms were more likely to engage in receptive anal intercourse than tops, with versatiles reporting intermediate rates of both behaviors. Although the results suggest preliminary evidence regarding the predictive utility of self‐labels, sexual behaviors of self‐label groups were greatly overlapping. Differences were found among self‐label groups in gay self‐identification, internalized homophobia, sexual sensation seeking, and anxiety. Results suggest an added value in assessing self‐labels in addition to asking about sexual behavior.