Bollwerk Zivilgesellschaft? Der Drang zum Extremen und Fanatismus in diesen unsicheren Zeiten

International studies show that the globalization and liberalization of modern societies often are experienced as a profound self-confusion. As an answer to these fundamental attacks on their self-esteem, many people develop extreme belief systems, which help them to regain self-confidence and self-assurance. Based on two examples of radicalization – xenophobia and veganism- some underlying psychological processes are discussed. As some consequences of radicalization for societies can be expected, e.?g. a strong hostile social polarization, a growing incompetence to adjust to a world of permanent change, or the total refusal to engage in dialogue. However, some hope offers the civil society in their resolute concountering radicalism to defend the virtues of democracy.     

International coopetition for innovation: Are the benefits worth the challenges?

International coopetition has rarely been studied in relation to innovation. Further exploration of effects of international coopetition, i.e. the pursuit of simultaneous cooperation and competition, on a firm’s innovation performance is especially important as such a relationship is challenging with a high propensity to fail. This observation formed the point of departure for this study, which aims to increase the understanding of the effects of international coopetition on firm innovativeness and how these effects are conditioned on the magnitude of the organizational adjustments a firm introduces. We use an unbalanced panel of 9839 firms that participated in four waves of the Swedish Community Innovation Survey between 2008 and 2014 as our empirical base. We illustrate that firms that cooperate with competitors internationally are more likely to exhibit higher propensity to introduce radical innovations, yet this effect is conditioned upon the magnitude of organizational adjustments. Overall, our study contributes to the understanding of the implications of international coopetition and what a firm needs to benefit from it.     

Organizational innovativeness and coopetition: a study of video game developers

Collaboration with rivals is viewed as a way to achieve superior performance of firms in terms of innovation output. Yet empirical results show that coopetition may either foster, hamper or be neutral to innovation. The motivation of our study resides in firms’ heterogeneity in terms of their innovative capacity, that is innovativeness, in order to better understand the complex relationship between coopetition and innovation. We explore the interdependency between organizational innovativeness and coopetition. Our study has been conducted in the Polish video game industry. The data has been collected through a survey administered to all 506 identified Polish video game developers, with an effective sample of 84 coopetitors. We run correlation and regression analyses in a multidimensional approach to organizational innovativeness and coopetition. Our findings show that coopetition is a popular strategy for video game developers, and is adopted by 68% of firms. Organizational innovativeness and its particular dimensions are positively and significantly related to both direct and indirect coopetition. Based on factor analysis we find its three components to be reliable: openness and encouragement to innovate; strategic innovative focus; and extrinsic monetary motivation. While extrinsic monetary motivation does not play a role in coopetition of video game developers, openness and encouragement to innovate stimulates especially indirect coopetition, while strategic innovative focus affects especially direct coopetition.     

Coopetition in coworking-spaces: value creation and appropriation tensions in an entrepreneurial space

Coopetition has the potential to improve entrepreneurship and innovation. It will be prevalent in coworking-spaces building a growing field for individual and corporate entrepreneurship. The individuals’ physical closeness in the professional and social space of the coworking-space eases multifaceted transfers of explicit and implicit knowledge, stimulating creation, transfer, overhaul, and implementation of entrepreneurial ideas. While entrepreneurs in these coworking-spaces collaborate on sharing knowledge and resources and on finding creative ideas from which can breed new venture concepts, they simultaneously compete on the appropriation of values. Thus, entrepreneurs in coworking-spaces face coopetitive tensions of creating and appropriating the values. Based  on  interview data and secondary sources, this paper explains four different prototype institutions of coworking-spaces: the corporate coworking-space, the open corporate coworking-space, the consultancy coworking-space, and the independent coworking-space. Study explains different tensions of value creation and appropriation that occur within the coopetition in the different forms of coworking-spaces.     

The relation between coopetition and innovation/entrepreneurship

This special issue is an outcome of the 2017 Global Innovation and Knowledge Academy (GIKA) Conference, which took place at ISEG School of Economics and Management, Lisbon, Portugal, between June 28th and 30th, 2017. As the seventh of its kind, the 2017 GIKA Conference continued to attract the attention of scholars from around the world, receiving more than 600 submissions, only 300 of which were accepted for presentation at the conference. The topic of this special issue—the relation between coopetition and innovation/entrepreneurship—had an own track at the GIKA Conference, which served as a first round review for some of the submissions to the journal. The special issue was also open for external submissions.     

Contract design and insurance fraud: an experimental investigation

This paper experimentally examines the impact of contract design on insurance fraud. We test how fraud behavior varies for insurance contracts with full coverage, a straight deductible or claim-dependent premiums (bonus-malus contracts), in a setup where rational and selfish individuals have an incentive to always claim the maximum possible indemnity. We find a substantial impact of contractual arrangements: Deductible contracts lead to a greater extent to claim build-up than full coverage contracts. In contrast, bonus-malus contracts that entail the same net gains from fraud as deductible contracts do not increase claim build-up. Thus, our results indicate that bonus-malus contracts may be superior to deductible contracts for behavioral reasons.     

David and Goliath: causes and effects of coopetition between start-ups and corporates

Coopetition (collaboration between competitors) among young firms (i.e. start-ups) and larger, more established firms (i.e. corporates) may be beneficial for both partners as each party typically has something to offer that is missing in the other. Start-ups often develop innovative ideas, are flexible and agile, willing to take risks, and aspire to achieve high growth, but they tend to lack the required resources, capabilities, and knowledge due to their newness and smallness. Corporates have resources, routines, and experience that enable them to work efficiently but lack a certain innovation capability. Research has suggested that coopetition represents an opportunity for start-ups facing restrictions in resources, while corporates benefit from start-ups’ innovative ideas. However, it is yet unknown whether start-ups and corporates engage in coopetition with each other and, if so, how and why they do this. This study seeks to fill this void by exploring the motives of coopeting start-ups and corporates, how they manage their coopetitive relationship, and what implications occur including potential benefits and risks. We present a multiple case study based on qualitative data collected through 70 interviews with Austrian-based start-ups and corporates representing 35 coopetitive partnerships. Discussing the findings based on our data, we propose relationships concerning coopetition and its role to enlarge resource- and technology-bases as well as its role in the development of dynamic capabilities.     

Subsidized Housing and the Transition to Adulthood

Despite abundant evidence about the effect of children’s socioeconomic circumstances on their transition to adulthood, we know much less about the effect of social policy programs aimed at poor families with children in facilitating how and when children become adults. This issue is particularly important for the U.S. federal subsidized housing program given its long history of placing subsidized units in some of the poorest and most racially segregated neighborhoods. Using counterfactual causal methods that adjust for the length of receipt of subsidized housing, I estimate the effect of subsidized housing on teenage parenthood, household formation, and educational attainment. I find that the subsidized housing program has either null or positive effects on the transition to adulthood and that these effects vary by both race and gender. These results underscore the importance of considering whether social programs have differential effects on the life chances of individuals based on both race and gender.     

The Role of Family Behaviors in Determining Income Distribution: The Case of South Korea

In this article, we examined what has contributed to the worsening income inequality and poverty between 1996 and 2011 in South Korea. We used a rank-preserving exchange method and a conditional reweighting method to assess the roles of family behaviors—including female labor force participation and family structure—characteristics of household heads, and men’s earnings. The results showed that the change in men’s earnings was a dominant factor in accounting for the increasing income inequality and poverty. The change in age and education among household heads also contributed significantly to the worsening income distribution. The change in family structure mainly affected the income disparity among lower-income families and increased poverty. The rise in women’s labor force participation improved the income distribution but not considerably. The distributional roles of family have not worked to prevent or reverse the worsening income distribution in the past few decades in South Korea.     

Growing Wealth Gaps in Education

Prior research on trends in educational inequality has focused chiefly on changing gaps in educational attainment by family income or parental occupation. In contrast, this contribution provides the first assessment of trends in educational attainment by family wealth and suggests that we should be at least as concerned about growing wealth gaps in education. Despite overall growth in educational attainment and some signs of decreasing wealth gaps in high school attainment and college access, I find a large and rapidly increasing wealth gap in college attainment between cohorts born in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. This growing wealth gap in higher educational attainment co-occurred with a rise in inequality in children’s wealth backgrounds, although the analyses also suggest that the latter does not fully account for the former. Nevertheless, the results reported here raise concerns about the distribution of educational opportunity among today’s children who grow up in a context of particularly extreme wealth inequality.