Estimating German overqualification with stochastic earnings frontiers

We estimate individual potential income with stochastic earnings frontiers to measure overqualification as the ratio between actual income and potential income. To do this, we remove a drawback of the IAB employment sample, the censoring of the income data, by multiple imputation. The measurement of overqualification by the income ratio is also a valuable addition to the overeducation literature because the well-established objective or subjective overeducation measures focus on some ordinal matching aspects and ignore the metric income and efficiency aspects of overqualification.     

How People Perceive and Will Cope with Risks from the Diffusion of Ubiquitous Information and Communication Technologies

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly pervasive and continue to reshape our environment. This trend carries different risks. Therefore, the early sensitization of people to these risks, as well as improving their capacity for protective coping behavior, is essential. Based on the protection motivation theory (PMT), we examined with structural equation modeling the relationships between different components of threat and coping appraisal to explain protective and nonprotective responses. Calculations were performed with data from a representative survey on perception and use of ICT among German residents (N= 5,030). Our findings largely supported the proposed model: an increased perceived threat was positively related to the intentions to react protectively and nonprotectively. Perceived coping efficacy increased the protective and decreased the nonprotective responses. Negative affect enhanced the perceived threat and the nonprotective response, but inhibited protective intentions. The implications of these findings on how to sensitize people to the risks of these new technologies are outlined.     

Niklas Luhmann: Contingency,risk, trust and reflection

The hurdle of Niklas Luhmann's extensive theories is their complexity and level of abstraction. These qualities are, however, exactly what constitute their empirical sensitivity to the interrelation between organization and society in today's hyper-complex society. Luhmann never theorized on public relations; yet his theories enable identification of frames for understanding public relations in interrelation to society's overall coordination processes. Contemporary society apparently tries to solve problems activated by the blind reflexivity of modernization by activating reflective forms of coordination. Correspondingly, practice ideals of public relations can be reconstructed as reflection—the specific worldview which facilitates self-insight in relation to the social context.     

A literature review and emotion-based model of age and leadership: New directions for the trait approach

Despite renewed interest in traditional trait approaches to leadership and despite recent demographic trends towards an aging workforce, research on leaders' age as a specific demographic trait variable has remained surprisingly sparse and fragmented. This article provides a comprehensive review of the empirical literature on this issue. Although a body of research relating leaders' age with their behaviors and outcomes has emerged, the existing findings exhibit little consistency and lack theoretical coherence. Integrating theories of emotional aging with research on emotions and leadership, we therefore develop a novel, emotion-based framework that explicates key mechanisms and boundary conditions underlying age–leadership linkages. Moreover, we outline opportunities for further theoretical extensions and provide recommendations for future empirical work. Overall, this article paves new ground for contemporary research on leadership traits by highlighting the relevance of leaders' age, summarizing current knowledge on this issue, and providing new theoretical and empirical directions.     

The Extramarital Affair: A Language of Yearning and Loss

This paper presents an extramarital relationship as an experience of self-enhancement, not of pathological conflict. It will suggest that the simultaneous relationship with the lover AND an empathically attuned therapist can be healing for the patient. It is seen as often an opportunity for essential developmental needs to be fulfilled when damaging failures in the bond between child and caretaker have restricted the vitalizing atmosphere of mutual influence that results in unrecognized subjectivity. Rather than viewed as a reality-escaping midlife enactment, these relationships can be better thought of as efforts to revisit the traumatic experiences that have created the organizing patterns that have limited a patient's self-development. An extramarital affair is often about yearning and loss and the freedom to enact one's own desire.