The German Administrative Record Census – An object identification problem

Summary: The next German census will be an Administrative Record Census. Data from several administrative registers about persons will be merged. Object identification has to be applied, since no unique identification number exists in the registers. We present a two–step procedure. We briefly discuss questions like correctness and completeness of the Administrative Record Census. Then we focus on the object identification problem, that can be perceived as a special classification problem. Pairs of records are to be classified as matched or not matched. To achieve computational efficiency a preselection technique of pairs is applied. Our approach is illustrated with a database containing a large set of consumer addresses.*This work was partially supported by the Berlin–Brandenburg Graduate School in Distributed Information Systems (DFG grant no. GRK 316). The authors thank Michael Fürnrohr for previewing the paper. We would like to thank also for the helpful comments of an anonymous reviewer.     

Ökonomischer Liberalismus, postmodernes Diversity Management in Unternehmen und der Geist des Kapitalismus

The present article introduces the concept of Diversity Management, which has its roots in the USA. The latter regards the workforce’s diversity, inequality, differentness and individuality as an essential contribution to a company’s success. Against the backdrop of the hegemonial waves in the world system and the related cultural cycles, the argument is being launched that an organizational change from fordism to post-fordism has taken place in the framework of the USA’s hegemonial downturn and the emergence of post-modernism as a cultural pattern. In this context, “diversity” has been able to make its way as an issue. On the one hand, this development attempts to carry out even more the “modern” ideas of “individualism” and “social equality of opportunities” also on an entrepreneurial level; on the other hand, the industrial-capitalist differentiation of labor, person and lifeworld is being demarcated in a “post-modernistic” way and is even more strongly tied into the logic of capital.     

Ist Das Normalarbeitsverhältnis Noch Armutsvermeidend?

The article tests the hypothesis that welfare state retrenchment and labor market deregulation have increased poverty within the German working population using a time series of poverty ratios based on different income concepts for a period of 14 years (1991–2004). The basic assumption is that changes in the societal context (welfare state, labor market, houschold structures), besides individual risk factors, explain the development of poverty over time. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study it is shown that changing labor market conditions and tax regulations have increased poverty, and this has not been attenuated by additional income sources (welfare state, household members) or by recent changes in household composition. As a result, poverty has increased for full-time employees during the observation period, especially so in Eastern Germany.     

Judged knowledge and ambiguity aversion

Competence has recently been proposed as an explanation for the degree of ambiguity aversion. Using general knowledge questions we presented subjects with simple lotteries in which they could bet on an event and against the same event. We show that the sum of certainty equivalents for both bets depends on the judged knowledge of the class of events. We also elicited the decision weights for events and complementary events. We found a similar effect of knowledge on the sum of decision weights.     

Sektion Kultursoziologie

Ohne Zusammenfassung