Rethinking the Foundations of Sustainability Measurement: The Limitations of the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI)

The objective of sustainability measurement is to move environmental decision making toward more rigorous, quantitative and empirical foundations. One of the most comprehensive attempts to lay out the foundations for sustainability measurement has been offered by the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI). This paper aims to advance the science of sustainability measurement by assessing the validity and reliability of this composite index in order to provide new insights for future indicator development. The architecture of the ESI is validated against the Pressure-State-Response (PSR) model, after which an exploratory factor analysis is conducted to reveal the latent structure of the index. Further, the performance of the ESI is tested in cross-national regression models. The results indicate a lack of consistency with the well established PSR model and a potential bias towards economically developed countries grounded in the architecture and weighting mechanism of the index. A re-weighted index (Equivalised ESI) is constructed, resulting in a new ranking of countries’ sustainability. The Equivalised ESI improves the measurement qualities of the index, and in so doing actually reinforces the rich-country bias of the ESI. Put differently, the Equivalised ESI brings the deficiencies of the original ESI to the fore. This paper illustrates that there are serious conceptual problems and validity concerns with defining the ESI as a sustainability measure. Taken together, the findings reinforce the need to reconsider future foundations of sustainability measurement in order to ensure that it is clear both what is being measured and how well.     

Bewältigungs- und Aneignungsmuster staatlich geförderter Beschäftigung bei ehemaligen Langzeitarbeitslosen

The article analyses the experiences made in publicly subsidized employment by long-term-unemployed in theoretical and empirical perspectives. The heterogeneity of the investigated population requires a differentiation between various types of personal employment histories as well as the examination of patterns of coping with subsidized employment from a differential perspective: Only a subgroup of the target-group share the notions of normality on which its construction is based. Furthermore, the wage subsidy can fulfill different functions with regard to the recipient’s personal employment history. Finally, problematic employment situations can result in the termination of a subsidized employment relationship. Since heterogeneous groups of persons can be affected by a permanent exclusion from the labour market, it seems problematic to tackle the problems connected with this situation by applying a single labour market measure.     

DO CIVIL AND POLITICAL REPRESSION REALLY BOOST FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENTS?

Multinational enterprises are often accused of having a preference for investing in countries in which the working populations' civil and political rights are largely disregarded. This article presents an empirical investigation of the popular "political repression boosts FDI" hypothesis and arrives at the conclusion that the hypothesis is not supported. On the contrary, multinational enterprises rather appear to be attracted by countries in which civil and political freedom is respected.     

The Influence of Commitment,Trust, Satisfaction,and Involvement on Donor Retention

Due to certain developments in the business of fundraising, there exists an increasing necessity to theoretically and empirically analyze donor behavior. This article examines donor retention from the donor’s point of view. It concretizes four antecedents and their relationships with one another. The influencing variables investigated are commitment, trust, satisfaction, and involvement. The empirical analysis conducted in Germany among donors of four representative social non-profit organizations shows that all variables have an influence on donor retention, although some of them only indirectly.     

How Journalists Think about Media Effects—And Why We Should Care

Research suggests that journalists’ beliefs about media effects are influenced by unsystematically gathered knowledge and subjective-intuitive judgments. However, it has also been shown that these presumptions must be considered important factors for the formation of journalistic coverage. Against this background, this article synthesizes existing research on dimensions, determinants, and consequences of journalists’ presumptions of media effects. The resulting framework offers researchers in the field of journalistic content production a comprehensive overview of the possible role that presumptions of media effects could play for journalistic content creation. In a second step, we summarize the implications that the current state of research points at. We discuss why journalism scholars should integrate presumed media effects into their research agendas and what communication researchers, as well as journalists themselves, could do to promote more realistic beliefs about media effects among journalists.     

Correlated variables in regression: Clustering and sparse estimation

We consider estimation in a high-dimensional linear model with strongly correlated variables. We propose to cluster the variables first and do subsequent sparse estimation such as the Lasso for cluster-representatives or the group Lasso based on the structure from the clusters. Regarding the first step, we present a novel and bottom-up agglomerative clustering algorithm based on canonical correlations, and we show that it finds an optimal solution and is statistically consistent. We also present some theoretical arguments that canonical correlation based clustering leads to a better-posed compatibility constant for the design matrix which ensures identifiability and an oracle inequality for the group Lasso. Furthermore, we discuss circumstances where cluster-representatives and using the Lasso as subsequent estimator leads to improved results for prediction and detection of variables. We complement the theoretical analysis with various empirical results.     

The Termination of Public Organizations: Theoretical Perspectives to Revitalize a Promising Research Area

While many studies deal with comparative public sector reform, the fundamental question of whether and to what extent states are actually able to abolish parts of their administrative structure remains untackled. Despite some efforts to solve this puzzle, the topic remains underestimated. This article identifies the main conceptual and theoretical problems associated with existent research on the termination of public organizations. Furthermore, the article systemizes various causal factors of termination into two broad dimensions: “organizational stickiness” and “political incentives.” Taken together, these constitute a typology, which is able to guide future empirical investigation of the termination of public organizations.