Does state ownership really matter? The dynamic alignment of China's resource environment and firm internationalization strategies

Recent research suggests that unequal access to home country institutional resources affects firm internationalization strategies. We add to this debate, based on an analysis of state-owned (SOEs) and non-state-owned (NSOEs) Chinese mining firms, by developing a more dynamic and multi-layered understanding of this interplay. We find that home institutional support can be ownership-based or performance-based, whereby the former benefits SOEs and the latter favors high-performing NSOEs. Combined, these support structures serve as institutional control mechanisms in promoting competition, performance and loyalty to national policies. In addition, they establish a permanent link between firm- and home country-specific assets and incentivize firms to develop dynamic resource access capabilities at home and abroad. Our findings inform our understanding of the firms-institutions nexus and Chinese foreign direct investment dynamics, especially in industries of strategic importance to the state.     

Employer Wage Differentials in Germany: A Comparative Note

The paper contributes to the growing empirical literature on employer wage differentials, presenting first estimates for West Germany and comparing them with recent findings from other studies for the USA, France and Denmark. The empirical results show that the variation of global employer wage differentials is comparatively low in West Germany and has remained stable during the first half of the 1990s. This low dispersion results from wage setting for blue‐collar workers, while cross‐country differences are negligible for white‐collar workers. Employer wage differentials have, however, become more important for the remuneration of West German blue‐collar workers during the period investigated.     

Die symbolische Macht der Individualisierung und der Kampf um die Kritik

In the article we highlight an aspect of the crisis of criticism which we call ??speechlessness of criticism??. The heterogeneous criticism cannot be bundled up to a critical story any more. A common language with explicatory pictures and grammars is missing. Two explanations are offered for the ??speechlessness?? of criticism: the changes of the normative power of justification orders and the individualisation process. Both developments are a symbolic power which can explain the speechlessness of the criticism of capitalism at least partially. After the sketch of the symbolic power of the legitimation order of project and individualisation, starting points for a renaissance of criticism are analysed. Finally we explore the relevance of a reflexive combination of critical sociology and sociology of criticism for the concept of a critical sociology of criticism.     

Institutional theory-based research on corporate social responsibility: Bringing values back in

Research applying institutional theory to corporate social responsibility (CSR) has experienced remarkable momentum. Institutional theory-based CSR research illustrates the role of values in guiding both agentic choices for CSR and the influence of institutional structures on CSR agency. Although values have been explored in this literature, systematic studies of values that seek to gain insights into the mutual relationship between agentic choices and structures are lacking. Such insights are crucial for exploring whether and how CSR is enabled or constrained. We thus ask two interrelated questions: (1) What is the role of values in institutional theory-based CSR research? (2) How and along which avenues should future institutional theory-based CSR research that focuses on values be mobilised? Based on our analysis of this line of literature from 1989 until 2021, first, we take stock of established institutional theory perspectives on CSR and disentangle what role values have played in this literature. Second, we outline how to mobilise values in future institutional CSR research based on four promising but under-investigated areas. From our literature analysis, two central functions emerge (which we label ‘bridging’ and ‘referencing’) that values can perform in the institutional analysis of CSR. Based on these two functions, our values-focused framework will help scholars examine the moral foundations that inform business–society interactions as well as understand how companies can responsibly manage those interactions with societal stakeholders.     

A note on the asymptotic distribution of a Perron-type innovational outlier unit root test with a break

This note provides the asymptotic distribution of a Perron-type innovational outlier unit root test developed by Popp (J Stat Comput Sim 78:1145–1161, 2008) in case of a shift in the intercept for non-trending data. In Popp (J Stat Comput Sim 78:1145–1161, 2008), only critical values for finite samples based on Monte Carlo techniques are tabulated. Using similar arguments as in Zivot and Andrews (J Bus Econ Stat 10:251–270, 1992), weak convergence is shown for the test statistics.     

Welfarist evaluations of decision rules under interstate utility dependencies

We provide welfarist evaluations of decision rules for federations of states and consider models, under which the interests of people from different states are stochastically dependent. We concentrate on two welfarist standards, viz. that the expected average utility for a person in the federation be maximized or that the expected utilities for the different people be equal. We discuss an analytical result that characterizes the decision rule with maximum expected average utility, set up a class of models that display interstate dependencies and run simulations for different dependency scenarios in the European Union. We find that the results that Beisbart and Bovens (Soc Choice Welf 29:581–608, 2007) established for two types of models without interstate dependencies are fairly stable if interstate dependencies are switched on. There are exceptions, though: sometimes the way in which alternative decision rules shape the welfare distribution is significantly affected by such dependencies. These exceptions particularly include cases in which the interests of people from different states are partly anti-correlated.     

Ruin problem of a two-dimensional fractional Brownian motion risk process

This paper investigates ruin probability and ruin time of a two-dimensional fractional Brownian motion risk process. The net loss process of an insurance company is modeled by a fractional Brownian motion. The two-dimensional fractional Brownian motion risk process models the surplus processes of an insurance and a reinsurance company, where the net loss is divided between them in some specified proportions. The ruin problem considered is that of the two-dimensional risk process first entering the negative quadrant, that is, the simultaneous ruin problem. We derive both asymptotics of the ruin probability and approximations of the scaled conditional ruin time as the initial capital tends to infinity.     

Subjektivierung der Biographie. Lebensorientierungen und Anspruchshaltungen

Opposing the tendency within current analyses in the social sciences to draw a conclusion from present changes in people??s working and living conditions to corresponding social-psychic dispositions, this article both theoretically and empirically develops the thesis that people??by considering structural preconditions??put demands on themselves and structure their resources and possible courses of action. In order to understand how this is done, the article develops the concept of ??life-orientation??. By means of four exemplary typifications of life-orientations gained from a research project on employees?? demands on work, we will demonstrate that established beliefs about actual forms of subjectivity are in need of correction.