"The reflective practitioner goes global": Vom Nutzen der Professionssoziologie für die Global Governance-Forschung

Ziel des Papiers ist es, einige grundlegende professionssoziologische Konzepte in die Debatte über Global Governance einzuführen. Zu den wichtigsten Governance-Mechanismen zählen nicht nur Hierarchien, Märkte und Netzwerke, auch professionsorientierte Institutionen spielen eine wichtige Rolle. Professionalisierte Praxis ist nicht gleichbedeutend mit der technischen Anwendung von Expertenwissen. Erforderlich sind vielmehr spezielle praktische und hermeneutische Kompetenzen, die eine einzelfallorientierte und kontextbezogene Herangehensweise ermöglichen. Zur empirischen Untermauerung werden zwei Praxisfelder besprochen, nämlich (1) Formen der internationalen Rechtsberatung und (2) die Praxis der Umweltauditierung in multinationalen Unternehmen. Beide Fälle zeigen den Schaden, der entsteht, wenn Experten zu technisch an ihre Aufgaben herangehen. Gleichzeitig ist zu beobachten, dass viele Praktiker sich dieser Gefahren bewusst sind. Sie entwickeln ihre eigenen Standards guter Praxis, und darüber hinaus bemühen sie sich um den Aufbau institutioneller Strukturen, durch die ein professioneller und reflexiver Modus der Aufgabenerfüllung unterstützt wird.The paper aims to introduce some basic concepts from the sociology of the professions to the debate on global governance. While hierarchies, markets and networks are often described as the most basic modes of global governance, profession-oriented mechanisms should also be taken into account. Professionalized practice - or reflective practice, as Donald Schön has called it - should not be confused with the technical application of expert knowledge. Rather, professional actors fulfill their tasks on the basis of specific hermeneutical skills which allow for a case-oriented and context-sensitive approach. As an empirical illustration, the paper includes (1) the case of international law reform assistance, which has become an important mechanism of governance in Europe and beyond, and (2) the practice of environmental auditing in multinational companies. Both cases demonstrate the damage which arises if experts fail to adopt a context-sensitive approach. At the same time, however, it becomes evident that many experts are highly aware of these technocratic dangers. They develop their own standards of good practice, and furthermore, they try to establish institutional structures which help to support a professionalized mode of action

Performance Evaluation of using a Dynamic Shortest Path Algorithm in OLSRv2

MANET routing protocols are designed to scale up to thousands of routers with frequent changes of the topology. In preference, MANET routing protocols should also support constrained low-power devices. One of the bottlenecks of scalability in link-state routing protocols is the performance of the shortest path algorithm (e.g. Dijkstra). In this document, we investigate the in-node performance of OLSRv2 and, in particular, study the benefits of using a dynamic shortest path (DSP) algorithm for this routing protocol. A DSP algorithm is an algorithm that adds or removes edges in the routing tree incrementally and calculates shortest paths, also incrementally. The performance in OLSRv2 with classic Dijkstra vs. DSP is evaluated, by comparing the CPU time for calculating paths in a large emulated network. Additionally, it is demonstrated that frequent topology changes due to mobility in MANETs lead to frequent routing table recalculations with only few routes updated each time. This property of MANETs makes the use of a DSP in OLSRv2 appropriate

Integrating Java Support for Routing Protocols in NS2

This document presents a modification of the existing tool AgentJ which allows for running a Java routing protocol within the network simulator NS2