Individual Ambidexterity and Performance in the Public Sector: A Multilevel Analysis

In this study, we examine individual ambidexterity (i.e., individuals’ balanced pursuit of exploitative and explorative activities) in a public management context. In particular, we combine survey data from junior scholars and secondary data from the Center for Higher Education to investigate the role of individual ambidexterity in an academic context. We conduct multilevel analyses and find that individual ambidexterity is positively related to research performance, indicating that individual ambidexterity positively influences individual performance in the public sector. In addition, we observe a negative relationship between the supervisory ratio and research performance, indicating that having a lower number of employees supervised by a single person leads to lower performance in the public sector.     

Politikdiffusion im Schatten des Parteistaats: Die Integration Chinas in das internationale Regime zur Geldwäschebekämpfung

This study scrutinizes the functions and effects of various mechanisms of policy diffusion by taking the hyper-sovereigntist state of the People’s Republic of China as a hard test case. It demonstrates that a one-sided focus on the contribution of international or transnational interactions to policy diffusion may lead to severe misinterpretations. Thus, careful control studies of the domestic determinants of policy diffusion are indispensable for clearing up the focus. As the Chinese case reveals, politically orchestrated, tactical adaptation to international regulatory standards can be employed to promote a nation’s rise in the global political economy. Policy diffusion does not therefore automatically promote the establishment of credible, shared norms of global governance.     

Clash of claims: nationalizing and democratizing policies during the first parliamentary election in multiethnic Czechoslovak Ruthenia

This paper examines the question of why the countrywide 1920 parliamentary election in Czechoslovakia was postponed in its eastern borderland, Podkarpatská Rus, by putting this event into a context of simultaneous processes of democratization and nationalization, described here as the “double transformation.” The territory in question was inhabited by a Ruthenian majority, who received the support of the government in Prague; a Jewish population without clear preferences regarding their loyalties and aims; a still-influential Hungarian minority; and finally, a Czech-dominated state administration. The aim of the state administration was to let the ethnically mixed population of Ruthenia vote for its parliamentary representatives in the most democratic way possible. However, this intention clashed with the realities in place: old loyalties of the local population toward the Hungarian elites, Hungarian revisionism, a lack of governance, and security issues. Complicating the situation, Romanian troops still occupied the eastern part of Ruthenia as a result of the war among Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania in 1919; Romanians claimed part of the territory for their own nation-state. Faced with these thorny issues, the Czechoslovak state administration felt constrained to postpone the elections until 1924.     

Towards a Measurement of Extreme Left-Wing Attitudes

Previous research on left-wing extremism relied largely on measurements that are unsuitable to detect and track extreme attitudes. In the absence of a clearly defined instrument for left-wing extremism, researchers based their predictions largely on indicators like voting behaviour or the left—right self-placement scale. Building on a large-scale investigation of data from the past 20 years, the paper shows that such indicators do not serve as adequate proxies, since those labelled as ‘extreme’ do not hold extreme attitudes in most cases. Analysing a variety of left-wing extremist attitudes across the past two decades shows that there is indeed a core set of attitudes that seem to resemble what we would call a traditional left-wing extremist identity. The paper suggests an instrument that can serve as a starting point for further developing an index of left-wing extremism. Finally, the potential of the extreme left is assessed using the constructed index. The results show that the estimated potential of the new measure differs substantially from conventional measurements, not in quantity but in its composition. As a result, traditional measurements fail to predict actual left-wing extremism. In particular, anti-pluralist mindsets are heavily neglected. Implications are thus discussed for Germany, and the world at large.     

Are School Committees a Source of Empowerment? Insights from Tanzania

Studies on user committees often critique the claim that membership to these committees empowers people. In this article, we use survey data on empowerment school committees in Tanzania to find out whether school committee membership is a source of empowerment of people at the local levels. Our findings suggest that membership in itself has limited impact on empowerment, while access to information and gender are the major sources of empowerment. However, the role of membership to the school committee is significant insofar as it can expose members to critical information on school issues.     

Justice Sensitivity and Cooperation Dynamics in Repeated Public Good Games

It is frequently observed that despite individual incentives to free ride, humans decide to cooperate with each other to increase social payoffs. In the current research, we address the effects of individual differences in justice sensitivity on cooperation. Using incentivized repeated public good games, we find that individual differences in justice sensitivity—the ease of perceiving, remembering, and reacting to injustice from the perspectives of an observer, beneficiary, or perpetrator, but not victim—substantially predicts cooperation in the absence of a punishment option. In contrast, when costly punishment is allowed for, cooperation becomes strategic as it also aims at avoiding subsequent punishment. If such a sanctioning mechanism is in place, justice sensitivity no longer predicts cooperation. The results regarding the degree of cooperation as reaction to initial non-cooperation of one’s counterparts highlight the role of justice-concerning personality traits for the sufficient provision of public goods, as sanctioning institutions are not always possible, effective, or suitable.     

Managing technological distance in internal and external collaborations: absorptive capacity routines and social integration for innovation

While high technological distance to project partners outside of the established value chain can positively influence innovation performance, project goals can only be achieved if the social integration of project members is improved in terms of coordination and communication. This paper draws on embeddedness and absorptive capacity literature to explore how social integration mechanisms translate into different learning outcomes in distant collaborations within and across organizational boundaries. Drawing upon expert interviews with project members as our primary source of data, we conducted an in-depth multiple case study analysis of a number of inter-organizational projects. Our findings indicate that the effect of different types of social integration mechanisms on learning outcomes also affect the ability to bridge distances in process and product technology. Moreover, they suggest that it is not just the extent, but also the interplay of social integration mechanisms surrounding internal and external absorptive capacity routines that enable project members to engage in the exploration, transformation and exploitation of distant knowledge. In examining how social integration mechanisms foster learning outcome in distant collaborations, our study contributes to the literature on absorptive capacity.