Wer das Stabilisieren vergisst: Warum eine schöne Abschlusspräsentation noch kein gutes Ende bedeutet

Many organizational change projects fail — despite a well thought out concept, professional project management and a binding implementation timetable. The reason why the expected success doesn’t materialize often lies with the missing maintenance. Once the project is officially completed and the client and project manager withdraw, the manner in which the organization will take up these changes is seldom systematically dealt with. Difficulties often arise when no discrete stabilizing measures are planned. We have derived four central action areas which will be clarified by way of practical examples. It will also be shown what is important to pay attention to in the stabilization phase so that a lasting success of the organizational change project can be ensured.     

Redistribution and the Individualism–Collectivism Dimension of Culture

Social Indicators Research - This paper examines the relationship between culture and redistribution, focusing on the individualism–collectivism dimension of culture. Perhaps surprisingly,...     

Plural identities and preference formation

This article explores under what conditions an agent can derive a transitive all-things-considered preference from a plurality of non-comparable objectives, values or judgements mirroring her plural identity. In contrast to existing contributions, the multiple values are reflected by partial (viz. incomplete) orderings. It is shown that a slight modification of the conditions employed by Arrow implies a spread of the dictate of one identity to its ‘incomplete parts’. The second result reveals that if one requires the decision making power to be spread a bit more equally across the various parts of a person’s identity, then even the derivation of an acyclic all-things-considered preference is rendered impossible. A third result shows that requiring some minimal consistency among a person’s plural identities, introduced via a domain restriction, allows the avoidance of the highlighted impossibilities.     

(Home-)Schools of Democracy? On the Intergenerational Transmission of Civic Engagement

Where do individuals learn civic engagement? While voluntary associations are often seen as the breeding grounds for democratic skills and virtues, many preferences are learned by children in their family and thus passed on between generations. The present paper uses data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991–2008) for the UK to analyze the intergenerational transmission of civic engagement and political participation preferences. It finds that both voluntary associational count variables as well as frequency and strength measures of doing volunteer work and political party support are correlated between parents and their grown up children (i.e. after leaving the parental household), even when controlling for resources like socio-economic background. The intergenerational transmission is more pronounced with regard to triggering filial civic engagement, but frequency of parental engagement is less strongly transmitted. A robustness analysis suggests that peer influences (as measured by regional levels of civic engagement) do not drive the intergenerational transmission of civic engagement.

     

A critical note on the role of the capability approach for sustainability economics

Can sustainability economics profit from the fusion with Amartya Sen's capability approach, thereby gaining solid normative foundations and wider applicability? We argue that this fusion is mistaken to the extent that the capability approach is essentially a static normative framework while sustainability economics demands a systematic long-term view with focus on wide-ranging societal change. These demands are best realized by taking an evolutionary perspective that focuses on the evolution and development of societies.     

Innovativeness and Subjective Well-Being

What are the effects of innovativeness on well-being? This paper argues that research on subjective well-being has progressed to a point where measures of subjective well-being (or: happiness) can usefully be employed to assess the welfare effects of innovative change. Based on a discussion of the prospects and pitfalls associated with subjective well-being as welfare measure and benchmark of societal progress, an argument is put forward as to why these measures are particularly well-suited in the context of innovative change. Empirically well-founded and with an explicit dynamic foundation, theories of subjective well-being allow for a nuanced and comprehensive assessment of the effects that innovativeness has on a society. Two evaluation rules, the “life domain evaluation principle” and the “welfare dynamics principle” are suggested to guide such normative assessment.     

Disentangling the Circularity in Sen’s Capability Approach: An Analysis of the Co-Evolution of Functioning Achievement and Resources

There is an ambiguity in Amartya Sen’s capability approach as to what constitutes an individual’s resources, conversion factors and valuable functionings. What we here call the “circularity problem” points to the fact that all three concepts seem to be mutually endogenous and interdependent. To econometrically account for this entanglement we suggest a panel vector autoregression approach. We analyze the intertemporal interplay of the above factors over a time horizon of 15 years using the BHPS data set for Great Britain, measuring individual well-being in functionings space with a set of basic functionings, comprising “being happy”, “being healthy”, “being nourished”, “moving about freely”, “being well-sheltered” and “having satisfying social relations”. We find that there are indeed functionings that are resources for many other functionings (viz. “being happy”) while other functionings (“being well-sheltered” and “having satisfying social relations”) are by and large independent, thus shedding light on a facet of the capability approach that has been neglected so far.     

A comparison of methods for the fitting of generalized additive models

There are several procedures for fitting generalized additive models, i.e. regression models for an exponential family response where the influence of each single covariates is assumed to have unknown, potentially non-linear shape. Simulated data are used to compare a smoothing parameter optimization approach for selection of smoothness and of covariates, a stepwise approach, a mixed model approach, and a procedure based on boosting techniques. In particular it is investigated how the performance of procedures is linked to amount of information, type of response, total number of covariates, number of influential covariates, and extent of non-linearity. Measures for comparison are prediction performance, identification of influential covariates, and smoothness of fitted functions. One result is that the mixed model approach returns sparse fits with frequently over-smoothed functions, while the functions are less smooth for the boosting approach and variable selection is less strict. The other approaches are in between with respect to these measures. The boosting procedure is seen to perform very well when little information is available and/or when a large number of covariates is to be investigated. It is somewhat surprising that in scenarios with low information the fitting of a linear model, even with stepwise variable selection, has not much advantage over the fitting of an additive model when the true underlying structure is linear. In cases with more information the prediction performance of all procedures is very similar. So, in difficult data situations the boosting approach can be recommended, in others the procedures can be chosen conditional on the aim of the analysis.