Determinants and effects of formal target agreements: an empirical investigation of German firms

We investigate organizational determinants and performance effects of formal target agreements for employees based on the IAB establishment panel, a representative panel of German establishments. The results show that establishments with a high employee turnover rate, a large proportion of temporary workers, and a highly qualified workforce are significantly more likely to implement target agreements. Also, establishments with works councils installed are more likely to do so, controlling, among others, for firm size. Concerning organizational performance, we apply a first-difference and a fixed effects approach and find that establishments that implement target agreements achieve around 5 % higher total sales compared to firms that did not introduce this practice. Hence, organizations seem to benefit from the implementation of formal target agreements for employees.     

Beware of Allies!

In science and technology studies (STS), reflexivity is not the foremost political or ethical concern that it is for some postmodernists, feminists, anthropologists, or those earnest students of Bourdieu. For us, reflexivity is a practical methodological concern. When reflexivity is raised in our scholarly communications it is, without irony, about crafting scientific communications (i.e., scholarly accounts like articles or books) reflexively. This paper therefore is an actor-network account of making reflexive actor-network accounts, specifically, in the process of writing-up qualitative research findings. It is a paper about research. It is a paper about the research process. As our empirical contribution, we report on research we previously conducted and about the subsequent steps we took toward a (publishable) way of reporting it. We are trying to honestly disclose how the process of preparing a reflexive account is more than merely a matter of cleaning-up the messiness of data, but also, and perhaps foremost, a process of finding, aligning, and occasionally distancing our accounts from our allies?—?in our case, actor-network theory (ANT) and reflexivity.