Do changing institutional settings matter? : educational attainment and family related employment interruptions in Germany

"Cross-sectional studies show that in West Germany women with different levels of educational attainment participate differently in the labor market. In this paper, I examine one potential underlying mechanism: the re-entry of mothers in the labor market after a period of inactivity. I argue that besides societal changes the reforms of parental leave legislation could be responsible for the educational divide in mothers' employment. Hypotheses are derived from human capital theory and labor supply theory assuming a rational behavior of women. Using retrospective life-course data from the IAB study ALWA, I find evidence that women with different levels of educational attainment have different re-entry patterns also when taking the educational attainment of the partner into account. Furthermore, parental leave schemes play a crucial role for re-entries. Some evidence of an educational polarization of re-entry behavior is found after the year 2000." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))erwerbstätige Frauen, Mütter, berufliche Reintegration, Berufsrückkehrerinnen, Erwerbsunterbrechung, IAB-Datensatz Arbeiten und Lernen, Bildungsniveau, Erziehungsurlaub, Erwerbsverhalten, Mutterschaftsurlaub, Westdeutschland, Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Improving retrospective life course data by combining modularized self-reports and event history calendars : experiences from a large scale survey

"Event history calendars (EHC) have proven to be a useful tool to collect retrospective autobiographic life course data. One problem is that they are only standardized to some extent. This limits their applicability in large-scale surveys. However, in such surveys a modularized retrospective CATI design can be combined with EHC. This data revision module is directly integrated into the interview and used as a data revision module. Hereby insights from cognitive psychology are applied. The data revision module stimulates the respondent's memory retrieval by detecting both temporal inconsistencies, such as gaps, and overlapping or parallel events. This approach was implemented in the IAB-ALWA study (Work and Learning in a Changing World), a large-scale representative telephone survey with 10,000 respondents. By comparing the uncorrected data with the final data after revision, we investigate to what extent the application of this data revision module improves data quality or more precisely, time consistency and dating accuracy of individual reports." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))Biografieforschung - Methode, empirische Sozialforschung, Lebenslauf

Behavioral Intentions, Actual Behavior and the Role of Personality Traits: Evidence from a Factorial Survey Among Female Labor Market Re-Entrants

Factorial surveys (FS) are used frequently to draw conclusions about behavior. However, in FS only behavioral intentions are measured and answering fictive situations are likely to be connected with individual personality traits. Therefore, it is unclear to what extent behavioral intentions as measured by FS and actual behavior are related. It is also unclear whether and how personality traits influence intentions and actual behavior. This paper addresses this subject matter by analyzing these research questions. The theory of planned behavior serves as the theoretical basis (Ajzen, 1991). The research questions are addressed with data from a factorial survey collected among 395 prospective female labor market re-entrants. They were asked about their willingness to accept lower wages if compensated by "positive" nonmonetary job characteristics. A follow-up study after one year also included information on actual behavior, i.e., whether the woman has found a job. The analysis reveals that women who are willing to accept "negative" job characteristics are more likely to re-enter employment, suggesting a high correlation between results from the factorial survey and actual behavior and thus external validity. Furthermore, personality traits only have a minor influence on behavioral intentions and behavior. This confounds previous non-experimental research results. However, some individual effects are different in the intentions and behavioral model, which also indicates differences between experimental and real-world settings

The re-entry of mothers in Germany into employment after family-related interruptions: empirical evidence and methodological aspects from a life course perspective

It is still difficult for mothers in Germany to reconcile family life with employment. This becomes particularly apparent when mothers attempt to re-enter the labour market. Partly this varies very strongly according to level of education; partly legal regulations on parental leave play a decisive role. In addition, women in the Western part of Germany interrupt their employment for a longer time than women from the Eastern part of Germany - even twenty years after reunification. In the meantime, this appears to be more a result of different institutional regulations rather than differing socialisation. Finally, the re-entry of mothers into the labour market after interrupting their employment to have and look after children also seems to depend on the characteristics of the jobs offered. Here it becomes apparent that, along with pay, non-monetary characteristics also play an important role - especially those affecting one's personal time budget.Familie und Erwerbstätigkeit miteinander zu vereinbaren, ist für Mütter in Deutschland noch immer schwierig. Dies zeigt sich insbesondere beim Wiedereinstieg in den Arbeitsmarkt. Dieser variiert zum einen sehr stark mit dem Bildungsniveau, zum anderen spielen gesetzliche Regelungen zu Erziehungszeiten eine entscheidende Rolle. Zudem unterbrechen Frauen in Westdeutschland ihre Erwerbstätigkeit länger als Frauen in Ostdeutschland - auch 20 Jahre nach der Wiedervereinigung. Dies scheint indes weniger der unterschiedlichen Sozialisation geschuldet als unterschiedlichen institutionellen Regelungen. Schließlich hängt der Wiedereinstieg von Müttern nach einer familienbedingten Erwerbsunterbrechung auch von den Charakteristika der angebotenen Stellen ab. Hier zeigt sich: Neben der Entlohnung spielen auch nicht-monetäre Eigenschaften der Arbeitsstelle eine wichtige Rolle - insbesondere solche, die Einfluss auf das individuelle Zeitbudget haben

Novel approaches for managing platform-based ecosystems

Digitalization challenges existing organizations and industries. The associated advancement changes the way organizations and their customers interact. This has increasingly fostered the emergence of platforms to facilitate such interaction. Online platforms are software or hardware infrastructures that serve as a foundation and facilitate the interaction between multiple parties (e.g., between organizations and users). Organizations create platforms as part of a larger ecosystem. One major challenge concerns the design of platform-based ecosystems so all participants benefit from their participation. The management of associated relationships with other ecosystem participants is consequently a key challenge and demands according foresight. Platform-based ecosystems are subject to research in the field of information systems. Thus, scientific literature addresses many corresponding research questions and provides valuable insights for both research and practice. However, organizations face numerous challenges when engaging in ecosystems. Such challenges are, e.g., to develop new ecosystems, to incentivize participants to participate in the ecosystem, to cooperate with other participants, and to monitor the ecosystem. In this respect, this doctoral thesis provides a brief overview of platform-based ecosystems and the respective participants therein. Further, the thesis addresses four key challenges in the context of platform-based ecosystems, and proposes novel approaches in order to overcome the challenges. The basis for the novel approaches stems from five research papers. The first and second research paper address the challenge of determining design options when developing new ecosystems via blockchain-enabled initial coin offerings. The papers feature a taxonomy and derive predominant archetypes by drawing on real-world cases. The third research paper addresses the challenge of incentivizing users to participate in platform-based ecosystems. The paper proposes an approach to model financial incentives concerning platform adoption. The fourth research paper proposes an approach to analyze organizational cooperation patterns for the purpose of innovation integration. The developed approach incorporates taxonomy development and enables organizations to determine cooperation characteristics to align the cooperation decision with the cooperation objectives. The fifth research paper addresses the challenge of monitoring customer sentiment on online platforms. The proposed design science research artefact includes a detector of negative sentiment such that organizations are able to identify when a negative sentiment develops, and intervene before users spread the sentiment, e.g., through comments. Each research paper answers a stand-alone research question in the realm of platform-based ecosystems and derives a theoretically founded and separately evaluated research artefact. The artefacts draw on underlying, well-established research methods that allow answering the respective problem statements. Since the problem statements are motived in a practical context, this thesis bridges the gap between a practically oriented problem and a theoretically founded solution. As a result, the derived insights contain a contribution for both, research in the field of Information Systems and practice audience, and encourage the engagement of both domains

How to Design More Empathetic Recommender Systems in Social Media

Social media’s value proposition heavily relies on recommender systems suggesting products to buy, events to attend, or people to connect with. These systems currently prioritize user engagement and social media providers’ profit generation over individual users’ well-being. However, making these systems more “empathetic” would benefit social media providers and content creators as users would use social media more often, longer, and increasingly recommend it to other users. By way of a design science research approach, including twelve interviews with system designers, social media experts, psychologists, and users, we develop user-centric design knowledge on making recommender systems in social media more “empathetic.” This design knowledge comprises a conceptual framework, four meta-requirements, and six design principles. It contributes to the research streams “digital responsibility” and “IS for resilience” and provides practical guidance in developing socially responsible recommender systems as next-generation social media services

Grief in the Digital Age - Review, Synthesis, and Directions for Future Research

Death and grief are going digital. Start-up companies are working on avatars that people feed with personal information while alive so that relatives can communicate with this artificial self after death. This is supposed to make it easier to say goodbye. Considering these digital innovations, the IS community should be the leading discipline for handling grief. However, IS scholars attribute grief to other disciplines, such as psychology. Like any crisis, also grief cannot be merited to one single discipline. We conduct a literature review and synthesis alongside the ‘BAO framework’ [1]. Findings suggest that IS research has so far not grasped the consequences of grief on either individual or organizational and societal levels. To spark future research, we propose 9 clear-cut IS research questions. The provided comprehensive understanding of IS intersecting grief is crucial for different (also practical) stakeholders to leverage the potential of IS in coping with grief

Clinical and morphological findings on mustard gas [bis (2-chloroethyl) sulfide] poisoning

n 1984 and 1985, a total of eleven Iranian patients were transferred to hospitals in Munich, Germany, after a reported gas attack in the Iran-Iraq war. The initial symptoms and pretreatment in Teheran, Iran, as well as the admittance examination data, the clinical courses of the patients, and the clinical laboratory data in Germany, are reported. The main injuries were to the skin, the eyes, and the respiratory tract. One patient stopped breathing suddenly on the third day of treatment (eight days after the exposure). A large piece of mucous membrane blocking a bronchus was removed during an immediate bronchoscopy, but attempts at resuscitation failed. The most important autopsy findings in this case were severe pseudomembranous inflammation of the trachea and the bronchial tubes. The histological findings are reported. Chemical proof of the poison (mustard gas) was established. A review of the history of chemical warfare, the physical and chemical properties of mustard gas, and a literature survey of clinical findings (including, especially, experiences from World Wars I and II) contribute to the understanding of the actual cases