Books 2009

The population is ageing, and family constellations are changing. These processes jeopardize the sustainable provision of public welfare benefits, leading some authors to infer that there are growing distributional conflicts between generations. This study focuses on the questions of how the state and the family shape the living conditions of generations and how this interaction affects the socio-political attitudes of age groups in four countries - Germany, France, Italy, and Sweden. In particular, the authors inquire into the income in old age, care for dependent elderly, financial support for families with children, and care for infants. The country comparison shows how differently intergenerational relations can be organized and which strategies are proving viable in the light of demographic ageing. The key finding is that intergenerational bonds of solidarity remain robust, meaning predictions of a potential conflict between the generations are vastly exaggerated.

Overtime and certain components of remuneration can be credited in long-term working-time accounts and then drawn down at a later point. The basic idea is to save up time for use in a later phase of working life. For the company, long-term working-time accounts make for flexibility; for the employee, they offer the opportunity to improve the distribution of occupational and nonoccupational demands across the course of life. However, the range of ways for companies to implement this instrument is extraordinarily broad, as is the range of possibilities for employees to use it. In that context the objectives of flexible labor management, the desires of the employees, the legal framework, and the rights of all participants in an industrial democracy constitute a complex and sometimes contentious arena that calls for careful analysis. This volume tackles the task. Drawing on representative data from companies, detailed industrial case studies, and quantitative and qualitative surveys of employees, the authors comprehensively present and evaluate the practices and obstacles involved in using long-term working-time accounts.

Are the Germans really the "world champion donors" they are sometimes said to be, or do they tend to be reserved about this form of giving? Solid data for a precise answer is scarce, but various surveys and studies do hint that Germans are willing to give donations. This kind of information is of great interest to organizations of civil society, decision-makers, policy-makers, and the research community. Voluntary transfers of money, goods, and services in the public interest say something about a society's behaviours, values, and overall condition. The contributions in this volume afford an overview of the available behavioural data on donations in Germany. The authors analyze findings of the German Federal Statistical Office, results of surveys, and information collected by different institutions. They also ask what basis exist for continual reporting on donations and what methodological structure it would require in order to provide the public with sound scientific information. Creating and expanding such a resource would help increase the transparency of voluntary giving.

The professional prospects of liberal arts scholars are less clear cut and subject to greater fluctuation on the labor market than those of university graduates in other disciplines. What is sought are all-around academics, or "generalists", whose backgrounds must flexibly meet the needs of future employers. Building on a volume published earlier, this book presents additional contributions by young liberal arts scholars who describe their experience with orienting themselves professionally and finding their way. The texts stem from a competition held in 2007 by the "Council for Social and Economic Data" as part of the "Year of the Humanities" to highlight new ideas and options for professional activity for young academics in this field. Given the frequently observed discrepancies between acquired and actually desired qualifications, the authors of these essays ask which abilities and skills improve the outlook for liberal arts scholars who are just beginning their careers? In times of growing uncertainty on the labor market, is it still possible to forecast job requirements at all? How great a role does university training play in successfully launching one's career? What new fields can one explore and develop?

This reader for university students and lecturers contains important theoretical contributions to the analysis of social structure and arranges them by discipline. The starting point is the question of what social inequality is taken to mean and what explanations there are for its origins. The introductory review of research by the editors presents the key basic concepts. The subsequent documentation contains texts on the classical theories of social inequality, including ones by Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu. Essays by Ralf Dahrendorf, Helmut Schelsky, and Ulrich Beck - grouped under the overarching question of "Are We Still Living in a Class Society?" - follow up by tracing the continuing discussion of class and strata. These authors also relate social inequality to issues of race, gender, and globalization. Other parts of the volume contain more recent contributions on social milieus and life styles (Stefan Hradil, Michael Vester, and others) as well as dynamic approaches dealing with the life course (Karl-Ulrich Mayer, Walter Müller, and Helga Krüger).

Modern societies increasingly compel couples to reconcile the time commitments of two jobs or careers and to juggle them with the multivarious responsibilities of running a household and raising a family. Different desires and competing goals that shape the response of the partners lead to new problems with cooperation and coordination. Drawing on the theoretical concept of "household governance", the author systematically analyzes data from the Dutch Time Competition Survey to identify ways in which couples try to cope with these complications by turning to institutionalized arrangements in the home, including outsourcing strategies, informal agreements, quality standards, and approaches to conflict management. The study shows that couples are highly creative in developing appropriate solutions but that they are still often unable to combine occupational and family obligations as they would like. Heavy professional demands and financial restrictions are not the only factors to blame. In particular, deciding on the scale of one's participation in the labor market confronts couples with a fundamental trade-off: Opting for fewer working hours in order to improve compatibility entails unforseeable employment risks for the individual.

This book describes the theory structure underlying contests, in which players expend effort and/or spend money in trying to get ahead of one another. Uniquely, this effort is sunk and cannot be recovered, regardless of whether a player wins or loses in the competition. Such interactions include diverse phenomena such as marketing and advertising by firms, litigation, relative reward schemes in firms, political competition, patent races, sports, military combat, war and civil war. These have been studied in the field of contest theory both within these specific contexts and at a higher level of abstraction. The purpose of this book is to describe the fundamental common properties of these types of interactions and to uncover some common properties or laws that govern them. The book begins by describing the properties of static contests and tournaments. Aspects such as timing, entry, sabotage and delegation are added and contest design issues such as the admission or exclusion of players and the structure of prizes are discussed. Further, structures are analysed in which players interact repeatedly in the same or different contest environments. Examples are inter-group conflict followed by intra-group rivalry, elimination tournaments and other dynamic contest structures.

Revenue and tax policies in Europe are about to change profoundly. Two issues dominate the agenda. First, the European Commission is obliged by the European Parliament and the European Council to examine all aspects of the EU budget in detail. The question is whether fundamentally new budget structures would be purposeful and, if so, whether changes in them would in fact have a hope of receiving the mandatory unanimous approval of the EU member states. The creation of an EU tax would be a revenue variant that could replace the current complex system that gives the EU its own budget resources. Second, increased competition for tax revenues in the EU since its eastward expansion is compelling the member states to modify their tax systems. With the widespread decline in corporate tax rates, proposals for a jointly consolidated basis for assessment of corporate taxes are now under debate. How advantageous would such consolidation be? What would be the prospects of achieving it? The contributors to this conference volume discuss the economic and legal facets of these issues.

Multinational corporations that set up a place of business outside their home country are confronted by the question of the degree to which they can seamlessly transfer their production, organization, and business models to the host country or must adapt to the local and national conditions there. The challenges become all the greater if there are cultural boundaries to overcome. This volume is a study of the internationalization strategies adopted by multinational automotive manufacturers in India. The author shows that the corporations follow quite different policies in this regard. How the home country's organizational and personnel concepts are combined with those of the host country depends heavily on a number of considerations. For example, what market segment does the firm serve? Does the firm use an international production system? What is the nature of that system? How does the firm plan to enter the market (by taking one over or rather by creating a new one)? What regulatory interests does the relevant government pursue? Internationalized and locally shaped practices are closely interwoven, with the latter dominating personnel management and labor relations and with supranationally standardized approaches tending to be applied to production technology and planning.

This book starts from the observation that innovations in the automotive industry are coming increasingly from networks, not single companies. These often global innovation networks encompass not only enterprises of different specializations but also research institutes. In response to the discussion about production moving out of traditional automotive regions, the authors ask to what degree a policy promoting regional clusters can successfully tap into these dynamics of innovation. They have in mind the EU's concept of clustering, the aim of which is to enhance the potential of regions primarily by networking them. Detailed analysis of the approach and effect of this policy is provided by eight case studies on European automotive regions in key and peripheral areas. The book thereby explores the polarity between automotive manufacturers, with their orientation to global innovation networks, and the regions, whose specific potential lies in scientific and technical infrastructure and business sectors that consist mostly of small to medium-size subcontracting firms.

In many cities today, new hopes for growth focus on the cultural and creative industries. Attracting creative people into the city and granting them opportunities to pursue their talents is widely considered a proven way to foster urban development. It is widely agreed that "creative urban milieus" - usually concentrated in certain quarters of a city - offer inspiring conditions. But what actually characterizes such milieus? How do they arise? Which resources do creative persons need and which do they really use? Research has not yet answered these questions adequately. This book aims to tackle them by means of precise qualitative description and systematic analysis. Taking a "creative quarter" known beyond its own region - Kastanienallee in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg - the author details how social foundations of creative production are linked with the specific way of life led by creative solo freelance artists and with a definite place in urban space. The study leads to specific recommendations on how creative quarters can be supported by their local communities. It also points out the social hazards confronting creative persons, who operate under circumstances often verging on the precarious.

What exactly is neoliberalism, and where did it come from? This volume attempts to answer these questions by exploring neoliberalism's origins and growth as a political and economic movement. Although modern neoliberalism was born at the "Colloque Walter Lippmann" in 1938, it only came into its own with the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society, a partisan thought collective", in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1947. Its original membership was made up of transnational economists and intellectuals, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Karl Popper, Michael Polany, and Luigi Einaudi. From this small beginning, their ideas spread throughout the world, fostering, among other things, the political platforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the Washington Consensus. The book presents the key debates and conflicts that occurred among neoliberal scholars and their political and corporate allies regarding trade unions, development economics, antitrust policies, and the influence of philanthropy. The contributions capture the depth and complexity of the neoliberal "thought collective" while examining the numerous ways that neoliberal discourse has come to shape the global economy.

The words "globalization" and "internationalization" are often associated with the notion of an anonymous, almost predetermined process acting on all participants in the same, even egalitarian, manner. The decidedly different argument taken in this collection of twelve essays is that internationalization has different effects, premises, and forms characterized by self-made constraints and varying alternatives to act, depending on the society involved. Input from transnational or supranational actors is absorbed, remolded, refined, and linked back to the international level by national and local entities. Whether such formative opportunities are used or not depends on intelligent strategic combination of the constituent factors. This central motif emerges from the volume's selected research results on various topics, including the development of supranational standards and rules; national and corporate business models that exist despite internationalized markets and chains of value-added; transnational business alliances; large and small multinational enterprises; and the representation of employee interests.

Pursuing research today primarily means designing, conducting, and concluding projects. This way of going about the task is now all but taken for granted in every discipline, even science studies. But does such project orientation really owe to the inherent logic of research activity? And what will the consequences be if research becomes increasingly structured around projects? The author addresses these questions with a historically and theoretically grounded concept of project research as the independent type of societal structuring it has become. Case studies from empirical, theoretical, and engineering research are used to show that working in a project setting is not the natural vehicle of research and can therefore eventually confound research practice. The omnipresence and axiomatic acceptance of the project-based research approach derive instead from the fact that it is a highly adaptable and institutionally rooted operational configuration. Not until these conditions came about was it possible for project-based research to develop as it has.

The Academy Group on Aging in Germany was a joint project by the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina) and the Deutsche Akademie der Technikwissenschaften (acatech). Their recommendations start from the fact that demographic development has, on average, considerably extended human life, with many now people reaching old age in better health than in the past. The Academy Group pursued three objectives with its recommendations: (a) to improve each person's chances of leading an independent, self-responsible life into advanced old age; (b) to shape generational relations in a productive, just, and mutually beneficial way; and (c) to ensure and advance the sustainability of society at large. Demographic change entails both challenges but also opens great opportunities. The lengthening of human life offers untapped potential for progress. Drawing on it depends on using demographic change as a driving force to achieve the necessary changes. Demographic aging will then contribute to social dynamics and become demographic opportunity.

The added value that the concept of governance has contributed to science lies primarily in research on processes. The contributors to this volume, most of whom belong to the WZB's interunit group on "New Forms of Governance", analyze a broad spectrum of processes involved in transformation, dissolution, pluralization, and new creation. The book's four sections deal with different dimensions of this subject. The first part, "Power and Domination", deals, for example, with Germany's labor market, legitimacy in democratic civil society, transnational standard-setting, and gender aspects of governance issues. Educational policy, industrial democracy, and corporate governance are addressed under the title "State and Market". Knowledge in processes of change constitutes the third section, which treats the topics of advising the government, of the science system, and of the relation between knowledge and trust in governance across sectorial boundaries. The final part, "Government and Law", the authors discuss transnational legal standards, among other matters.

Despite recent success with the integration of older job-seekers into the labour market, the likelihood in Germany that people in this group will find employment remains low, especially among those trying to resume employment after the age of 50. To explore different local ways to reintegrate these older workers and achieve sustainable improvement of their opportunities on the labour market, the German Federal Ministry of Labour created "Program Perspective 50 plus." The primary responsibility for its implementation rested with the joint ventures set up between the nation's regional employment agencies and the municipalities charged with placing long-term unemployed persons receiving a basic allowance. These bodies were to work with local agencies, businesses, chambers, educational institutions, policy-makers, unions, churches, and social associations to form joint "employment pacts." The present volume imparts the main insights gained by the research evaluating the projects that were funded through these alliances. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative studies, the authors evaluate regional networks, organizational structures, and instruments for promoting employment. The current results of practical job-placement are contextualized in recent findings from psychology on the motivation of older employees, from sociology on selection processes during recruitment and on the position of older employees within the company, and from neurophysiology on the learning ability of older people.

This volume is written in honor of Thorleif Pettersson, an erudite social scientist with a spezial interest in sociology of religion and a scholar playing a key role in the "World Values Surveys". Somme of his closest colleagues and friends have contributed insightful essays to this book in recognition of his academic achievements. Part I concentrates on religion, secularism and morality. The essays in Part II deal with the broad subject of democratization and good governance. Finally, Part III contains contributions on values related to war and peace. The volume concludes with a chapter which offers a broader historical and theoretical perspective on the study of values. Together the essays represent a broad spectrum of research and analyses related to the study of human values and socio-cultural change. From Classical Greece to contemporary social science, this research tradition is based on the recognition that "values matter". In sum, the chapters illustrate a broad research field where surveys of people's values and attitudes in almost hundred societies on all six continents are analyzed.

This book is the latest volume in a series presenting internationally relevant results of Germany's national elections and of empirical research on elections and voters since 1980. One of the special aspects of Germany's 2005 national election is that it was moved forward because of parliament's early dissolution when the federal chancellor lost a vote of no confidence. The first part of the book contains contributions on the political background of this election, the course of the campaign, east - west differences in voter behavior, shifts in voter allegiance, and effects of the issues and the candidates. Given the recurring and particularly heated debates in 2005 on the reliability of election forecasts, the present volume explores the topic from the academic and commercial perspectives of election research. In the second part of the book, survey and experimental data serve as a basis for treatment of traditional and new questions of election research. The analyses center mostly on long-term trends and regional facets of voter behavior in Germany. The third part addresses international trends and elections in other European democracies.

Reports of "honor killings" of young Muslim women who had adopted a "western" lifestyle or who had refused to meet the expectations of their parents appear in the media on a fairly regular basis. Such acts of violence starkly illustrate the lines of normative conflict within migrant Muslim families. The topic calls attention to the socialization processes and the structure of the parent-child relations in families with religious or traditional values, the two focal points of this empirical study of Moroccan immigrants and their daughters. Based on narrative interviews, it casts light on the socialization and child-rearing practiced by the parents as well as on the ways that young female family members experience and deal with the behavioral demands of their parents. The study illuminates four ideal-type coping strategies with which young women respond to the conformity required of them. First, they can adapt to host country's values and liberation from the parents' ethnically informed field of socialization. Second, they can orient themselves to the parents' traditional notions but seek self-determined religious individuation. Third, they can accept their parents' expectations for lack of strength to resist them. Fourth, they can pretend a willingness to adapt so as to neutralize friction between mutually exclusive demands made by different agents of socialization.

John Keane presents a history of democracy from its very beginnings. He poses some timely questions: can we really be sure that democracy had its origins in ancient Greece? How did democratic ideals and institutions come to have the shape they do today? Why are many people now gripped by the feeling that a bad moon is rising over all the world's democracies? Do they indeed have a future? Keane unearths the beginnings of such precious institutions and ideals as government by public assembly, votes for women, the secret ballot, trial by jury and press freedom. It explains how and why democracy spread in modern times to Latin America, Africa and Asia. It tracks the changing, hotly disputed meanings of democracy and describes quite a few of the extraordinary characters, many of them long forgotten, who dedicated their lives to building or defending democracy. The book proposes that we are now living in an age of "monitory democracy", a genuinely different type of democratic rule that began to develop after the end the World War II.

Citizens living in presidential or parliamentary systems face different political choices as do voters casting votes in elections governed by rules of proportional representation or plurality. Political commentators seem to know how such rules influence political behavior. They firmly believe, for example, that candidates running in plurality systems are better known and held more accountable to their constituencies than candidates competing in elections governed by proportional representation. However, such assertions rest on shaky ground simply because solid empirical knowledge to evaluate the impact of political institutions on individual political behavior is still lacking. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems has collected data on political institutions and on individual political behavior and scrutinized it carefully. In line with common wisdom results of most analyses presented in this volume confirm that political institutions matter for individual political behavior but, contrary to what is widely believed, they do not matter much.

Constitutional courts are powerful actors in nearly all liberal democracies. But there are frequent doubts that they are consistent with democracy when they intervene in democratic processes, for the democratic legitimacy of constitutional courts is comparatively weak. The author analyzes the specific functions that these institutions perform in democratic systems of government and empirically answers the question about the democratic compatibility of constitutional courts. The book focuses on disputes between federal and state government, between organs, and between contending procedures for monitoring standards. The author concludes that constitutional courts need not be antagonists of democratic politics at all and that, as shown by the Federal Republic of Germany, they can even be constitutive for democratic governance. Based on thorough analysis of the rulings handed down by the German Federal Constitutional Court from 1951 to, this study shows that the highest court in the land has been exceedingly conducive to democracy and has thereby contributed to its high quality in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The volume contains presentations from the conference entitled "Aging, Education, and Life-long Learning: Aging in Germany" and brings them together with additional essays on the topic. Scholars and other relevant actors from a variety of countries, including Germany, formulate new findings and perspectives in the fields of history, political science, psychology, law, sociology, and the day-to-day operations of civil society. The contributions explore the opportunities and alternatives arising for families and civil society because of the pending changes due to the extended life spans. The authors discuss which problems the policy- and decision-making communities, particularly those in welfare states, can and must solve in societies with aging populations. Current findings on older people's time use and intergenerational transfers are examined, as are historical and political science analyses of and approaches to older people's participation in and inclusion by society. The book also considers new forms of participation in civil society, such as neighbourhood out-patient home-nursing care groups. Like the previous volumes in the series on aging in Germany, this one is thus directed not only to people in the disciplines represented by the contributing authors but also to readers interested in the practical and political issues of aging.

Normative plurality is at odds with the idea of normative unity, which constitutes the basis of state law and order. The authors of the contributions in this book discuss the ways normative plurality is manifested in the local, national, and transnational context. Spanning the legal, social, and cultural sciences, the texts explore perspectives that researchers in those fields have on the problems stemming from plurality and on proposed approaches to coping with them through law. The volume is not about formulating metadogmatics of judicial pluralism but rather about shaping the discourse on normative plurality along the lines of four cross-sectional questions. The concept of law is first distinguished from other social norms. Collisions between rules are categorized to discern the junctures at which the normative unity of law is challenged. Available mechanisms, institutions, and practices for coming to grips with normative plurality are then considered. Lastly, the authors pose the methodological question of how to deal with behavioral standards operating alongside the law. This book's international comparative essays address tribal law and sharia (Islamic law) in Afghanistan, law in China, and various legal traditions in France, Germany, and England.

This book gauges the influence of nationalist parties on European policies. The ability of regions - the constituent units from decentralized member-states - to shape EU decisions has been at the centre of discussions on European integration theory and of European Union politics for fifteen years now. By combining evidence from Germany, Italy and Spain, and from two EU policy areas - audiovisual and cohesion - the author shows why and when understanding EU policies requires taking regional lobbying of the European Parliament and the Commission into consideration. This first attempt to combine the literature on "The Europe of the Regions" and on multi-level governance with policy analysis will be illuminating for scholars and practitioners interested in federalism, nationalist parties, and the EU decision-making process as well as for those concerned with Europeanization.

This volume by Jutta Allmendinger presents the results of her study on the life plans of young women in Germany, which she conducted in 2007 and again in 2009. Drawing on surveys of women and men ranging from 17 through 19 and 27 through 29 years of age, the author depicts the meaning that young women attach to occupation, family, and partnership. She takes a detailed look at gainful employment, describes why women want to have children and how children change life, and investigates the subjects' partnerships in their understandings and misunderstandings. After observing differences and similarities between life plans in eastern and western Germany, she concludes the book by examining the impact of the past decade's financial crisis, which, though unapparent in the actual work situation of the respondents in the second survey, distinctly affected the image they held of society. She finds that women on the move. They are well educated and self-assertive, and they want children and a career. It is now up to the policy-making and business communities to create the appropriate conditions.

The nineteenth edition of the Ecology Yearbook focuses on resource conflicts surrounding the tension between economic expansion and ecological limitation. The scarcity of oil, water, land, and metals is increasing, and demand for them is rising. Many nonrenewable resources are about to peak, have passed that point, or have already dwindled to absolute scarcity. The use of renewable resources is overstretched, underdeveloped, or fraught with new contradictions. Global population continues to expand, and new countries crowding onto the world market are jockeying for advantage as they compete for resources. But competition has also led to strategic innovations that have inspired commitment to improve resource efficiency and material productivity. They have produced concepts such as the ecological footprint and the ecological backpack to diminish conflict. The 2010 Ecology Yearbook contains numerous examples of ways to deal with the upheaval in the world, how to make for a leaner economy and a more contented society, and how to sharpen institutional supervision of the environment.