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AbstractTenants all over the globe face the challenges of increasing rents and even forced evictions, particularly in the private urban rental sector. Affordable housing shortage and displacement have become severe societal problems for the lower- and middle-income segments. Certain legal institutions, including tenancy law, provide a decommodifying capacity for more tenure security and stability. This paper studies this capacity of tenancy law by comparatively examining the tenants’ and landlords’ rights in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland through the lens of decommodification. The focus is (1) on the rules of access to housing for new residents entering the housing market and (2) the rules of exit that govern the ability of the occupants to continue living in their apartments. Findings show that while tenants’ rights in Switzerland are weakly protected by law, tenants in Austria and Germany receive robust protection. Austrian and German tenants cannot be evicted at short notice, nor are landlords allowed to dismiss them unless they declare legitimate self-usage. Also, tenants remain protected from arbitrary rent increases in case of rental upgrading. Conclusions help practitioners to consider tenancy law as an influential way to counteract the market-driven dynamics in housing and to enhance the protective capacity within renting property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate determinants of willingness to adopt telerehabilitation, willingness of technology use, core affect regarding using telerehabilitation, and digital competencies in rehabilitation professionals in Austria and Germany before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. A cross-sectional paper-based and online survey was conducted before and during COVID-19, respectively, with three cohorts of rehabilitation professionals. Outcomes were the willingness to adopt telerehabilitation evaluated using the extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology; willingness of technology use using the short scale for assessing the willingness of technology use; digital competencies and core affect using the Digital Competence Framework and semantic differential, respectively. Multivariate ordinal regression analysis was performed to determine predictors. Included were 603 rehabilitation professionals. Analysis revealed differences between Austria and Germany and before and during the pandemic for most outcomes. German residency, the pandemic, and a higher educational level were most important predictors of higher willingness to adopt telerehabilitation, willingness of technology use, digital competencies, and positive core affect. The pandemic increased most aspects of willingness to adopt telerehabilitation, willingness of technology use, digital competencies, and positive core affect. Results confirm that rehabilitation professionals with higher degrees are more prone to adopt innovations in healthcare.Registration: German Clinical Trials Register (DRKS00021464) The willingness to adopt telerehabilitation is associated with external factors increasing the need for alternative rehabilitation delivery, such as COVID-19, and with financial facilitators, such as reimbursement. As the willingness to adopt telerehabilitation is higher among speech and language therapists and dietitians, efforts are necessary to enhance its use in physiotherapists and occupational therapists. As a higher willingness to adopt telerehabilitation was observed in younger rehabilitation professionals and those with higher education, increasing the importance of telerehabilitation in education curricula and further knowledge transfer into practice for those already working in the field seems necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How distancing requirements in the COVID-19 pandemic transformed intimate relationships is under-researched. Against the backdrop of research on the HIV pandemic, the paper departs from the assumption that decreased legitimacy of intimate arrangements and subjective worry about the likeliness of infection may reduce the frequency of multiple sexual contact and intimate well-being during the pandemic. Based on findings from a quantitative study which included measures of risk perception, frequency of contact with sexual partners and communities, concealment, as well as relationship quality in Austria and Germany, this paper examines sexual behaviour in association with relationship status and sexual identity. Analysing data from a convenience sample of 4,709 respondents, of whom 24 per cent identified as LGBQA+, 2 per cent as non-binary, and 6 per cent as consensually non-monogamous, bivariate analysis found significant differences in social distancing, frequency of contact with sexual communities and satisfaction with current sex life. Text analysis of the survey's open-ended responses indicates monogamisation due to declined legitimacy of less conventional intimate arrangements during the pandemic. Findings point to the importance of the sexual morality that defined pandemic experiences in times of HIV for understanding normative pressure on intimate life during COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, the term "interreligiosity" is well-established in discussions about religious education. This paper addresses various current approaches and concepts within interreligious pedagogy in Germany and Austria. On the one hand, it strives to bring order to the wide, impervious variety of previous approaches and on the other hand it identifies existing focal points, main topics and tendencies. The research subjects are theoretic-conceptual models, didactic and methodological approaches, and empirical analyses on applied interreligious projects within pedagogical practice. It is shown that there is an imbalance in the existing literature-namely, the lack of practical orientation. The paper concludes by outlining suggestions on the future of interreligious pedagogical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of federal states to manage the COVID-19 pandemic has created much debate. Federations differ considerably in the way they have been tackling the crisis, however. To shed light on how European federations (Austria, Germany, Switzerland) managed COVID-19, this paper distinguishes two dimensions of federal decision making: centralised/decentralised and unilateral/coordinated decision making. Drawing on official government documents and press reports, it examines decisions on the introduction of containment measures and their subsequent easing during the first wave. While Austria and Switzerland adopted a centralised approach, decentralised decision making prevailed in Germany. However, most decisions were coordinated between the governments at the federal and constituent unit level in Austria and Germany, in contrast to Switzerland where unilateralism prevailed. This difference in approaches can partly be explained by the distribution of powers. Political and economic factors also influenced the choice of crisis management strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on research undertaken as part of the EU funded EPPIC project, this paper aims to update and elaborate on the relationship between drug use and offending behaviours by exploring variations within a cross-national sample of drug-experienced young people in touch with criminal justice systems. Adopting a trajectory-based approach, interviews were undertaken with 198 young people aged 15–25 in six European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, and UK). Data were analysed by applying the Bennett and Holloway categorization of the drugs-crime link, with a focus on the concept of social exclusion as developed by Seddon. Three main types of mechanisms (economic, pharmaceutical, and lifestyles) are used to interpret the data, showing how the relationship between drugs and offending can vary according to type of substances and over time. Furthermore, it can be associated with very different degrees of social exclusion and needs. The results suggest that while economic inequalities still play key roles in explaining drug use and offending, both behaviours can originate from a state of relative deprivation, resulting from the contradictions inherent in 'bulimic societies' that raise aspirations and desires while providing young people scarce opportunities for self-realisation and social recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past, woodborers like A. punctatum and X. rufovillosum were widespread in historic furniture, households, and building structures, but as they need a high wood moisture content and central heating and climate control have become common today their occurrence is rare and often limited to open-air museums, rural museums, and historic buildings. In this paper, we report on the spread and transportation of different wood-boring beetles with wooden pallets, wooden transport boxes used for art transportation, and also the rising problem of different Lyctus species (powder post beetles) in new wood used in museums. Not only the native Lyctus linearis but also the introduced L. brunneus, L. cavicollis, and L. africanus can be found in transport boxes (nine cases in Germany between 2003 and 2015), infestations of new picture frames (three cases in Austria between 2010 and 2015), and new wood sold to carpenters in museum and conservation studios (used for new stretcher and picture frames, two cases in Austria). In some cases (two in Germany) a newly-laid parquet floor was infested by powder post beetles. The house longhorn beetle (H. bajulus), the furniture beetle (A. punctatum), and the Anobiid Oligomerus ptilinoides were all found infesting wooden pallets inside museum stores (five cases in Austria). New wooden pallets and transport boxes are treated once with heat after production, but our examples show that infestation and transportation of wood pests are still possible and are a new challenge for integrated pest management (IPM) in the future. We examine and discuss the materials used to transport art and possible measures to combat and prevent pests (plastic pallets or the use of other wood types). In addition, the biology and life-history of powderpost beetles is described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the content of so-called 'fake news' differ across Western democracies? While previous research on online disinformation has focused on the individual level, the current study aims to shed light on cross-national differences. It compares online disinformation re-published by fact checkers from four Western democracies (the US, the UK, Germany, and Austria). The findings reveal significant differences between English-speaking and German-speaking countries. In the US and the UK, the largest shares of partisan disinformation are found, while in Germany and Austria sensationalist stories prevail. Moreover, in English-speaking countries, disinformation frequently attacks political actors, whereas in German-speaking countries, immigrants are most frequently targeted. Across all of the countries, topics of false stories strongly mirror national news agendas. Based on these results, the paper argues that online disinformation is not only a technology-driven phenomenon but also shaped by national information environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present the development of feminist geographies in the three German-speaking countries Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Since the emergence of feminist approaches in German-speaking geography in the 1980s, feminist geographers situated in these countries have worked closely together within the context of the Working Group "Geography and Gender". The overview highlights cornerstones of the development of feminist geographies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland such as the Feminist Geography Newsletter (Feministisches GeoRundMail), the Doreen Massey Reading Weekends, the feminist geography student meetings (Feministisches Geograph_innentreffen) and the current DFG-research network "Feminist Geographies of the New Materialism". By doing so, we try to appreciate both the historical development of feminist geographies and the current situation in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Highlighting both informal and institutionalized pillars of feminist geographies in these countries, we show how feminist geographies have moved from a marginalized position towards a vibrant field that gains more and more attention within the German-speaking geography community as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the liberalisation of markets during the 1990s, the pressure on public sector entities to demonstrate their performance in financial and non-financial terms has increased. Compared to the private sector, accountability expectations and obligations are higher for public enterprises due to public ownership and objectives associated with the public mission. While there is a vast body of literature on public accountability in general, a research gap exists when it comes to linking the general debate of public accountability to sustainability reporting practices of public enterprises. Thus, the paper addresses the research questions about the performance of reporting practices of public enterprises with respect to public accountability and about the state of the art of sustainability reporting of public enterprises in Germany and Austria with respect to accountability. Therefore, this paper combines two research domains, social and environmental accounting research and the accountability of public enterprises. The paper reports the results of a survey, analysing the reporting practices of German and Austrian local public entities in particular. Annual reports and, if available, sustainability reports from 103 Austrian and German cities were examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing the number of tertiary graduates has been a priority on the political agenda of the EU for some years. The focus has mainly been on academic courses though, with less emphasis on the role of vocational education and training. International educational statistics indeed show a clear increase in the number of persons completing tertiary education programmes in recent years. In overall terms, this development is referred to as ‘academisation’. The present paper provides a critical analysis and uses examples from Germany, Austria and France to show that this interpretation is neglecting two crucial facts. One is that various academic programmes in fact are combining academic with vocational learning. The other is that there are vocational programmes in the tertiary education sector that are not adequately visible in international education statistics. This understanding is important in relation to future policy-making as well as individual decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims at assessing the status of animal welfare in Austria and Germany as it is regulated by private, national, and European animal welfare legislation. In order to achieve this, an inventory of existing private and state-driven animal welfare certification schemes that are relevant for fattening pigs in Austria and Germany is done, and the overlap between legislative and private certification requirements for animal welfare analyzed. The paper's methodological contribution lies in the development of an assessment approach based on the Austrian 'Animal Needs Index' that allows the evaluation of minimum farm animal welfare standards without expensive and time-consuming on-farm measures. The comparison of legislative and private certification scheme pig standards indicate slight differences between the minimum animal welfare obligations of certification schemes existent in Austria and Germany whereas the reviewed Austrian scheme obligations show in general more diversification from the evaluated legislative standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to analyse the relationship between wages and education at a European level, using a quantile regression in order to be able to extend the study along the whole wage distribution. This analysis is carried out for a sample of 14 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom), using the European Community Household Panel data-set. The paper aims to investigate whether the relationship between wages and education at European level is homogeneous and stable through time by running regressions for average and current (log)wages. Policy implications are derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the emergence of immigrant writing in Germany and Austria with a view to explaining why a guestworker literature emerged in Germany in the 1970s but not in Austria despite the fact that the two countries' immigration histories were comparable. Whilst these differing developments can be traced back to a number of factors, the paper argues that a critical factor is the opportunity structure within the receiving countries. Using this approach and Bourdieu's theory on the literary field, I show that the changes in the literary field in Germany were conducive to such a development at the time, while the structure of the literary field in Austria hampered such a development. However, when the first immigrant and ethnic minority publications eventually appeared in Austria in the 1990s, the circumstances were comparable to those in Germany in the 1970s: the writers positioned themselves as immigrants to express their opposition to mechanisms of political and cultural exclusion. Yet, the responses to these developments differed: while the works written in 1970s' West Germany display a strong belief that change can be brought about by workers' solidarity in the fight against capitalism, the novels published in the last decade in Austria seem to subscribe to a more individualised approach to social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore a series of issues and tensions raised by the papers in this Special Issue of Environmental Education Research . The papers focus on developments in environmental education and ESD research in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In order to provide an alternative framework for contextualising and understanding the trends and challenges illustrated in the collection, we begin with an examination of Germany’s green political movement, both at the level of national politics but also in relation to broader cultural shifts that have taken place in recent years. We then invite further debate on environmental education and ESD by focusing on three nodes within the discourse on these complex, dynamic and linked fields of theory and practice. First, we explore the themes of compatibility and compliance regarding environmental education and the ‘global’ as two of the key ingredients to ESD. Second, we consider the growing dominance of competency-based approaches to ESD, primarily in terms of educational standards projects, but also in relation to images of the human therein. Third, we look into understandings of agency in relation to innovation and change, including the role of NGOs in research and policy-making, and the sources and drivers of possible frames for future research agendas. The article ends by inviting wider discussion and critique of the achievements, tensions and challenges for research and development in environmental education and ESD, both in the three countries, and further afield. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How much did national competition policies converge between 1950 and 2000, and what were the forces behind this? These are the questions the paper attempts to answer, for three countries whose competition policies differed substantially at the outset: Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. The paper measures the degree of convergence of national competition policies, and concludes that there has been convergence towards the stricter EU anti-trust norms. This can be explained by neither negative ('the market') nor positive ('the state') integration, as competition policy is one of the few policy areas where the EU has never explicitly tried to harmonize national legislation. Other forces must have been at work. We investigate the role of various actors, which each play a role in three theories of European integration: institutionalism, which stresses the importance of the central European institutions; neofunctionalism, which focuses on international business; and the epistemic community approach, which highlights the importance of transnational expert communities. We find that convergence has been mainly the work of subtle 'topdown' pressure from the CEC and the ECJ ('the courts'), combined with the emergence of an epistemic 'community' of legally trained officials, which has been a channel for the exchange of information, ideas, solutions and arguments between the systems and levels of law. EU case law provided an important model, experiment and source of norms for this community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the thesis that popular music in early twentieth-century Germany was Americanised by shifting the focus from the meaning and reception of music to the way it was produced and disseminated by professionals, from music publishers and composers to bandleaders and critics. Firstly, it stresses a key difference in the way the music business was modernised on both sides of the Atlantic around 1900. While in the US the sheet-music trade became ‘Taylorised’, the music business in Germany, as elsewhere in Continental Europe, was transformed into a rights industry. Secondly, the paper highlights the prominence of Austrian music producers and their repertoire in Germany and suggests that, at least in a business sense, popular music in Germany was Austrianised rather than Americanised. Thirdly, it proposes that ‘Jazz’ after the First World War was hardly a straightforward import of American culture, but a site where incumbents and newcomers to the music profession struggled for position. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper gives an overview of the historical and theoretical developments of Ethnomedizin in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It demonstrates the richness of this interdisciplinary field at the interface of anthropology, medicine and public health, and provides the unique perspectives of some of its founders from the 1970s onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an interactive multi-agent scenario assessment model and uses it to examine the future impact of climate change on winter tourism in the German and Austrian Alps. It is based on the 10-year 2001–2010 German GLOWA (GLObal change of the WAter cycle)-Danube project, which investigated climate change impacts over a broad range of sectors, using a high-resolution model to rate tourism development in the Upper Danube catchment area under many different future climate and societal scenarios. Its regionally differentiated analysis of the effects of climate change on both tourism supply and demand is essential because tourism varies at the small scale concerning natural resources as well as market segments. The project produced simulated numbers of overnight stays and operating days for specific ski areas, thus evaluating 50-year implications for the winter tourism industry. Three different ski areas are used to describe the functionality of the whole simulation system. As the model analyses tourism development at a high level of individualisation, it sensitises policymakers to the importance of forward planning using sustainable adaptation strategies, breaking new ground by examining the many and complex interacting factors impacting winter sports tourism, including demand shifts between specific ski areas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Germany's apprenticeship system is and has always been considered to be the major sub-system of VET. In this context, the debate circling around the European and German Qualifications Framework (EQF and DQR) has become one of the central issues of VET research and policy. Tasks take on a concrete shape if (a) a serious approach is adopted towards the ideas underlying the European Qualifications Framework; and (b) if consideration is given to the 'construction sites' typical for the German VET system as a whole. This paper intends to sharpen VET policy awareness for the problem of dealing with those unresolved German VET issues within the context of the development of the DQR. A comparative view includes Austria and France as two countries with diverging learning cultures in VET from the German case, but obviously with more 'European' imprints within their respective VET systems. It can be shown that there is an interrelation between the attention apprenticeships as such receive against the background of European ideas such as 'progression', 'permeability' and 'lifelong learning' (LLL), including the implementation and use of 'hybrid qualifications'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 23 January 2009, Professor Magne Sæbø celebrated his 80th birthday. On this occasion, on 29 January, the Old Testament Department at MF Norwegian School of Theology in Oslo, where Sæbø served as Professor of Old Testament from 1970 to 1999, hosted a one-day conference where three of his colleagues from Germany and Austria, representing the younger generation of scholars, lectured on selected texts and topics in the Old Testa-ment. These papers, including the following presentation on Magne Sæbø as Old Testament scholar, which opened the conference, are published in this volume of SJOT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper picks up "matching problems" related to current European education policy moves by referring to the German, the Trench and the Austrian VET system respectively. As we here refer to "dual systems" or "school-based systems" respectively, the pre-conditions for transforming European policy into national policies are very different. One major aspect here is the institutional framework and the progression pathways from VET to higher education. European ideas accompanying the present "Lisbon-Brugge-Copenhagen Process" demanding the opening-up of education and VET in the context of concepts such as the "Learning Economy" or "Lifelong Learning" have become a crucial background for re-framing the education system more or less fundamentally. VET systems with a strong focus on initial training obviously face the most serious challenges. Solutions lie in "nation-specific" strategies which encourage and enable change without losing the benefits and the functionality of the established system. Austria and Trance seem more prepared than Germany when it comes to linking up VET and higher education through so-called "hybrid qualifications". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses an incomplete information game model to describe and explain the so-called blank check issued to Austria by Germany in early July 1914. It asks why Germany would cede control of an important aspect of its foreign policy to another lesser power. The derived explanation is consistent not only with the actual beliefs of German and Austrian leaders but also with an equilibrium prediction of the game model. The issue of whether unconditional German support of Austria constituted either a necessary or a sufficient condition for the outbreak of major power war the next month is also addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the integration of Turkish labour migrant children in four countries across Europe in terms of their educational performance. By looking at the PISA 2003 (Programme for International Student Assessment) data pertaining to mathematics achievement of 15-year-olds, it explores the effects of ethnicity, gender and family background, on the one hand, and institutional factors (such as kindergarten attendance, grading and tracking), on the other, to offer a better understanding of the large immigrant-native gaps in educational performance. As a result, the author argues that institutional factors can have an impact on school-related integration, in addition to the effects associated with individual factors, thus adding another layer of disadvantage on the children of immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper notes that recent fiction in German by writers from eastern Europe and former Yugoslavia constitutes a new wave of migrant writing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It suggests a provisional unity to these texts based on the snapshot they provide of late-stage communism and the post-communist transformation of eastern and western Europe, focusing on five common scenarios. Yet the considerable areas of overlap with trends in other German-language literatures indicate that this literature cannot be labelled “marginal”. Rather this emerging field is transforming German literatures from within and contributing to a post-Cold War remapping of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article first outlines the differences in outcome of pension reform in Germany and Austria. The 2001 German pension reform cut benefits very little, but it started a system changing transformation process by strengthening the second (occupational pensions) and third pillar (private pensions). The 2003 Austrian pension reform, pushed through against major opposition from the labour unions, contains very few elements of policy innovation, but benefits have been cut back much more significantly than in the German case. The paper explains the difference in outcomes (system change in Germany, retrenchment in Austria) by looking at the structure of political institutions. The federal government in Austria is much less constrained by formal veto players than the German government, which had to engage in extensive coalition-building to get the pension bill through the second chamber of parliament. Therefore the influence of informal veto players (mainly unions) was much higher in Germany. The impact on the reform outcome was the positive discrimination of occupational pensions and less severe cuts in the benefit levels. The concluding thesis is that for successful and long-term sustainable welfare state reform, a small number of formal veto players is a valuable resource. A large number of formal veto players is an obstacle to retrenchment reforms, although it might encourage policy innovation, because political actors will look for other policy venues to increase their leverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current debates about activation policies focus only to a very limited degree on continental or conservative welfare states, as countries like Austria and Germany are usually assumed to exhibit a low degree of activation. However, active labour market policies have a long tradition in both countries. This paper analyses the development of active labour market policy in Germany and Austria during the last two decades with special emphasis on recent reform attempts. Against this background, the potential outcome of the central reforms is discussed. In spite of claims to 'modernise' the welfare system and labour market policies, current developments work mainly in the direction of curtailing benefits and rights of the unemployed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]