CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN THE EUROPEAN BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT. EU-US COMPARISON

When interacting with people from different cultures, it is natural to interpret their actions through your own culture's standards. However, doing so can cause misunderstandings. If you employ or conduct business with people from other countries, you can avoid misunderstandings by recognizing cultural differences, such as communication styles, religious beliefs, power structures, and attitudes toward time and work. Your relationships with people from other cultures are enhanced when you are aware of cultural differences.Cultural diversity, international business, European business environment

Clause union and verb raising phenomena in German

In this paper we discuss a class of constructions in German syntax which have been known as coherent infinitive, clause union or verb raising constructions. These data run against the predictions of strictly configurational theories by apparently having a syntactic structure where the subcategorization frames of two or more verbal heads are merged into one. Thus, in addition to a fully bi-clausal structure with two clearly separated verbal heads, we also have to envisage the case where a verb is apparently raised from an embedded to form a verb cluster together with its governing verb, while the sets of their arguments are merged into a single set, representing the case of clause union. In addition, there are constructions where there is no evidence for clause union, but where one could nevertheless argue for the formation of a verb cluster. We investigate these data by looking at a series of constructions which bear evidence on the issue. Among these are extraposition, which appears a reliable test for nonobligatory verb raising; subjectless constructions, which are possible only as the complements of so-called raising verbs but not of control verbs; S-pronominalization, which seems to be limited to equi-verbs; scrambling and long reflexivization, which we can take as evidence for clause union; the scope of adjuncts and negation which argues in favour of verb raising, but does not necessarily presuppose clause union; and finally certain topicalization phenomena which appear to violate almost any of the generalizations set up so far by configurational theories

“All the Foundation of the Earth becomes Desolate” Tracing Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon connections through a Shared Literary Frontier

The mythology of migration is deeply integral to the medieval Germanic societies peopling Northern Europe and the island nations of the North Sea. Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic society construct their identities through a memory of migration that takes places within a frontier that is mythic and historical in scope. By surveying eco-critical components of Anglo-Saxon poems such as “The Wife’s Lament” and “The Husband’s Message” alongside the Icelandic sagas Egil’s saga and The Vinland sagas, a shared tradition of the frontier ideal is revealed

Comparative International Law at the ICTY: The General Principles Experiment

For a significant period of time, the comparativist and the international lawyer were con- sidered to inhabit different worlds: the former scrutinized similarities and differences between domestic legal systems while the latter focused on the universal realm of international law that overlays these systems. This comfortably segregated image has been conclusively shattered by numerous studies demonstrating the multiple areas of interaction between international and comparative law.1 Of these, one of the ripest areas for further reflection is the “general prin- ciples of law” as a source of international law. Puzzlingly, given the traditional domestic law origins of the general principles of law, comparative law and methodology have rarely featured in the scholarship and jurisprudence on the general principles.2 Thus, the attempt of the Inter- national Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to use the general principles as a freestanding source of international criminal law provides a particularly intriguing oppor- tunity to study the interaction between international and comparative law

Pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon Worship: A Semantic Study

This thesis pursues two aims. First, to reconstruct the pre-Christian meanings of 18 Old English word-families that belong to the semantic field of worship in the Anglo-Saxon literary record. The ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain in the fifth century; they began to adopt Christianity with the arrival of Roman missionaries at the end of the sixth century and the Christianisation process was politically completed by the end of the seventh century. This study’s reconstructive task aims to describe the cultural facts of religious worship during this target period of two-and-a-half centuries, when these settlers in Britain practiced traditional heathen cults, through comparison of the Old English corpus data with the linguistic testimony of other early Germanic languages, further interpreted in light of relevant historical and archaeological testimony. The second aim is to characterise how the Christianisation process affected vernacular terminology for religious worship at large, through considering the relative situation of the relevant word-families. It will be argued that Christianisation introduced new conceptual categories that practically re-centred the idea of ‘worship’ away from its pre-Christian basis in technical and communal procedure, together with an ideological binary that defined correct forms of worship against their opposites. It will further be argued that this process occurred in two distinct phases, each characterised by different priorities: the first phase was led by the missionaries, who had to present Christianity as a more effective new cult by the standard of pre-Christian religious norms; the second phase followed the establishing of a native clerical infrastructure, during which time vernacular terminology was more holistically renovated under the influence of the Christian text

Alignment and axiality in Anglo-Saxon architecture: 6th-11th Centuries

Axial alignment is an intriguing aspect of Anglo-Saxon architecture, which has occupied scholars for some time but has not been researched thoroughly and systematically. This thesis offers an assessment of Anglo-Saxon sites – secular and ecclesiastical – featuring alignment, analyses their recurring features and addresses functional and cultic aspects of these sites. One of the resulting conclusions is that alignment is a fairly uniform phenomenon across both secular and ecclesiastical sites, and in fact secular and ecclesiastical contexts should not be treated as separate. It has also been possible to demonstrate that alignment is an Insular phenomenon and not a result of Continental influence, which challenges the existing research on this subject. Instead, it has been proposed that Anglo-Saxon alignment has its origins in the British Isles and was inspired by a multitude of existing prehistoric linear compositions in the landscape

A 'New Order' - National Socialist notions of Europe and their implementation during the Second World War

The term Europe was omnipresent in the Third Reich during the Second World War. An abundance of primary sources attests to the German interest in a new European order. Nevertheless, historiography is in disagreement on the Europeanness of this New Order and on its actual relevance for National Socialist policies. This study argues that these differing appraisals are the result of a mistaken understanding of the National Socialist New Order. National Socialist Germany did not pursue a single, stable, and clear-cut notion of Europe-to-be, but constantly kept negotiating its war aims and the future of Europe under the heading New Order . By means of a discourse-analytical approach, this thesis reconstructs this New Order and shows that its defining dimensions were long-standing and well-established knowledge and belief systems: the idea of European economic cooperation and völkisch beliefs. Depending on the military situation and the scope of the German sphere of influence, the discursive weight of these interpretive frames varied during the war. Nevertheless, they produced temporarily stable visions of Europe-to-be. Contrasted with this development, an analysis of German policies clearly demonstrates that the New Order discourse did matter. A hermeneutical approach which draws on discourse-analytical concepts of power relations makes clear that the New Order discourse was powerful. It defined the permissible ways of thinking and speaking about the future of Europe and it endowed the activities of German occupation authorities and private companies with meaning. Thus, this study and its innovative perspective shed new light on the New Order and broaden our understanding of National Socialist wartime policies. Its findings suggest that the National Socialist Europe must not be dismissed as anti-European. National Socialist Germany discursively constructed and realised its own ideals of Europe-to-be. This völkisch and economic reorganisation not only guided the policies of German occupation policies and informed the actions of private businesses, but it also fits well into the German tradition of European thinking