Introduction

Social Indicators Research -     

Essay: An Insight into Current German Research on Listening,as Exemplified by the Educational Project “GanzOhrSein”

The article gives us an exemplary insight into research in Germany that deals directly or indirectly with aspects of listening. The reader is given a clear picture of the Munich university project GanzOhrSein aimed at promoting listening skills in schools. The educational value of listening is initially derived from research findings and the model course of action to promote listening skills is explained via the cultural potential. The findings of the accompanying research clearly show that the diverse ways of promoting listening ability that have been developed and tested, do broaden the hearing and listening habits of the children and teachers participating in the project, and do facilitate listening conditions in lessons. The article will also demonstrate what researchers and everyday school practice can gain from this project, and how the institutionalisation of the promotion of listening can benefit.     

The nearest neighbor Spearman footrule distance for bucket, interval, and partial orders

Comparing and ranking information is an important topic in social and information sciences, and in particular on the web. Its objective is to measure the difference of the preferences of voters on a set of candidates and to compute a consensus ranking. Commonly, each voter provides a total order of all candidates. Recently, this approach was generalized to bucket orders, which allow ties. In this work we further generalize and consider total, bucket, interval and partial orders. The disagreement between two orders is measured by the nearest neighbor Spearman footrule distance, which has not been studied so far. For two bucket orders and for a total and an interval order the nearest neighbor Spearman footrule distance is shown to be computable in linear time, whereas for a total and a partial order the computation is NP-hard, 4-approximable and fixed-parameter tractable. Moreover, in contrast to the well-known efficient solution of the rank aggregation problem for total orders, we prove the NP-completeness for bucket orders and establish a 4-approximation.     

A Review of Theory in Family Business Research: The Implications for Corporate Governance

In recent years, increasing scholarly attention has been directed toward the field of family business research. Based on an exhaustive sample of 235 publications, this article provides a comprehensive review and a critical assessment of the theoretical underpinnings and corporate governance issues in family business research. Three predominant theoretical perspectives, namely principal–agent theory, stewardship theory and the resource‐based view of the firm, have emerged and provide empirical evidence that family businesses significantly differ from non‐family firms in important dimensions such as agency costs, competitive advantages or corporate governance structure. On their own, none of the aforementioned perspectives succeeds in addressing all complexities associated with family businesses and their corporate governance. Accordingly, joint approaches combining different theoretical frameworks can help to improve understanding of the family business. The article concludes by discussing possible directions for future research that might further contribute to building a comprehensive theory of the family business and its corporate governance.     

Do service-oriented IT architectures facilitate business process outsourcing?

How does a firm’s IT architecture affect its potential to outsource business processes? As Information Technology (IT) has become many firms’ essential operational infrastructure or “backbone”, we are interested in scrutinizing to what extent the kind of IT architecture affects a firm’s boundaries or the plasticity of its boundaries. Focusing on the particular concept of service-oriented architectures (SOA), we concretely ask: How does SOA affect business process outsourcing potentials? Since SOA is widely expected to modularize the IT implementation of business processes, it should increase business process outsourcing (BPO) in terms of buying in the provision of single business functionalities. We develop and empirically evaluate a theoretical model that conceptualizes the relationship between SOA and BPO. Questionnaire data from 115 firms give first evidence that SOA facilitates BPO. By increasing IT modularity, SOA supports BPO by increasing sourcing flexibility and, in particular, operational benefits, while at the same time lowering financial risks and strategic risks, such as lock-in. Overall, however, firms see SOA-based BPO mainly in an operational context with low hidden costs and little strategic benefits.