Soziologie der Freundschaft

The article argues that nowadays research on friendship has reached a dead end. The only thing everyone in the field agrees on is: “friendship matters”. But how and what for is completely contingent, conceptionally as well as methodically. Alternatively the paper argues that the phenomenon of friendship becomes clearer when looked at under four functional aspects: first as a compensating practice of care for those who can’t trust in family bonds nor in welfare contracts; second as an intermediate social form that lasts longer than membership and partnership alike; third as a mirror of lifelong socialization of the self; and forth as a diffuse resource of organization and association. All aspects concern the enigma of voluntary bonds in a society of individuals.     

Specialization and Prestige in the Legal Profession: The Structure of Deference

The process of specialization is now well advanced within the legal profession, and the specialties have acquired clearly varying levels of prestige among the practicing bar. What are the characteristics of the specialties, or of the lawyers who practice in them, that might account for these variations in prestige? In describing the prestige differences and several of the variables that might be thought to account for them, the authors analyze the results of a survey of a large random sample of Chicago lawyers. Among the findings are a strong relationship between prestige within the legal profession and the type of clients that the specialty serves, a substantial correlation between prestige and the degree of intellectual challenge presented by the subject matter of the specialty, and the perhaps surprising result that prestige is not significantly associated with the income earned by lawyers practicing in the specialty. The authors conclude that legal specialties that regularly confront personal suffering lose social standing as a result, that prestige within the profession is directly proportional to the degree to which the specialty facilitates the conduct of corporate enterprise, and that the varying prestige of the specialties is likely to affect the political and professional power of the lawyers who practice in them and to influence the patterns of recruitment of lawyers into law practice.     

Security of tenure in conventional and flexible employment regimes: A neoinstitutional perspective

Security of tenure is discussed in this paper by contrasting conventional and recent hybrid so-called flexible employment regimes. These regimes will be analyzed in a neoinstitutional perspective—that is, within transaction cost and agency theory frameworks, including public choice considerations.We start from the premise that in a standard employment scenarioex ante hostages may not be taken and that limitedex post compensation payments are efficient. We then trace features of safeguarding employee investment in hybrid flexible regimes such as new independent contracting, franchising (and other relevantvariants of symbiotic contracting, capacity-oriented variable work time schemes, job sharing, and so on. We compare these new institutional creations in the labor market with standard regimes under the hypothesis that in an ideal scenario Pareto superior moves are feasible but that there is a systematic aberration from optimality caused by information asymmetries, search constraints (boundedness), and a lack of adaptive capacities of the regime users, particularly employees. This regime deception factor (RDF) needs theoretical and empirical scrutiny from both legal and economic perspectives.     

哥白尼式的革命

在十七到十八世纪，耶稣会士成为中国和欧洲之间的使者。《教育信笺》是关于哲学思考的主题。许多知识分子发现古老的中国，受到震撼。《圣经》里对历史大一统的认识遭到质疑。中国的历史让圣经的编年史受到冲击，历史学家、哲学家和神学家徒劳地试图调和东西方思维对世界起源的分歧。热爱汉学的人士和反对汉学的人士相互辨争。耶稣会士的作品被某些哲学家、例如海德，认为缺乏真实性；但是在另一些人眼里，例如莱布尼兹，则被看作是“我们时代最重大的事件”，因为他们的作品冲击了《圣经》的编年史，甚至是《圣经》本身所提到的民族诞生和惟一语言的真实性。