Wiederherstellung eines besonders geschützten Biotops

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(Neo-)evolutionäre Wahlverwandtschaften

Max Webers ambivalente Haltung gegenüber der Anwendung der Konzepte Selektion und Adaption auf die Untersuchung der kulturellen und sozialen Evolution ist leicht verständlich angesichts seiner Skepsis hinsichtlich der Reduzierbarkeit der Soziologie auf die Biologie und in Anbetracht seines Argwohns, dass sich die selektionstheoretischen Erklärungen bei genauem Hinsehen als wertegeladen oder zirkulär erweisen würden. Seine Bedenken lassen sich unter Zuhilfenahme von Entwicklungen in der Evolutionstheorie zerstreuen, die für ihn zu Lebzeiten nicht vorhersehbar waren, es jedoch möglich machen, die grundlegenden Vorstellungen seiner Religionssoziologie auf überzeugende Weise zu reformulieren. Dies macht es allerdings notwendig, seine Metapher der ?Wahlverwandtschaft“ zwischen religiösen Vorstellungen und dem Verhalten idealtypischer Akteure durch empirisch überprüfbare Hypothesen zu ersetzen, die die Anpassungsfähigkeit bestimmter religiöser Meme mit der Anpassungsfähigkeit bestimmter ökonomischer Praktiken in Verbindung bringen.     

Distributive justice and willingness to pay for municipality child care

With the aim of investigating factors affecting willingness to pay for municipality child care, a survey was undertaken in Sweden of 1840 parents living in five municipalities of different sizes. On the basis of the greed-efficiency-fairness hypothesis (Wilke, 1991) which is supported by results from experimental social dilemma research, it was hypothesized that perceived fairness of how the quality of child care is distributed (equal, proportional to need, or proportional to payment) as well as of method of payment (collectively by taxes or proportional to use by fees) would be important determinants of willingness to pay. Results showed that perceived fairness of how quality of child care is distributed played some role but that other factors had stronger effects. Perhaps also reflecting fairness considerations, willingness to pay by fees was on average higher than willingness to pay by taxes. Predicted from previous research, willingness to pay by taxes was furthermore found to increase with income and degree of use. However, willingness to pay by taxes showed an increase rather than the predicted decrease with municipality size.     

Why Does Employment Legislation Not Damage Small Firms?

Business rhetoric and conventional theory expect that employment regulations will have negative effects on small firms. Prior research has shown that effects are quite rare, but has not explained why. Case studies of 18 firms from three sectors identified four explanations. (1) Perceptions of effects tend to be broad and general, rather than reflections of concrete experience. (2) 'The law' is not uniform, with older laws being largely taken for granted. (3) Effects depend on competitive conditions, which are more important influences on firms than are regulations; where conditions are benign, regulations can be absorbed, but in other circumstances employment regulations can exacerbate competitive pressures. (4) A degree of informality in small firms further eases responses. By the same token, however, hopes that regulation will stimulate modernization are rarely realized.     

Public Sector Reform Knowledge Production: Validation and Evidence as 'Agreement'

In this article I draw on public sector reform knowledge in the United States, New Zealand and Australia. I argue that we, as practitioners, do not need to immerse ourselves in academic debates about 'positivism' or 'post-positivism'. These are frameworks for examining knowledge capable of validation. Instead, we are now engaged in using diverse forms of knowledge to spread the word on what works and does not work to deliver outcomes. Such knowledge is not above reproach; it is not acceptable merely because it exists but nor is it unacceptable because it cannot be rigorously validated in a positivist way.     

Some Remarks on the Concept of Toleration

The paper contains a conceptual analysis of "act of toleration" and the property of "being tolerant". Being tolerant is understood as a dispositional property of persons manifested in what the author calls the "circumstances of toleration". The main circumstances distinguished are: a tendency to prohibit a certain behaviour and the competence to determine the deontic status of the behaviour in question. An act of toleration, then, consists in not prohibiting (or cancelling the prohibition of) that behaviour. It is argued that this requires the existence of two different normative systems, the "basic system", and the "justifying system". Acts of toleration must be based on reasons coming from the latter. This insight enables one to establish a difference between reasonable and unreasonable toleration, as well as between toleration and related concepts like indifference, acquiescence, etc. The analysis also introduces the distinction between "vertical" and "horizontal" toleration. Acceptance of this last category implies that toleration does not necessarily require hierarchical relationships between those who tolerate and those whose actions are tolerated.     

Dominance and change in the global computer industry: Military, bureaucratic, and network state developmentalisms

This article examines the conditions under which firms in different economies were able to emerge as significant actors in the global computer industry during different time periods. To achieve this, the article divides into three periods the history of the industry in terms of the three major policy regimes that have supported the dominant firms and regions. It argues that these policy regimes can be thought of as state developmentalisms that take significantly different forms across the history of the industry. U.S. firms’ dominance over their European counterparts in the 1950s and 1960s was underpinned by a system of “military developmentalism” where military agencies funded research, provided a market and developed infrastructure, but also demanded high quality products. The “Asian Tigers”—Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea—in the 1970s and 1980s were able to eclipse their Latin American and Indian rivals due in large part to the significant advantages offered by a highly effective system of “bureaucratic developmentalism,” where bureaucratic elites in key state agencies and leading business groups negotiated supports for export performance. The 1990s saw the emergence of a system of “network developmentalism” where countries such as Ireland and Israel were able to emerge as new nodes in the computer industry by careful economic and political negotiation of relations to the United States, reestablished at the center of the industry, and by more decentralized forms of provision of state support for high-tech development. Finally, the conditions under which new regimes can emerge are a consequence of the unanticipated global consequences of previous regimes. While state developmentalisms have been shaped by existing global regimes, they have promoted further and different rounds of industry globalization. Seán ó Riain is professor of sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. His research has been primarily on the political economy of high-tech growth in Ireland and elsewhere, and on work and class politics among software developers. He is the author ofThe Politics of High Tech Growth: Developmental Network, States in the Global Economy (Cambridge, 2004).