Der Aufstieg der Beratung zur transnationalen Regierungsform im Feld des Managements

In the twentieth century management consulting has become a transnational form of governing the firm. Seeking advice from consultancy is part of everyday corporate governance, having worked for a consultancy is a guarantee for sought after skills in once career and management concepts developed in consulting contexts are accepted as genuine management knowledge even in academic terms. This development is the outcome of a process of professionalizing management and management consulting, at the heart of which stands a discursive redefining of the firm and its governance. The discursive change of the field of management coincides with the transnationalization of the political field, a development that opens up a whole new bunch of possibilities for professional service firms such as management consultancies to engage in professionalization projects. As a result management consultancies have become decisive agents and a power of consecration in an increasingly autonomous field of management. The research is conducted by using an analytical framework that draws on Bourdieu’s heuristics on practice fields and his studies on the field of power as well as on Foucault’s concept of governmentality.     

Understanding the Clayton Act of 1914: An Analysis of the Interest Group Hypothesis

The trusts issue culminated in the passage of the Clayton Act in1914, which conventional wisdom holds was a response to theperceived ineffectiveness of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.Using ordered and multinomial logit analysis, we were able todetect economic interest variables that explain the senators'votes. The empirical findings strongly support the wealth transferhypothesis, and the regression results clearly show that senatorsresponded to interest groups. While we also found some support forthe ideological perspective, it is clear that there was much moreto the vote than the conventional story would suggest.     

When Universal and Legally Secured Property Rights are not Necessary for Market Growth: The Politics and Reality of Chinese Urban Redevelopment 2002–2005

This study uses developments in China's urban housing market from 2002 to 2005 to engage with a hypothesis drawn from the Rule of Law discourse, that secure property rights across market participants are necessary for effective market growth. This particular market has been characterized by both significant demand-side growth and weak property rights for private home owners, contradicting the hypothesis. There are various theoretical objections to this hypothesis, but by focusing on a specific market, I isolate key factors to rephrase the hypothesis, emphasising pragmatism and structural market predictability as a substitute for formal and universal property rights. Indeed, formally weak property rights may in this instance have been a partial and temporary driver of market growth.     

Fight the Youth: Youth Bulges and State Repression

It is generally acknowledged that large youth cohorts or “youth bulges” make countries more susceptible to antistate political violence. Thus, we assume that governments are forewarned about the political demographic threat that a youth bulge represents to the status quo and will attempt to preempt behavioral challenges by engaging in repression. A statistical analysis of the relationship between youth bulges and state repression from 1976 to 2000 confirms our expectation. Controlling for factors known to be associated with coercive state action, we find that governments facing a youth bulge are more repressive than other states. This relationship holds when controlling for, and running interactions with, levels of actual protest behavior. Youth bulges and other elements that may matter for preemptive state strategies should therefore be included in future empirical models of state repression.     

Grundlegende Probleme des empirischen Kulturvergleichs. Ein problemorientierter Überblick über aktuelle Diskussionen

This article explicates and discusses nomothetic and idiographic approaches in empirical cross-cultural research. Both approaches are confronted with at least three common problems: the problem of a clear and practical useful classification of the concept “culture”, the problem of the comparability of cultures including the old discussion about the incommensurability of phenomenon from different cultures and the problem of nostrification – the question if and how one could explain and understand different cultures avoiding a simple transfer of own concepts. The different and sometimes similar proposals for solutions of these problems in the different approaches are presented.     

Severance payments for dismissed employees in Germany

This contribution investigates severance payments for dismissed employees in Germany. Particularly, it responds to two questions: “Who receives severance payments?” and “By which characteristics is the level of severance payments determined?”. Individual and collective dismissals are analyzed separately. This is the first study on this issue using individual representative data—the German Socio-Economic Panel—and multivariate methods. The results indicate that rather women, persons with many years of tenure and working in large firms receive severance payments. There is a huge variance in the size of the payments. The most important determinants are the previous wage, tenure and age.