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Die Rolle von Sozialstruktur und Geschlecht für die Entwicklung der Stimmenanteile der „Volksparteien“ CDU/CSU und SPD
No full textMapping bureaucratic overload: Dynamics and drivers in media coverage across three European countries
No full textBureaucratic overburdening has emerged as an important theme in public policy and administration research. The concept signifies a state where public administrators are overwhelmed with more tasks and responsibilities than they can effectively handle. Researchers attribute this phenomenon to several key factors, such as an increasing assault on the public sector, a growing volume of policies to enforce, and “external” shocks. These studies converge on the perception that the public sector's capacity to effectively implement policies and to address societal problems is progressively diminishing. However, there is a clear knowledge gap regarding the breadth, dynamics, and pervasiveness of this issue, as existing research often narrows its focus on the implementation of specific policies or policy sectors. This paper addresses this research gap by mapping the frequency of bureaucratic overload reports in newspaper articles from Italy, Ireland, and Germany, spanning two decades from 2003 to 2022. In the second step, we describe the drivers of overload that we coded in a random sample of articles. Our research reveals that the overburdening of public administration is indeed an escalating problem resulting from an “explosive” cocktail of external and internal challenges that simultaneously affect public authorities
LEIZ Case Studies
No full textLEIZ Case Studies: LEIZ presents the LEIZ Relational Economics in Practice case study series, available for open access on this website. Our team of researchers, including professors, postdocs, and PhD candidates, have dedicated many months to creating this valuable resource for educators and students of business studies. The cases in this series are all based on real-life business challenges. They include structured case descriptions, key challenges, core questions, and theoretical discussions based on cutting-edge research. Topics covered include AI implementation, large project management, global organization and transformation, and transcultural learning and managing transcultural teams
Artificial Intelligence in Organizations – Employee Acceptance of an AI Tool in the Workplace
No full textThe digital transformation gained an additional facet through recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Large Language Model-based tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot especially drew much attention, and the occurring advancements are being admired. These tools now enter the working world, calling for empirical sociological research regarding the digital transformation (of work). Accordingly, the presented research deliberates the implications of AI tools for organizations and their members and asks about the workers’ stance toward this newest aspect of digital transformation at the workplace. To unravel this, (early) results of an empirical research project will be presented. The object of the corresponding study is a large corporation that recently granted all its employees access to an AI tool. The online survey takes place three months after the AI tool was made available company-wide and explores the actual usage of the tool, workers’ satisfaction with their company’s approach, and their attitude towards AI. It will illuminate the workers’ acceptance or reluctance towards AI, differentiating between age groups, their management responsibility, occupational groups, and more. A goal is to determine different intra-organizational groups and possible informal practices that go against the ideas of management. Here, the research attaches to organizational sociology, which in recent years has focused increasingly on the digital transformation and has been highly influenced by digital sociology. Informal networks and structures can highly impact the individual worker’s attitude towards organizational change and, therefore, influence the success of the AI implementation. In many regards, the formal structure created by decisions taken by the management is powerless to informal connections and arrangements by workers. Nonetheless, both structures are useful for the organization. So, in examining the usage and attitude towards AI by employees, much is learned about the internal organizational structure and the effects newly implemented digital technologies might have
“This is not real Fandom, just FOMO”: Media-Multitasked Negotiations of Fan-Authenticity during the 2022 World Cup
No full textThe 2022 football World Cup was the most controversial sports-event in recent times (Beyer & Schulze-Marmeling 2021; Brannaga & Reiche 2022) and had international football fans face difficult decisions in their reception. Coming out of pandemic lockdowns, what could have been celebrated as a return to form turned out to be an event equally as inaccessible to the football world. Qatar has no major football history or culture to speak of, which made the host country reliant on tourism to fill newly built stadiums. Travelling costs, -restrictions, or the moral obligation to boycott the world cup altogether negatively impacted the stadium atmosphere everyone longed for. In a twisted irony, football fans’ stance on the value of co-present sports spectatorship for the authenticity of a game and its fandom underwent a second re-framing after COVID: “Real” fans watch from home or boycott, while “fakes” reside in stadiums. Main broadcasters and national sports organizations were partaking in the event as usual, in the eyes of fans making them complicit in Qatars “sportswashing” (Grix & Holiham 2014; Brannagan & Roockwood 2016; Meier et al. 2019) regardless of awareness- and human rights campaigns that accompanied the spectacle. The last years spawned heated debates about the constitution and moral obligations of football fandoms considering the growing hypercommercialization of “their” sport (Gruneau & Horne 2017), human rights infringements, questionable politics and many more issues (Zeyringer 2021; Nieland 2023). Such debates seldom made it into broadcasts but instead played out in pubs or stadiums where fans aired out their frustrations and bonded in the process. As football reception underwent mediatization surges in the last years however, a pressing question revolves around if and how such co-located practices play out online, in a co-oriented (Göttlich et al. 2017, Göttlich 2023) but mediated fashion. “Social Media Sport” (Bowman & Crammer 2014) reaches new heights when reception itself is mediatized (Majumdar & Naha 2020; Mastromartino et al. 2020; Rowe 2020; Grix et al. 2020). In our contribution, we highlight how a newfound mutual awareness among globally online recipients and commenters affects fandoms’ identities and social practices. We critically investigate assumptions of a more unified and networked “global fandom” in view of FIFA as a common enemy by closely analysing how online discourse among co-oriented fans plays out on social media platforms.Twitter still retained its identity and appeal for sports watchers (Hull & Lewis 2014, Bowman & Crammer 2014) in late 2022. Football fans used twitter for news, discussion, but most importantly to make their dissent known in the lead-up to the “winter world cup” by proclaiming protests and boycotts (Hill, Canniford & Millwand 2016; Nieland 2017; Hölzen & Meier 2018; Meier et al. 2021). Once the event started, users were following and tweeting about the events in real time through media multitasking and more specifically, second screening (Göttlich et al. 2017). For many fans that boycotted the broadcasts, the second screen became a first screen (Lopez-Gonzalez et al. 2019), as the discourse surrounding the games could be followed while still upholding some form of moral high ground. This prompted a clash of watchers and non-watchers who all share the love for football and their national teams, but both denied the other side their authentic fandom. To examine the negotiation of fandom that occurred holistically, we employ a mixed-methods approach that combines large-scale twitter-data-analysis with deeper qualitative inquiry. Our data set consists of 1.313.716 tweets scraped during 11 world cup games, as well as 1.123.057 tweets scraped from hashtags like #fifaworldcup that were persistent over longer periods of time. This allowed us to spot differences in real-time co-oriented media reception during games and asynchronous discourse about the mega-event (Schmidt 2018; Meier et al. 2021). Individual games were recorded for contextual reviewability during tweet analysis. Gephi is used for data visualization and the analysis of key words and account activity during specifiable timeframes. The dataset was cleaned and filtered through with a media-multitasking whitelist, leading to key accounts and tweets that were analysed in MAXQDA. The qualitative and quantitative processes both mutually inform another, leading to the formation of re-occurring themes and typified practices.Our findings provide novel research on media participation structures and techniques – in the sense that they portrait a form of participation that lays outside of traditional media broadcast structure and occurs between recipients. Online comments were written parallel to and largely in critique of the broadcast. Watchers wrote about and retweeted happenings of the game, while boycotters perceived the flow of the game through its surrounding discourse. We saw the negotiation of fandom by both parties play out on three levels:(1) Individual users position themselves in an ambivalent and highly contested opinion field of their twitter spheres. In that field, they signal affiliation through criticism.(2) Interpersonal communication occurs in sub-tweets. Popular postings inform and influence the discourse arenas which are formed under them.(3) On a larger scale, hashtags predefine the discourse that will happen therein. Fans scan hashtags to post and lurk in an environment that is most agreeable with their stance. The knowledge needed to navigate football-twitter are part of mediatized media reception, in which fans reclaim a semblance of opinionated stadium-curve- or pub-atmosphere while being isolated in their living rooms or bound by moral obligation not to watch games. We subsume the communicative practices and motivations of fandom-negotiation under the term “Communitization through Criticism”. Rather than a unified movement of online protest in view of sports organizations’ partaking in the morally questionable world cup, fan groups have split and fragmented further. Twitters logic of organizing communicative topics under hashtags and placing importance on popular tweets further intensified the issue. Critical and controversial messages were used as ankers to discuss topics under, already framing communication in several layers of meaning and opinion. As such, an interpersonal discussion among two fans could only happen with the knowledge of their respective stances already on full display via like-to-comment ratios. In such an environment, arguing one’s authenticity did not occur on even playing fields. The conclusion for many users was to either comment and lurk around the hashtags and tweets they already agreed with, or to defend their authenticity in short positional statements untied from the need for elaboration or defence. In the end, Co-oriented reception and discussion of the World Cup on twitter succeeded in making the fragmentation and division among a seemingly global football fandom mutually visible but failed at bringing already oppositional stances and sub-communities together through a newfound co-awareness
Averting conflagration in Kenya: Multi-level pathways of de-escalation and implications for atrocity prevention
No full textThere appears to be a fundamental mismatch in contemporary genocide studies when it comes to analyzing factors of escalation vis-à-vis de-escalation in contexts of mass violence. While most studies focus on causes and drivers of genocidal atrocities, they tend to overlook potential pathways of de-escalation, hallmarks of resilience, and sources of restraint. The paper seeks to address this prevailing imbalance by taking up Scott Straus' incisive (yet hitherto largely neglected) stimulus: “why does genocide not happen when it could”? The principal aim is to determine why and how high-risk countries manage to retreat from the brink of genocidal violence.First, a comprehensive literature review aims to assess the theoretical status quo on both genocidal escalation and de-escalation. Second, resultant insights are brought face to face with in-depth field research on Kenya's atrocity prevention campaign following the eruption of mass violence in 2007/2008. By employing an interpretivist process tracing approach, five pathways of de-escalation are identified in the Kenyan case: political negotiation, international mediation, societal involvement, institutional reform, and discursive restraint.The findings suggest that scholars of mass atrocity must overcome the enduring dichotomies of prevention that seem to be cast in stone. These include the juxtaposition of prevention and response, structural and operational action, as well as international and domestic measures. The analysis of multi-level de-escalation pathways in Kenya rather demonstrates that halting mass violence is a much more complex endeavor that needs to be sustainably grounded in a perpetual and self-reflexive approach to both atrocity prevention and concomitant scholarship
