Sektionen Jugendsoziologie und Kultursoziologie

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

International Strategy and Knowledge Creation: The Advantage of Foreignness and Liability of Concentration

International business scholars increasingly emphasize regional strategies based on an optimal location of downstream sales. There has been less scholarly attention, however, to the relationship between international strategy and upstream knowledge creation including R&D. Building on contemporary strategic management theory and the knowledge‐based view we remedy this. The viability of home‐regional or bi‐regional strategies is based on common assumptions that imply negative consequences of distance and foreignness for downstream sales and marketing and benefits from agglomeration for upstream knowledge creation activities including R&D. In contrast, we propose that upstream knowledge creation, radical innovation in particular, rather gains from distance and foreignness and from being dispersed, suggesting the effectiveness of a global strategy. Based on the resource‐based view and recent research on the economics of strategic opportunities and competitive advantage, we provide theoretical explanations for this. We demonstrate how a global multinational corporation is uniquely equipped with knowledge extensity including heterogeneous social‐identity frames in multiple sub‐units. Thanks to arbitrage advantages between the sub‐units’ separate and often locally embedded knowledge, a global multinational corporation can address complex interdependences and interactions between knowledge sets required for knowledge creation. This suggests that maximum exploration capabilities are made possible by a global rather than a home‐regional or bi‐regional strategy.     

Structure-preserving mappings of uniform order statistics

There are several well-known mappings which transform the first r common order statistics in a sample of size n from a standard uniform distribution to a full vector of dimension r of order statistics in a sample of size r from a uniform distribution. Continuing the results reported in a previous paper by the authors, it is shown that transformations of these types do not lead to order statistics from an i.i.d. sample of random variables, in general, when being applied to order statistics from non-uniform distributions. By accepting the loss of one dimension, a structure-preserving transformation exists for power function distributions.     

Reliability properties of record values from non-identically distributed random variables

In reliability theory, order statistics and record values are used for statistical modelling. The r-th order statistic in a sample of size n represents the life—length of a (n?r+l)-out-of-n system, and record values are used in shock models. In recent years, reliability properties of order statistics and record values have been investigated. The two models are included in Pfeifer's concept of record values from non-identically distributed random variables. Here, some results on the transmission of distributional properties, such as increasing failure rate, are shown for such records, which contain the results for order statistics and ordinary record values as particular cases.     

Complaints and inequality

Temkin (1986, 1993) set out a philosophical basis for the analysis of income inequality that provides an important alternative to the mainstream welfarist approach. We show that the Temkin principles can be characterised by a parsimonious axiomatic structure and we use this structure to derive a new class of inequality indices and an inequality ordering. This class of indices has a family relationship to well-known measures of inequality, deprivation and poverty. The ordering is shown to have properties analogous to second-order dominance results.We would like to acknowledge financial support by the Training and Mobility of Researchers Programme of the European Communities, grant #ERBFMRXC T980248 (Living Standards, Inequality and Taxation), and to thank STICERD for hosting Ebert in order to facilitate our collaboration. Ralph Bayer helped greatly in preparation of the figures. We are grateful for comments from Yoram Amiel, Kurt Devooght and Alain Trannoy and from participants at workshops in Warwick, Bocconi, the LSE and Venice. We also wish to acknowledge the helpful comments of the referees of this journal.     

Using equivalent income of equivalent adults to rank income distributions

The paper proposes the consistent and rigorous use of equivalence scales for households of different size. Equivalence scales are employed for deriving the income of an equivalent adult representing the household and for weighting the different household types. The proceeding takes into account the possibilities and the needs of different household types at the same time and seems to be adequate if income distributions are to be compared in terms of social welfare or inequality. The approach allows to define and to investigate the usual concepts (Lorenz curve, Lorenz dominance, social welfare function, progressive transfers etc.) for heterogeneous populations. They can be interpreted in an obvious way, and the results, well known for homogeneous populations, can be generalized. Furthermore, some unpleasant and unsatisfactory paradoxa or impossibility results, which can be found in the literature, vanish in the framework considered. Received: 7 March 1997/Accepted: 4 November 1997     

Die Integration qualitativer und quantitativer Forschung – theoretische Grundlagen von „Mixed Methods“

Mixed Methods have been used in social research for quite a long time, as can be seen by looking on influential empirical studies from the first half of the 20^th century, where the combined use of qualitative and quantitative methods was justified in most cases only pragmatically (if at all). Unfortunately, the discussions led from the 1970s onwards about theoretical justifications of mixed methods designs often suffered from a focus limited on formal and epistemological issues. This holds true for the debates about the notion of “triangulation” as well as for the controversies about the paradigms presumably underlying quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods research. By contrasting “positivism”, “constructivism” and “pragmatism” outdated frontlines were often preserved and complex philosophical problems oversimplified. Furthermore, the focus on epistemology led to a neglect of substantial issues relating to the research field (which are always critical for the use of methods).The necessity for using (and combining) quantitative and qualitative methods follows from the nature of social structures relevant for the concrete field of investigation which may differ widely according to their stability and flexibility. Thereby structures with limited scope or “contingent structures” create specific problems for qualitative and quantitative methods which can be detected and dealt with by drawing on the strengths of the respective other methodological tradition in mixed methods designs.     

Datenanalyse in der Mixed-Methods-Forschung

This article discusses data analysis in mixed methods approaches. The challenge of integration during the stage of analysis has recently become a main point of the discourse on mixed methods that for more than a decade had been centered on topics of research design and compatibility of paradigms. The article focuses on key aspects of integration strategies as well as on points of the integration, which depend largely on the research design of the project. Ten different integration strategies in three areas are presented in detail, namely result-based, data-based and sequence-oriented integration strategies. Joint displays, which jointly present data and/or results of the qualitative and the quantitative research strands a particularly important.     

Seat Biases in Proportional Representation Systems with Thresholds

In proportional representation systems, apportionment methods are used to convert the number of votes of a party into the number of seats allocated to this party. An interesting characteristic of any such method are the seat biases, that is, the expected differences between the actual seat allocation and the ideal share of seats, separately for each party, when parties are ordered from largest to smallest. For electoral systems with a threshold, that is, with a minimum percentage of votes that parties must reach in order to be eligible to participate in the apportionment process, we show that seat biases decrease from their maximum to zero, as the threshold increases from zero to its maximum, and that all seat biases decrease linearly.