European cultures and management styles

After the establishment of the Common Market in Europe, many companies from abroad opted for a single European headquarters and searched for European managers. That leads to the question whether one can really speak of a common European management style. The article at hand examines this issue. To do this, the legal framework and Corporate Governance background of individual European countries are assessed. Furthermore, cultural differences in Europe are considered. Referring to studies of cultural dimensions in European countries, the authors propose five different cultural areas in Europe. This leads to a concluding discussion of management styles in these regions.     

Zur Aktualität des Kompetenzbegriffs und zur Bedeutung der Kompetenz-entwicklung für das Coaching

The popular use of the term “competence” and the significance of competence development in coachingThe term “competence” is frequently used by employers, employees, trainers and authors alike, though in many cases the concept behind this term might differ considerably. But what does competence really mean, how does competence differ from other concepts like qualification, ability and skill and what is essential in developing competencies? If competence is seen as a disposition of self-organization, it helps people to solve unknown and difficult requirements based on their knowledge. The basic aim of coaching is the development of job-related competencies. Particularly social and personal competencies can be highly improved and enlarged by coaching. Thereby the coach takes the role of a consultant, who assists the coachees during their learning process and supports them with appropriate methods and tools.     

Methodological Challenges Posed by Measures of Performance

Performance measures are everywhere, but they are filled with errors, and these errors are likely to cause faulty inferences. We should distrust performance measures, but we cannot ignore them because they are powerful motivators that can produce dramatic improvements in human and organizational performance.     

Unsicherheiten im Beratungsdiskurs

Uncertainties in discourses of consulting. Why consultees need philosophy — pragmatism for exampleThe author demonstrates, in which way the pragmatism, particularly the philosophy of John Dewey with his aspects of epistemology, theory of acting, theory of learning, theory of democracy and ethics, can help, how people in organisations can learn to act intelligently and successfully in processes of consulting, although just today uncertainties are wide-spread.     

Mentoring und Coaching in Unternehmen — Abgrenzung der Inhalte

Mentoring and coaching in companies — definition of contentsOften Mentoring and Coaching are used at the same time in the same situations. Mentoring marks the consultation relationship inside the company, regarding knowledge of the culture of the company, habits and unwritten statues, whereas coaching intends to get independent advice for the personality from outside the company. The different use of the terms enables the user to define the roles, contents, goals of the consultation which are dependent of the individual development goals of the person.     

Entwicklung zur Handlungskompetenz durch Supervision in der Automobilindustrie

Development of competence by supervision in automotive industryAs a result of problems with the implementation of teamwork in the production processes a car manufacturing company decided to install training activities for the technical management. The author who participated in this training program, describes in which way a psychodrama oriented supervision was implemented as a specific learning process.     

Above and Below the Water: Social/Ecological Transformation in Northwest Newfoundland

Marine fisheries and fishing societies develop around the resources provided by a particular ecosystem. As they exploit these resources, fisheries transform the ecosystem, which pushes fishery and society to adapt in turn. This process is illustrated by fisheries, ecological and social data tracking dramatic changes on Newfoundland's Northern Peninsula and its adjacent marine ecosystem, the northern Gulf of St. Lawrence. There a longstanding fishery for cod and other groundfish collapsed in the 1990s, and was replaced by fisheries targeting invertebrates. The new invertebrate fisheries have different socioeconomic characteristics than the former groundfish fisheries. The shift in target species reflects deep ecological changes that were underway at least a decade before official recognition of the crisis. Our analysis of biological data reveals that the main ecological changes occurred during the glory years of the 1980s, when Newfoundland's domestic fisheries were at their peak. Overfishing and interactions with adverse climatic conditions drove the changes. As the ecosystem transformed, human population declined due to outmigration, and social indicators show signs of distress. Accounts by outport residents paint a generational picture of social change.     

A Quantitative Investigation of the Population-Land Inequality-Land Clearance Nexus

This paper provides a quantitative investigation of the population-land inequality-land clearance nexus. Drawing on the literature on farmer optimization behaviour, the study formalizes and empirically tests a model of population-induced agricultural land clearance. The model makes several assumptions about this process: (a) The rate at which agricultural land is brought into production due to rising population pressures accelerates with the level of inequality in access to land, (b) Egalitarian systems have a greater capacity to absorb rising numbers of people per unit of land area and, thus, will have lower rates of agricultural land clearance than higher ones and (c) Irrespective of its degree of egalitarianism, the capacity of any system to hold people in one place will eventually break down once a critical population threshold is reached. Due to their lower population absorptive capacity, this level will be reached sooner under unequal systems of land distribution. Thus, the model also hypothesizes that the stimulatory impact of population growth on the demand for new land will exhibit a non-linear threshold pattern. For the farmer, the decision to clear a new plot of land will reflect these population-inequality interactions: Earnings from farming in settled areas will tend to fall as population densities and inequality in access to land increase. Time series results confirm that rural population growth is a significant factor driving agricultural land clearance in many of the 59 developing countries of our sample. Results also suggest that this rate of clearance is largest in countries with highly inegalitarian patterns of distribution. In contrast, cross-sectional regression results do not suggest any direct role for land inequality in population-agricultural land use outcomes. Contrary to the models assumption that this relationship should follow a non-linear threshold pattern, cross-sectional results also find no evidence that the absorptive capacity of highly densely populated land systems has been reached on average. However, they do provide support for an indirect linear relationship: Population induced agricultural land clearance is significantly magnified as inequality in access to land increases. Drawing on the empirics of the growth-inequality literature, the study suggests that this magnifying role may be linked to inequalitys impact on the assets of the poor. That is, by undermining the capacity of the rural poor to make productive investments in the land base, inequality in land distribution mediates population pressures in a way that affects both the quality and quantity of assets available to the poor to raise incomes, invest in skills accumulation, and spur demand in the rural economy as a whole.     

Abstract Aggregations and Proximity Preservation: An Impossibility Result

An impossibility result for completely abstract social aggregation rules is presented. It is shown that non-imposition and a new no-veto property (two properties in the spirit of the Pareto principle and non-dictatorship respectively) are incompatible with an inter-profile consistency condition formulated in terms of proximity preservation.The result in this paper has been presented in the Staff Seminar at the University of Graz and at the 2001 Meeting of the Public Choice Society in San Antonio. We are grateful to all participants, especially Hannu Nurmi and Don Saari, and to an anonymous referee for helpful comments.     

The Popular Debate about Low Fertility: An Analysis of the German Press, 1993–2001

Despite increasing research on the causes, consequences, and measurement of low fertility, questions about the nature and the extent of popular concerns over low fertility have yielded more speculation than examination. We address this gap in the literature through an analysis of 328 German newspaper and news magazine articles mentioning low fertility from 1993 to 2001. Our analysis reveals a paradox: while fertility rates have remained well below replacement levels and governmental discussions of low fertility have increased, discussion of low fertility as a concern in and of itself has been small and unchanging over time. We find this to be true because the problem of low fertility is rarely invoked as a concern in its own right, but is most often used as a tool in the popular debate to discuss other problems – political, economic, and cultural.