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Transnational surrogacy—the carrying of a child by a woman in one country on behalf of persons in another—is strongly shaped by documents. Of these, identity documents are particularly crucial as they establish the belonging of a child born through such an arrangement both to its parents (birth certificate) and to a country (passport). However, the acquisition of these documents is subject to national laws that may contradict one another in transnational settings where citizens of more than one country are involved. As a result, in the last few years, there have been several cases of children stuck in legal limbo without clear parenthood and citizenship. Based on ethnographic research in India and Germany, we analyze how in such a transnational setting, documents and documentation become part of the making and unmaking of persons and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies have reported a right-leaning bias in the media's reporting of how the public thinks of political issues, raising the question: Why, and to what extent, is this the case? One reason in particular has been discussed in this regard: Journalists judge public opinion to be more right leaning than it actually is (Beckers et al. 2021; Lewis et al. 2004). This paper therefore studies to what extent journalists misjudge audience opinion. The analyses are based on large-scale representative surveys of journalists (1993/2005) and the voting-age population (1994/2005) in Germany. Results show that German journalists (mis-)judge audience opinion to be more right-leaning than the audience sees itself. The results also show that journalists judge audience opinion to be to the right of their own stances, and that journalists in federal states with a right-leaning government and in West Germany judge audience opinion to be even further to the right. Audience feedback does not push journalists' judgements of their audience towards the right, however. These results are discussed vis-à-vis research showing that there is a consistent bias in the depiction of opinions expressed by ordinary citizens, and research documenting that political elites overestimate public support for right-wing policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At times when migration and diversity are politically salient and controversially discussed, the rhetoric of staying 'as we are' is widespread. But how do 'we' actually change and how would 'we' know when it happens? Based on the premise that political communities are the products of narratives of peoplehood, this paper explores how such narratives evolve over time. It conceptualizes different modes of balancing narrative continuity and change. These modes – repetition, adaptation, and institutionalization – are illustrated with reference to evolving German narratives of peoplehood centring around (not) being a country of immigration. The paper argues that all modes lead to some degree of change in narratives of peoplehood. Against the backdrop of different understandings of the core of a narrative, it further discusses when such changes fundamentally affect who 'we' are. Overall, the paper invites scholars, policymakers, and citizens to think critically about the essential aspects of their political communities' narratives and to be aware of the stories that 'we' are told and that 'we' tell ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper asks for the contribution of growth models for the explanation of public sector employment relations in Germany. The paper is subdivided into three parts. The first elaborates on long-term developments as well as forms of employment. The second part analyzes wage setting systems, that is, bilateral collective bargaining for employees and unilateral decision-making for civil servants. The third part compares the empirical outcomes of both sub-systems with the assumptions of growth models and distinguished explicitly various concepts of the state as corporate actor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On July 17, 2021, the CDU's chancellor candidate Armin Laschet was photographed laughing during a speech by the German Federal President in the flood-stricken city of Erftstadt. The photographic images caused an uproar and contributed to the CDU's defeat in the September 23 election. The paper analyzes why these images resonated with such damaging effects. Theoretically, it sets the analysis on the background of the moralization and personalization of politics and argues that photography, with its ability to capture behavior at a distance, plays a prominent role in these processes. While this condition explains why an image of a laughing politician can generate such indignation in the first place, the paper discusses how this effect was amplified in the case of Laschet by a range of contextual features: (a) the timing of the images in the middle of an election period where politicians come under intense scrutiny; (b) their appearance in a crisis situation (the German flooding disaster) where politicians are surrounded by other role expectations than in routine periods; (3) Laschet's new, insecure position as leader of the CDU; (d) his history of scandals and poor political judgment; and (e) the frivolous and boisterous manner of his laughter. At a general theoretical level, the paper's insights caution us to avoid prima facie conclusions about the autonomous power of photographs. Instead, they encourage analytical sensitivity to the importance of timing and context as explanatory elements in our understanding of photographic exposés. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary tax research is split into two camps: comparative approaches emphasize continuity and cross-country differences, while the globalization literature stresses similar changes across countries. Counter the continuity thesis, this paper finds that neoliberal dynamics were at play in a case considered largely resilient to such dynamics: German governments implemented a series of corporate tax reforms which radically curbed business taxes and added a short-term and cost-cutting component to investments and corporate finance. While these changes point towards neoliberal change, they were distinct from the trends we see in other economies: crucially, the German reforms did not follow the common trend of reducing taxes for individuals and entailed a particular emphasis on enhancing multinational's access to international capital – but did not liberate financial incomes from tax in general. Based on archival documents from the Bundestagsarchiv, this paper traces the process of German tax reforms and finds that neoliberal dynamics were at play but received a local (export-oriented) colour through processes specific to the German polity. Because consensual institutions granted power to a specific business coalition, radical change was long blocked. Reforms could only be implemented once the state forged a new coalition. Making sense of the mediation of neoliberal dynamics through state institutions can contribute to a better understanding of the variegated nature of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Right-wing populists are gaining ground in Western democracies. Surveys show that they often distrust established media and public service media (PSM) in particular, claiming that they are biased against them. This paper examines how they have challenged PSM and proposes some potential responses to these challenges. The paper is based on an analysis of a number of recent and long-standing surveys of public attitudes towards the media, combined with an analysis of support for right-wing populists. It focuses on three purposively sampled national case studies: Austria, Germany and Sweden. We show several commonalities among PSM in these three countries, including similar right-wing populist attacks on PSM. The findings crystallise around two points: First, the impartiality and objectivity of news media has generally become less taken-for-granted in a 'high-choice' media environment offering various news products of different quality. Secondly, historical left-right distinctions have become less clear-cut, also because right-wing populists challenge them. Consequently, the role of PSM in creating a shared national conversation which represents the diversity of society has also come under siege. At the same time, partisan websites and social media platforms enable certain groups to showcase content that is more aligned with the perspectives of right-wing populists. The paper concludes by asking if right-wing populists are a growing threat to PSM and whether this threat is isolated or potentially indicative of a broader and more sustained pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared to the United States, the relationship between ethnicity and gentrification is still understudied in the Western European context. However, while Western Europe does not have the same racial history as the United States, ethnic and racial divisions are still expressed through urban inequality. This paper, a study of small-business owners in an ethnically stigmatized Berlin neighborhood, shows how the gentrification process leads to the revelation and reification of ethnic boundaries between Turkish immigrants and their descendants and the so-called German majority society. It firstly finds that gentrification by Turkish-origin business owners is frequently understood as an ethnic remake that leads to the displacement of Turkish immigrants and their families in favor of non-immigrant Germans. The gentrification process is accordingly perceived, not only as a form of material dispossession, but also as a form of cultural dispossession in which the multicultural character of the quarter is erased. Second, the paper postulates that, in cases in which Turkish immigrant entrepreneurs adapt their businesses to the demands of new middle-class consumers, they tend to exclude the lower-income population in the quarter whom they mainly define as Turkish or Arabic. All in all, the debate presented in this paper shows how, in the German context, gentrification relates to prior forms of ethnic prejudice, discrimination and racism. It thereby also complicates the prominent discussion on the nexus between gentrification and displacement by showing that, even if long-time residents are not immediately threatened with having to leave, they still experience forms of exclusion that are entrenched with already existing structural inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite renewed interest in the role of business in shaping the welfare state, we still know little about how factions of capital adapt their strategies and translate these into political infighting and coalition building. Based on a detailed process tracing analysis of the political battle over German pension funds, this paper shows that cleavages within business do not necessarily run along the lines of finance vs. non-finance. While 'financial challengers' (banks and investment companies) advocated financialized pension funds, 'financial incumbents' (insurers) defended a conservative understanding of old age provision. Tremendous political momentum towards financialization notwithstanding, challengers remained largely unsuccessful. Incumbents elicited support from the wider business community by adjusting their strategic goals and engaging in discursive reformulations to effectively fight pension financialization from within capital. To accommodate such competition politics and coalition building, the paper argues for a more dynamic understanding of business strategizing and highlights the importance of discursive political strategies. It shows that some capitalists may act as antagonists of elements of financialization and problematizes the actual mechanisms of coalition building through which business plurality affects political outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occupational sex segregation persists in part because men seldom enter female-dominated occupations. Whereas programs providing women with gender-atypical learning experiences aim to increase female representation in male-dominated domains, similar programs for men—despite their potential to counteract the prevailing lack of men in female-dominated occupations—are rare. In this paper, I investigate whether men's gender-atypical learning experiences affect their likelihood of entering female-dominated occupations by studying the effect of participation in Germany's civilian service. The civilian service offered a social-sector alternative to compulsory military service, and its suspension in 2011 induced exogenous variation in men's gender-atypical learning experiences. Combining register data from Germany's social security system with data from the German Microcensus shows that men's likelihood of entering the labor market in female-dominated occupations declined by about 21 percent when the civilian service was suspended. Scaling the estimate by participation in the civilian service indicates that having completed the civilian service increased men's likelihood of entering female-dominated occupations by about 12 percentage points. This illustrates that programs exposing men to gender-atypical learning experiences can promote occupational integration and could "unstall" the gender revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political participation is socially distorted: Socio-economic resources affecting the probability of individuals becoming politically active question the principle of political equality. Such inequality in participation based on social stratification is well documented for elections, while research on inequality in referendum participation is still scarce. Based on the observation that such inequality varies between referendums, this paper explores referendum-specific contextual factors that may affect socially distorted referendum participation. We leverage information from an original dataset covering 1788 districts in 35 German municipalities for 68 local referendums held between 2000 and 2019. The results of our multilevel models indicate that concurrent first-order elections boost referendum turnout and decrease social stratification, while the closeness of the decision increases turnout but does not affect stratification bias. Moreover, we find a curvilinear relationship between turnout and stratification, with stratification only diminishing from participation levels above 40–50%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of wearables in the workplace allows for close monitoring of work processes and might also have consequences for work content and skill requirements. Past research has emphasized the detrimental effects of wearables, particularly those caused by the standardization of work and monitoring of workers. By contrast, this study asks under what conditions the implementation of wearables as part of digital assistance systems is beneficial for workers. Based on recent contributions in the field of labor process theory, this study analyzes the implementation of new technologies using the concepts of the regulatory regime, organizational first-order factors, and workplace second-order choices. The analysis is based on findings from 48 interviews with 83 interviewees in 16 German manufacturing workplaces along with making site visits. It examines the implementation of wearables and the impacts on work content, skills, working conditions, and employment. Besides showing how labor agency affects the implementation of new technologies, the particular contribution of this study lies in analyzing the differences in the implementation of wearables in capital- and labor-intensive organizations. While standardization of work and reduction of work content prevailed in labor-intensive processes, capital-intensive processes were most often characterized by the extension of skill requirements and the risk of work intensification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops the new concept of the geography of placemories as a critical approach for deciphering spatialised memories in cultural geography. In referring to Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism and cultural materialism in line with Raymond Williams, the paper reflects on processual conceptions of feeling, society, memory and place. First, reviewing existing research on memory and place elucidates that cultural geography takes spatialised memories as fixed objects. Its analysis leads to statements about society. Second, to avoid this fallacy, the paper shifts the analytical basis for the cultural geographical conception of memorial sites from place to feelings and experiences by developing a new view on spatialised memory. The resulting processual problematisation of the ontology of memories, as well as its relevance for the present and spatialisations, is called the placemoric approach. The analysis of contested remembering processes with regard to the prerogative of interpretation of half-timbered houses in descriptions of Nuremberg's old town in North Bavaria, Germany demonstrates the capabilities of the placemoric approach. In doing so, the paper shows how spatialised memories are the socially constructed result of permanently changing feelings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1931, Deutsche Luft Hansa and China's Nationalist government came together to form the Sino-German airline Joint Venture (JV), the Eurasia Aviation Corporation. Eurasia plied the skies over China and beyond, as part of its mandate to project newfound state power in a global infrastructural race to prove its technocratic capabilities and modern identity. By tracing the founding, development, and dissolution of Eurasia Aviation Corporation, this paper seeks to overturn the paradigm of the “dominant parent” enterprise where the foreign side controlled the destinies of Sino-foreign JVs. Using epistles and contracts between Luft Hansa, the Executive Yuan, Eurasia, and the ministries that had purview over the Sino-foreign JV – as well as using aerophilatelic catalogues, route networks, and Chiang Kai-shek's lectures (Chinese Citizenry and Aviation) – this paper proposes that Nationalist state actors were capable of formidable and strategic stewardship over the business that transcended the quasi-equity on paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the lacuna model—an innovative investigational tool for the study of cross-cultural differences in a broader context. Originally developed and still widely used as a linguistic instrument, the lacuna theory also applies to empirical investigations in the field of cross-cultural management. Using several examples from the business world to illustrate the taxonomy, the authors demonstrate how lacuna analysis can be carried out. By comparing the lacuna model with Hofstede's framework, the paper presents the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and concludes with a discussion of the potential offered by the lacuna model for cross-cultural management research and suggestions for its further development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forecasts predict a growing shortage of skilled nursing staff in countries worldwide. Nurse migration is already a common strategy used to address nursing workforce needs. Germany, the UK, and Australia are reviewed here as examples of destination countries for nurse migrants. Agreements exist between countries to facilitate nurse migration; however, it is not evident how nurse migrants have contributed to data on which these arrangements are based. We examined existing primary research on nurse migration, including educational needs and initiatives to support policymakers', stakeholders', and health professions educators' decisions on measures for ethical and sustainable nurse migration. We conducted a rapid evidence assessment to review available empirical research data which involved, was developed with, or considered migrant nurses to address the research question: what are the findings of research that directly involves migrant nurses in producing primary research data? A total of 56 papers were included. Four main themes were identified in this research data: Research does not clearly define what is meant by the term migrant nurses; discrimination is often reported by migrant nurses; language and communication competencies are important; and structured integration programs are highly valued by migrant nurses and destination healthcare employers. Migrant nurses continue to experience discrimination and reduced career opportunities and therefore should be included in research about them to better inform policy. Structured integration programs can improve the experience of migrant nurses by providing language support (if necessary), a country-specific bridging program and help with organisational hurdles. Not only researching migrant nurses but making them active partners in research is of great importance for successful, ethical, and sustainable migration policies. A broader evidence base, especially with regard to the views and experiences of migrant nurses and their educational support needs, should be promoted to make future immigration policy more needs-based, sustainable and ethically acceptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper charts the space of lifestyles in Germany in order to assess whether its structure resembles that famously uncovered in France by Bourdieu. Mobilising multiple correspondence analysis and using data from a bespoke national survey of tastes and lifestyles fielded in 2017–18 (n = 2244), it unveils a two-dimensional system defined by tastes for the culturally exclusive and the economically exclusive. These dimensions are strongly associated with indicators of cultural capital and economic capital, and reveal differences by both capital volume and capital composition, but they are also structured by age and ethnic origin. While age is indicative of Bourdieu's concept of trajectory, the effects of ethnicity underscore the relative autonomy of the space of lifestyles and suggest its determination by more than one structural force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines German naturalization policies through an analysis of naturalization guidelines from 1921 to 2000 supplemented by archival research into their implementation. The substantive focus, first of all, is on the extent to which naturalization in Germany has become more or less discriminatory in ethnic and economic terms as well as on how one aspect of gender discrimination relating to the naturalization of spouses intersects with ethnicity. Second, is citizenship a privilege bestowed by the state solely at the state’s discretion and in accordance with state interests or is there a right to citizenship? The paper shows that negative ethnic discrimination, at least in its explicit varieties, has largely disappeared, and economic self-sufficiency has always been a prerequisite for naturalization, but the most recent statutory changes limit exceptions to this requirement. For executive discretion, we see a broad shift over time toward limiting state discretion with exercises of administrative discretion becoming fully reviewable by courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines commoning and practices of care from a feminist lens, here implying a focus on interdependencies of various spheres of life as well as social categories of difference. Through examples from two case studies of herders as commoners (the Nyangatom in Ethiopia and the Rechtler_innen in Germany), I establish connections between everyday that are inseparable when it comes to sustaining life and commons, while also highlighting conceptual challenges for feminist commons analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The well-known divergence between what policy and protocol look like on paper, and what happens in the actual practice of daily life remains a central challenge in health services provision and research. This disparity is usually referred to as the theory–practice gap and contributes to concerns that scientific evidence fails to make substantial impacts on the processes of service delivery. In this article, we present an argument for the inclusion of ethnographic methods in health services research and show that this approach enables researchers to address this divergence by working within it. We trace how ethnography, through generative processes of oscillation, can take us beyond lamenting the gap and capture the relational dynamics of people working together in complex systemic arrangements. By moving from example to methodological reflection, to principle of research, we demonstrate how the oscillation of ethnographic research between theory and practice can productively contribute to the field of health service research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the endurance of sector collective bargaining despite many announcements of its demise. Bourdieusian social theory is used to interpret collective bargaining as a dominated social field that is distinct and relatively autonomous from other economic, political and transnational fields. Empirically, we trace the trajectories of German and Italian metal sector's collective bargaining fields. In Germany, field agents contributed to a continuing erosion of collective bargaining, regional differentiation of membership strategies, and a reorientation of dominated employers' associations towards their members. In Italy, some field agents resisted supranational and national liberalization demands and contributed to the adaptation and innovation of bargaining practices and hence, to the preliminary re-stabilization and re-balancing of collective bargaining between industry and company level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides a technopolitical analysis of public infrastructure by attending to the ways large technical systems became a political problem and how the development of infrastructure has inflected biopower, territoriality and security. It seeks to deepen the historical understanding of technopolitics by exploring the concept of Daseinsvorsorge (existential provision), which served as a crucial framework guiding public infrastructure provisions in Germany. Daseinsvorsorge provides a particularly revealing lens through which to examine questions of technopolitics, since it makes it possible to illuminate the dis/continuities in the government of infrastructure between three distinct political regimes: Nazi Germany, the post-war Federal Republic and contemporary Germany. The concept first became operative in post-war Germany, but it had emerged during the Third Reich in the work of Carl Schmitt’s disciple Ernst Forsthoff. Forsthoff identified steps towards Daseinsvorsorge in Nazi infrastructure planning, which was part and parcel of war mobilization, and borrowed tropes from the geopolitical imaginary of Nazi Germany like Lebensraum. After the war, Daseinsvorsorge aimed at establishing equal living conditions within Germany. With European integration and the privatization of infrastructure, the norms and forms of Daseinsvorsorge eroded without vanishing, since they surface in modified ways in EU guidelines and in critical infrastructure protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election coverage is often assumed to be different to everyday political coverage. We argue that this depends on political institutions. In majoritarian countries, where elections choose governments, election coverage should decisively move towards political competition and away from policy. In consensual countries, where coalitions are based on policy negotiations, there should be a less pronounced shift towards political competition and away from policy. To test this argument, we use an automatic coding system to study 0.9 billion words in Die Welt for 12 years and in the Financial Times for 30 years. The results support our institutional hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does local exposure to refugees increase right-wing support? This paper studies a case uniquely suited to address this question: the allocation of refugees to the rural hinterlands of eastern Germany during the European refugee crisis. Similar to non-urban regions elsewhere, the area has had minimal previous exposure to foreigners, but distinctively leans towards the political right. Our data comprise electoral outcomes, and individual-level survey and behavioral measures. A policy allocating refugees following strict administrative rules and a matching procedure allow for causal identification. Our measurements confirm the presence of widespread anti-immigrant sentiments. However, these are unaffected by the presence of refugees in respondents' hometowns: on average, we record null effects for all outcomes, which we interpret as supporting a sociotropic perspective on immigration attitudes. Masked by these overall null findings, we observe convergence: local exposure to refugees appears to have pulled both right- and left-leaning individuals more towards the center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the late fteenth century a new category of medical practitioner appeared in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire: the Franzosenarzt or French pox doctor. Until now, there has been no dedicated study of these practitioners. Through an analysis of municipal records from Nuremberg (circa 1495 to 1560), this paper offers the first dedicated investigation of the Franzosenärzte in this city, focusing on uncovering their relationships with Nuremberg’s civic and medical hierarchies. It demonstrates why the Franzosenärzte gained a footing within the city’s municipal healthcare system, but remained subject to the suspicions of the civic and medical authorities. These suspicions, combined with a competitive medical marketplace and Nuremberg’s economic difficulties, precipitated the disappearance of the Franzosenärzte from the city around 1557. Nevertheless, for a brief moment, the Franzosenärzte’s practical expertise in treating the French pox unsettled Nuremberg’s nascent medical hierarchy and the ambitions of the city’s physicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the internationalization of the commercial real estate markets of France and Germany, markets typically ignored in comparative political economy. Although both markets are embedded in Continental European capitalism, their trajectories of internationalization are variegated. After exploring how processes of internationalization are processed within each country, we show how these processes have played out in the commercial real estate markets of France and Germany. The French state played a key role in guiding processes of internationalization: the introduction of new tax regimes allowed French property companies to raise capital at the stock exchange. The case of Germany demonstrates the continued importance of the banking sector for real estate investment markets. Although the typical characteristics of the French and German political economies are strengthened in this process, agents also feel the need to respond to the interests of international investors by creating Real Estate Investment Trust-like systems to absorb domestic and foreign capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In social-science based research, it is still an open question how cities cope with the multi-faceted challenges of climate change. Via the example of the German coastal cities of Lübeck and Rostock and on the basis of a discourse analysis (of news articles and expert interviews), this paper contributes to this research question by asking how cities actually perceive their vulnerability and resilience related to climate impacts. The study reveals that perceptions in the two cities differ considerably and are idiosyncratic when compared to each other. This is remarkable because both cities share similar geographic conditions as well as climate forecasts. Furthermore, they both have in common a long history as Hanseatic cities. What makes Rostock special, however, is that it was part of the former German Democratic Republic and that, after the German reunification in 1990, it suffered from socio-economic problems and marginalization. The paper's findings raise the question of how divergent local knowledge about climate-related vulnerability and resilience can be conceptualized. It is also imperative to consider how local experiences of economic problems and social marginalization influence local knowledge regarding climate change. Consequently, the authors suggest a theoretical approach which is mainly based on social constructionism. Furthermore, they highlight the role that locally shared experiences--such as of social marginalization--play in the emergence of climate change constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German accounting has traditionally followed a dual ledger approach with strictly separated internal cost accounting, as the basis for management information, and external financial accounting focusing on creditor protection and based on the commercial law. However, the increased adoption of integrated accounting systems implies a significant change in the relationship between financial and management accounting systems. We use Hegelian dialectic to trace the historical development of German accounting from separated systems and antithetical propositions of full integration, to the emergence of partial integration as the synthesis of this transformation process. The foundation of our paper is a comprehensive analysis of the literature on the relationship between financial and management accounting in Germany. On this basis, we elaborate how financial accounting in Germany has been shaped by its economic context and legislation, and how financial accounting – accompanied by institutional pressures – in turn influenced management accounting. We argue that the changing relationship between management and financial accounting in the German context illustrates how current accounting practice is shaped not only by its environment, but also by its historical path. Based on this reasoning, we discuss several avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the globalization process of German core export metalworking industries, to show how the globalization of national corporations has different effects on domestic economies. Contrary to the prevalent views on the globalization of production, this paper holds that the outcomes and patterns of globalization vary, due mainly to the politics of the main actors inside and outside corporations. This paper compares Germany’s negotiated globalization with U.S. employer unilateralism. In most U.S. corporations, employers decide how to globalize based on the short-term perspective of shareholder value. By contrast, in Germany, main industrial actors—including employers, works councils, and trade unions—collectively negotiate how to globalize. In this conflict-laden process of collective negotiation, German actors have created a political compromise that combines the upgrading of domestic production with globalizing overseas, whereas Americans have failed to do so. Furthermore, this paper emphasizes that divergent patterns of globalization are not predetermined by national institutions. To the contrary, the successful outcomes in German globalization come mainly from actors’ proactive readjustments in their traditional model of industrial relations, creating new practices, such as active union involvement in company-level bargaining, and the democratic bottom-up process instead of the traditional top-down process of negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper analyses whether the adoption of the IAS regime implies an improvement of the firms' earnings quality. Referring to a sample of German listed companies reporting under the IAS and German GAAP (HGB) in 2000-2004 years, we first examine whether IAS adopters are less subject to earnings management. Our findings show that, in general, the IAS sub-sample exhibits a level of earnings management lower or equal to the HGB adopters. The general evidence supports the position of the International Accounting Standard Board and of that part of the academic literature stating the IAS's better quality. Secondly, we investigate whether investors perceive a lower level of uncertainty and information asymmetry for earnings under the IAS regime, after controlling for the level of the discretionary accruals. We find that the IAS adoption entails a lower information asymmetry, but this benefit decreases with the firm size. This means that investors perceive the benefits of higher-quality accounting standards as partially offset by a greater managerial discretion in the small and medium size firms. Therefore, the improvement of the enforcement mechanisms (in addition to the Standard's quality) should be a major concern for IASB and other regulators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the choice of affiliation or no affiliation to a large hotel chain from the viewpoint of luxury hotel property owners in Germany. Grounded in transaction cost theory, this study identifies how uncertainty and frequency influence the owners' choice of unaffiliated operation and affiliation. The study augments the traditional governance literature in the field of the hotel by shedding light on the market/hierarchy decision of property owners rather than on the market entry strategies of international hotels firm. Through a multiple regression analysis on a sample of 122 existing five-star hotels in Germany, this study provides new empirical evidence that a frequent contract conclusion with the same hotel chain and a "hotel unrelated" background of the owner increases the likelihood of affiliation. In contrast to what transaction cost theory traditionally predicts, our results reveal that uncertainty is not influencing the owners' market/hierarchy decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Martin Wagner (1885-1957) was a leading city planner of the Weimar Republic and chief planner for Greater Berlin from 1926 to 1933. This essay addresses the role of statistical data visualizations in early twentieth-century planning and, specifically, in Wagner's conception of the city as a financial organism subject to managerial-governmental intervention. I argue that for Wagner modern techniques of social data calculation and representation, such as the balance sheet and the graph, became key instruments of planning by translating urban territory into an avatar of the metropolitan economy. Heuristic devices, such "paper cities" of data also had a rhetorical function, both in Germany and in the United States, Wagner's adoptive home after 1938—serving to publicize planning expertise and frame the discipline's intellectual and political legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the impact of two separate factors on the spread between French and German electricity prices, the amount of production by variable renewables and "market coupling". As renewable electricity production is concentrated during a limited number of hours with favourable meteorological conditions and interconnection capacity between France and Germany is limited, increases in production of wind and solar PV in Germany lead to increasing price spreads between the two countries. Our estimates based on a sample of 24 hourly French and German day-ahead prices from November 2009 to June 2013 confirm that renewable electricity production in Germany has a strongly positive impact on price divergence. On the other hand, market coupling, the establishment of a combined order book on the basis of information of both markets, which was introduced in November 2010, can be shown to have mitigated the observed price divergence. Both results have policy relevant implications for welfare and the optimal provision of interconnection capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discrimination is a problem for both minority groups and the societies in which they live. Perceived group discrimination reflects the direct experiences of immigrants but is also an indicator of reception context and social cohesion in the host country. This paper examines perceptions of group discrimination among recently migrated Polish immigrants to four Western European countries, and specifically focuses on changes over time in these individual perceptions, using a new longitudinal survey of immigrants. Are there cross-national differences in (changes in) perceived group discrimination, and how is discrimination related to exposure to and experiences in the host country? By employing a panel design we find that perceived discrimination is higher among Polish migrants in the Netherlands in Wave 1 than in the other three countries; perceptions of discrimination also increase more there between waves of the survey, as well as in the UK. Perceptions of group discrimination are related to some aspects of exposure to the host country, but most strongly associated with negative experiences in the host country. Differences in country contexts – attitudinal climate and national discourses – seem to play a role in understanding perceived group discrimination among new Polish immigrants in Western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Candidates with local ties perform better than their rivals without such attachments. We focus on the underlying mechanism of the localness effect and hypothesise that voters prefer local candidates for instrumental reasons, expecting better representation, and for reasons of a shared place identity. To test these expectations, we rely on the unusually detailed ballot for local elections in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Using multi-level regressions of the electoral results of 6503 candidates running in 21 cities in 2014, we confirm the importance of candidate localness for electoral success in low-information elections. Furthermore, we provide insights into the mechanisms behind this relationship. While instrumental motivations are independent of the composition of the electorate, a large share of elderly voters amplifies the identity effect, whereas many young voters, a high residential mobility, and a high population density diminishes this effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Half the population of Europe's largest economy by population and economic output lives in 30 main urban agglomerations. This paper presents a series of cartogram visualisations of population changes in Germany for these areas that happened in the period 2008–2013. Most of the areas have seen an urban renaissance by regaining growth. After a long period of suburbanisation, growth started returning to city centres. Among the few declining major urban agglomerations, the old industrial Ruhr area stands out, with an overall decline that is larger than any decline in all other major urban agglomerations put together. Population decline in the analysed period almost exclusively took place in suburban areas. Both trends mark an important change in the population dynamics of these major urban regions in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The partnership principle in the European Union has often been examined in the context of the emergence of a multi-level type of governance. Recently, a number of studies have focused on the implementation of the European Cohesion Policy in the new member states. They have listed the numerous obstacles to its functioning effectively. However, given the shortfalls, they were not in the position to question the entire range of effects of partnership when it does indeed work. Complementary to this approach, this paper starts from the example of a best-practice, looking at the concrete results of the use of partnership to ensure a place-based approach to regional policies. It uses the example of the East-German Land of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a NUTS II region that benefits from structural funding under the convergence objective. After a brief description of how the partnership principle works on the ground, it examines the conditions of its success. It then analyses its contribution to “good governance”. Lastly, it examines whether this form of partnership rises to the challenge of implementing a place-based approach as defined in the Barca Report. It argues that it neither offers all individuals a chance to become informed and contribute their knowledge or express their preferences about the delivery of projects, which involve the very technical issues of regional development and the disbursement of the structural funds. Nor does it allow control and pressure on policy makers by the citizen. The findings show that, as a consequence, the kind of policies promoted fail to fulfil both the objectives of efficiency and equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Going beyond the territorial/relational divide in regional studies requires researchers to do more than examine the extent to which territoriality and relationality are complementary alternatives. The variety of networked regional spaces means it is intellectually unsustainable to simply relate a single networked regional space to territory-scale without first considering how networked regional spaces interact. Illustrated through the experience of Germany, our paper demonstrates that interaction between different networked regional spaces (eg, city-regions and cross-border regions) is resulting in new networked regional imaginaries (eg, cross-border metropolitan regions). Its overall aim is to show that the production of entirely new networked spaces can assist in overcoming the contradictions present in one configuration of regions, but this only serves to create a new 'regional problem' requiring ever more complex configurations of regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the 2006 Air Security decision rendered by the German Constitutional Court as an occasion to question typical assumptions in critical scholarship about the relations between sovereign power and biopolitics and about the kinds of political spaces these logics can generate. After a brief overview of the argument the first part of the paper summarizes the 2006 Air Security decision and the legislation it addressed. Public debates in Germany around the issue are then surveyed, with an emphasis on the contrast drawn by a number of commentators between utilitarian and 'Kantian' ethical positions. As a result of the apparently Kantian line it took, the Court conjured a specific but ambivalent space of 'benevolent abandonment'. The latter half of the paper explores the theoretical implications of the decision, arguing that understanding it as Kantian is too simple, and relating it to Michel Foucault's and Georgio Agamben's theorizations of the nexus of biopower and sovereignty. While the 2006 decision does not easily fit within Agamben's discussion of the 'sovereign ban' in Homo Sacer (Stanford University Press, 1998), it can be grasped by means of another strand of his reasoning, most fully developed in his discussion of "inoperativity" in The Kingdom and the Glory (Stanford University Press, 2011). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have been dominated by discourses describing a resurgence of regions. Yet despite its prominence the region remains a largely Delphian concept. In the period of new regionalist orthodoxy, for example, while it was recognized that regions take various forms, the normative claim that we were living in a ‘regional world’ became narrowly focused on regions as subnational political units. Nevertheless, the emergence of city-regions, cross-border regions, and European Metropolitan Regions is leading some scholars to suggest the formation in this century of a brave new ‘regional world’. With economic, social and political activity increasingly orchestrated through regional spaces that cross-cut the territorial map that prevailed through much of the twentieth century, the literature is adorned with accounts advancing the theoretical and policy rationale for relational approaches to regions and regionalism. Yet far less has been written on the struggle to construct these spaces politically, thereby neglecting questions of territory and territorial politics. With this in mind, our paper draws on the experience of Germany to consider the political struggle to overcome the contradictions, overlaps, and competing tendencies that result from new regional spaces appearing alongside, rather than replacing, existing forms of state scalar organization. In particular, we observe how the Federal State is using the ambiguity of the regional concept to present territorial and relational approaches as complementary alternatives. The paper concludes by relating these findings to ongoing debates on how we, as ‘regional’ researchers, should approach the analysis of regions and regionalism; speculates on the degree to which they form progressive and effective spatial policies; and asks what lessons can be learnt about contemporary state spatiality more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the recently enacted pharmaceutical price and reimbursement regulation in Germany, new drugs are subject to a rapid assessment to determine whether there is sufficient evidence of added clinical benefits compared with the existing standard of treatment. If such added benefits are confirmed, manufacturers and representatives of the Statutory Health Insurance (SHI) are expected to negotiate an appropriate reimbursement price. If parties fail to reach an agreement, a final decision on the reimbursement price will be made by an arbitration body. If one of the parties involved wishes so, then the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (Institut für Qualität und Wirtschaftlichkeit im Gesundheitswesen, IQWiG) will be commissioned with a formal evaluation of costs and benefits of the product in question. IQWiG will make a recommendation for a reimbursement price based on the ‘efficiency frontier’ in a therapeutic area. The purpose of the assessments is to provide support for decision-making bodies that act on behalf of the SHI insurants. To determine the willingness to pay for new drugs, IQWiG uses the following decision rule: the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of a new drug compared with the next effective intervention should not be higher than that of the next effective intervention compared with its comparator. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the theoretical and empirical relationship between the willingness to pay for drugs and their health benefits. The analysis shows that across disease areas IQWiG has a curvilinear relationship between willingness to pay and health benefits. Future research may address the validity of the willingness-to-pay function from the viewpoint of the individual SHI insurants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article identifies some of the patterns and dynamics that have emerged in the uneven landscape and shifting constellations of local immigration regimes in the wake of the 2015 ‘summer of welcome’. Using the German case, it explores key players and institutions within this urban policy arena, and how their collaborative/competitive interactions in addressing the challenges of (receiving) the many newcomers have been shaped by supra-local as well as contingent and political factors. Firstly, it looks at the role and relative autonomy that municipalities exert in designing (proactive) refugee and integration policies. Out of the broad spectrum of civil society organisations that engage in this field, the paper then focuses on the new civic engagement often referred to as volunteer welcome initiatives, and on another civil society actor less frequently discussed in this context: the protest movement organised by refugees themselves. The evolving practices of, and interrelations among, these three sets of actors illustrate the trajectory of the transforming relations within the city as a networked and contested space of immigration policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades of evidence point to the vital role of parents in shaping their children's partisan leanings, particularly concerning mainstream parties. And yet the contours of intergenerational influence remain quite obscured. For instance, scholars disagree on when social learning in the household occurs (childhood vs adolescence) and about who is the dominant socializer (mother vs father). Data from a long-term German household panel survey allow for a fine-grained examination of intergenerational influence processes over time. We model the partisan preferences of 18-year-olds as a function of their mothers' and fathers' own contemporaneous and past partisan preferences. Our intergenerational inquiry reveals that mothers dominate socialization during childhood while influence in late adolescence is more evenly distributed between mothers and fathers. We also find that mothers have an advantage over fathers in communicating center-left party preferences. These findings have implications for our understanding of socialization, partisanship, and democratic stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, recognition of same-sex relationships and non-normative families has increased alongside greater access to reproductive technologies. Despite this progress, surrogacy, a potential path to parenthood for gay couples, remains banned in many countries. Research indicates that gay couples, facing legal restrictions, often seek reproductive services abroad, navigating complex legal, political and sociocultural contexts in both their home and destination countries. However, existing research lacks cross-country comparisons that explore how different contexts shape gay couples' reproductive practices. This study enhances our theoretical understanding of the intricate interplay between social structure and social interactions. It explores how normative family conceptions, ingrained in legal frameworks, societal norms and cultural values at the macro level, profoundly influence the (normalising) practices of couples at the micro level. Empirically, this study compares Germany and Israel, where gay couples face starkly different challenges. Germany universally prohibits surrogacy, while Israel permits it, although not for gay men during my interviews. Drawing on interviews with couples from both countries who engaged surrogates abroad, this study analyses their struggles for legal recognition and social visibility as 'gay father families'. In both countries, couples navigate legal, political and sociocultural contexts differently, encapsulated in a process termed 'becoming a gay father family', involving concealing surrogacy and appropriating heteronormative family narratives. The data indicate that the couples' social interactions reflect and reinforce a discernible normative shift from heteronormativity to repronormativity in the context of assisted reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate intersecting wage gaps by gender and nativity by comparing the wages between immigrant women, immigrant men, native women, and native men based on Western German survey data. Adding to the analytical diversity of the field, we do a full comparison of group wages to emphasize the relationality of privilege and disadvantage, and we use a nonparametric matching decomposition that is well suited to address unique group-specific experiences. We find that wage (dis)advantages associated with the dimensions of gender and nativity are nonadditive and result in distinct decomposition patterns for each pairwise comparison. After accounting for substantial group differences in work attachment, individual resources, and occupational segregation, unexplained wage gaps are generally small for comparisons between immigrant women, immigrant men, and native women, but large when either group is compared to native men. This finding suggests that the often presumed "double disadvantage" of immigrant women is rather a "double advantage" of native men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prosecution of Max Merten (1911–1971), the only Nazi war criminal accused of Holocaust involvement in Greece, coincided not only with the start of the Greek-German negotiations on victim compensation but also with the Eichmann trial. In 1959, the Merten Case provoked a massive public backlash, both because of the gravity of his crimes and because of his impending extradition to West Germany. We argue that in the Cold War atmosphere, when the Merten Case attracted international attention, the actions of internal and external power elites in the West deliberately departed from the concept of transitional justice to use this murky affair to their political advantage. Rather than a fair trial, the aim was to obstruct it in the interests of good relations, political self-preservation, and gradual social amnesia about Greek complicity during the German occupation. In contrast, the Eastern Bloc fed the opposite narrative of rotten capitalism by building on its proclaimed struggle against fascism. By combining archival sources and newspaper coverage of the Merten Case on both sides of the East-West conflict, our article explores which mechanisms were mobilised in public and which incentives were carried out behind the scenes. This allows us to examine multidirectional attitudes in a geopolitical sense, with the main aim of showing the discursive imposition of disinformation operating (in)formally through the channels of political institutions during the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aristocracy and their use of commercial credit are seldom explored in the European comparative context despite important studies of the French aristocracy and their credit relations with shopkeepers, tradesmen and fashion merchants. This article studies the aristocracy and commercial credit in England, Germany and Sweden, by drawing on the normative literature and the account books, receipted bills, correspondence and diaries of several families occupying different echelons of the nobility. We examine the extent and nature of aristocratic engagement with shop credit, the ways in which they manipulated and managed this credit, and their motivations for doing so. We argue that the aristocracy was involved in a modern commercial credit economy and that this was central to their position in society and way of life. Our analysis of the ideals communicated through conduct books and parental advice and the actual credit practices of the aristocracy show that they took their credit arrangements seriously. They had to abide by the rules of commercial credit and settle their accounts: sometimes promptly, most often in a timely manner and only occasionally after considerable delay. The article offers a comparative framework for further and broader studies on the aristocracy within economic history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of universal health care systems is to achieve equality in the use of health services at the same level of care need. This study evaluates the relationship of socioeconomic position with the frequency of doctor visits in subjects with and without chronic diseases in Germany and Spain. The dependent variables included number of consultations and if a medical consultation occurred. The socioeconomic factors were income and education. The magnitude of the relationship between socioeconomic position and medical consultation frequency was estimated by calculating the percentage ratio using binomial regression and by calculating the difference in consultations by analysis of the covariance, in the case of number of visits. Statistically significant findings according to education were not observed. The percentage ratio in the medical consultations among those with lower and higher income was 1.03 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.01-2.88) in Germany and 1.11 (95% CI 1.03-1.20) in Spain among subjects with any of the studied chronic conditions. Also, in Germany the difference in the average number of consultations comparing lower income subjects with higher was 3.98 (95% CI 2.40-5.57) in those with chronic conditions. In both countries, there were no differences in the frequency of doctor visits according to education. However, a pro-inequality trend exists in favor of subjects with lower income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few years, scholars from a broad range of disciplines have started to explore the role that emotions play in the collective memory of social movements. Against this backdrop, they have proposed that activists do not necessarily commemorate failed struggles by drawing on negative emotions such as suffering and grief. As a case in point, the interdisciplinary literature has drawn attention to the fact that the historical labour movement commemorated even events that ended in bloodshed and defeat, such as the Paris Commune of 1871, through performances and writings that evoked feelings of hope and joy. Analysing commemorative practices by the German labour movement in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article shows that Commune memory differed considerably in Germany. In a first step, the article shows that during the two decades following the Commune's bloody demise, German socialists remembered the Paris Commune by drawing on hatred, anger, and grief – not hope or joy. In a second step, the article demonstrates that while the 1890s did see the rise of memory practices that emphasized hope, this was a peculiar kind of hope largely detached from the historical event that was commemorated. By the turn of the century, the German labour movement had established a memory tradition that saw the Commune as a painful but necessary step in the forward march of the movement. In a short conclusion, the article explores some of the reasons why memory traditions by the German labour movement differed from the pattern detected elsewhere. In so doing, it shows that the change in the affective repertoire corresponded to a change in the political needs of the movement. The conclusion thus points to how the historical examples discussed here contributes to a better understanding of role of emotions in social movements more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]