Über kulturelle Einbettung und strukturelle Innovationspotentiale von Projekten

A focus on culture provides a behind-the-scenes view of daily actions resulting from patterns established through structures and leadership concepts. The more complex, the more capable of making decisions, the more self-referential the units are, the more important corporate culture becomes for communication within projects and with their environments. Corporate culture – whether planned or random, functional or dysfunctional – develops wherever communication and collaboration happen regularly. Companies can use projects in a special way to create different cultures and thus to initiate change more successfully. In this process, corporate culture stands for the perspective on the whole including all its differences. The project leader has the special responsibility of relating different cultures to each other while considering and managing the project and its environments as a sensible whole.     

Denn sie wissen was sie tun!

Information and communication technologies (IT) permeate both the business and the private world. They cause profound changes for companies in terms of structure, leadership, culture, education and the position of individuals within the context of the company. Established structures, decision making habits and methods of communication are being called into question. This means that communication is neither explicitly controllable nor in some cases even specified, but it also should not be viewed as arbitrary. Structures which are treated as contingent require meta-management, reflection and determination. Leaders are forced to act within a constellation of tensions between the reduction and the expansion of complexity as basic functions of structuring. Ideally this type of steering takes place consciously and with a view toward the future, taking into account the increasing complexity and dynamics of the environment and the corporate culture. Empirical studies of our four intervention research projects show that the situation for many companies is sobering. Companies cannot always entirely interpret the rapid development of communication technologies and the consequences it brings with it, nor can they completely make use of its potential advantages. Companies and individuals are forced to think actively within the networked economy. The demand for further education shifts between the company (expertise, employee loyalty) on the one hand and the responsibility of the individual for his or her own development on the other. Agreements are the key to bringing harmony and new solutions to the conflicts among the differing interests of individuals, subsystems and the company as a whole. Considering the complex requirements for companies and management caused by IT, this article shows that reflective observation of intervention research, guided by theory and with a focus on targeted change of management practice, is a process which provides new opportunities for action in both theory and practice. In this process, focusing (systemization) and reflection (enhancement of perspectives) are fundamental keys for dealing with complexity.     

WE WANT MORE – WE ARE MORE

Impressed with the current migration in Europe and the connected socio-political and civil-societal challenges, we examine the question which contribution group-dynamic learning forms and its paradigms can raise awareness for a shared created future. Group dynamics understands itself as a place of practical philosophy, as intervention per se, where collectives can emancipate and participation should become alive. The origin of this idea is the examination with the unknown, the differences and the linked questioning of subjective truths, feelings and convictions. The connection between individual as well as collective self-enlightenment processes and the competence extension dealing with personal, cultural, moral, social etc. boundaries.We focus on the emotional effects (uncertainty and fear as a side effect of migration) as well as the theoretical background of the unknown and discuss the sense and the possibilities of participative-designed intervention forms of knowledge creation. Taking into account that several issues of collaboration for a shared future cannot be solved without the people concerned, we examine why we are “more”, why we want “more” and from what we will need “more”.     

Surrogate religion, spiritual materialism or protestant ethic? Three accounts of the function of religiosity in anti-ageing

This paper sets out to explore the conceptual requirements and semantic dimensions for the reconstruction of the links between anti-ageing and religious narratives of old age. Three arguments are presented from the existing literature; anti-ageing is interpreted first as a surrogate religious narrative, second as spiritual materialism and third as a residual effect of the Protestant Ethic. These arguments are explored in three ethnographic case studies presenting the religious anti-ageing narratives of, respectively, a user, a lobbyist and an entrepreneur from the German-speaking anti-ageing movement. While none of the cases clearly supports one of the established arguments, they do point to a powerful amalgamation of scientific and religious narratives, representative of an upsurge in materialistic values in religious interpretations of ageing and religiously legitimated calls for a new, self-controlling ethic in anti-ageing, one which seems to foster the individualisation of the risks of ageing in line with the commodification of the ageing body.     

Using Economic Freedom Indexes as Policy Indicators: An Intercontinental Example

We use time-series cross-section analysis to provide empirical validation for the existence of a specific American ethos and a specific European ethos with respect to economic policy. In our innovation, economic policy is proxied by “economic freedom” from the Fraser Institute database and constitutional “political institutions” are proxied by variables from the Database of Political Institutions (from the World Bank). Our results suggest that, once we control for political and institutional differences, the United States and Europe still pursue different economic policies.

Nonparametric Testing for Asymmetric Information

Asymmetric information is an important phenomenon in many markets and in particular in insurance markets. Testing for asymmetric information has become a very important issue in the literature in the last two decades. Almost all testing procedures that are used in empirical studies are parametric, which may yield misleading conclusions in the case of misspecification of either functional or distributional relationships among the variables of interest. Motivated by the literature on testing conditional independence, we propose a new nonparametric test for asymmetric information, which is applicable in a variety of situations. We demonstrate that the test works reasonably well through Monte Carlo simulations and apply it to an automobile insurance dataset and a long-term care insurance (LTCI) dataset. Our empirical results consolidate Chiappori and Salanié’s findings that there is no evidence for the presence of asymmetric information in the French automobile insurance market. While Finkelstein and McGarry found no positive correlation between risk and coverage in the LTCI market in the United States, our test detects asymmetric information using only the information that is available to the insurance company, and our investigation of the source of asymmetric information suggests some sort of asymmetric information that is related to risk preferences as opposed to risk types and thus lends support to Finkelstein and McGarry.     

大熊猫电刺激采精及精液冷冻保存研究

对卧龙自然保护区大熊猫研究中心的9只 5.5～16 .5 岁的雄性大熊猫进行了 17 次电刺激采精.其中 3 只是能进行自然交配并繁殖了后代的种公兽.比较研究了精液离心、不同稀释液和冷冻方法对大熊猫精液超低温冷冻保存后的活力、运动状态、精子和顶体形态的影响.细管冷冻是 1 种较好的超低温冷冻精液的方法.     

War as Rent-Seeking: A Public Choice Perspective on the Pacific War

Historical literature on the causes of the Pacific War generally focuses on either international relationships between the great powers in the interwar period or on the role of domestic interest groups in Japan, especially the Imperial Army and Navy. An alternative to these predominantly narrative approaches is to consider Japanese imperialism as explained by the public choice concept of rent seeking. Seeing both imperial expansions through armed conquest and domestic interest group rivalry as forms of rent-seeking behavior can provide a unifying perspective for understanding the Pacific War.

Minimum Size Survival Analysis Sampling Plans for Comparing Multiple Treatment Groups to a Single Control Group

We develop a sample size methodology that achieves specified Type-1 and Type-2 error rates when comparing the survivor functions of multiple treatment groups versus a control group. The designs will control family-wise Type-1 error rate. We assume the family of Weibull distributions adequately describes the underlying survivor functions, and we separately consider three of the most common study scenarios: (a) complete samples; (b) Type-1 censoring with a common censoring time; and (c) Type-1 censoring with an accrual period. A mice longevity study comparing the effect on survival of multiple low-calorie diets is used to motivate our work on this problem.