Politische Kultur im neuen Staat: Eine Kritik der aktuellen Forschung

Ideas developed in a research project concerned with todays' conflicts about the Nazi-past are applied to the present political culture in Germany and its interpretation by mainstream political culture research. This type of research is criticized because of it's conservative bias

Facilitating the Performance of IT Evaluation in Business Groups: Towards a Maturity Model

Leading market analysts such as Gartner, Forrester Research and IDC expect again for 2012 an increase of global in-formation technology (IT) spending between 3.7% and 6.9% compared to 2011. This trend emphasises the fact that ensuring the effectiveness and efficiency of IT or IT evaluation is a substantial task of strategic IT management. Weighing costs and benefits is already a real challenge for IT executives nowadays and is getting even more complex in the environment of business groups. Business groups are a collective of legally independent companies which are owned and partially managed by a core entity or management holding. The purpose of this paper is to develop a maturity model for IT evaluation on the group level as a management instrument to analyse and evaluate the current setup as well as to identify possible areas for improvement. The maturity model development is based on design science research and evaluated with experts residing on the management level from particular business groups

Managing costs and performance of IT in business groups: Towards a performance measurement model for global insurance business groups

According to chief operating officers (COOs) and chief information officers (CIOs) of leading insurance business groups, the utilization of economies of scope and scale are essential key success factors for achieving strategic cost and performance advantages. In the area of information technology, achieving these advantages requires appropriate IT governance mecha-nisms like IT performance measurement. Most recent IT performance measurement systems show a very specific scope and are not capable of providing a holistic evaluation of IT performance. Furthermore, their utilization within special organization forms like business groups is mostly not intended or considered. In this paper we will develop a strategic IT performance measurement model for insurance business groups. The development is based on a design science research approach with the support of a multiple case study and various expert interviews

Seeking the roots of entrepreneurship: Insights from behavioral economics

There is a growing body of evidence that many entrepreneurs seem to enter and persist in entrepreneurship despite earning low risk-adjusted returns. This has lead to attempts to provide explanations—using both standard economic theory and behavioral economics—for why certain individuals may be attracted to such an apparently unprofitable activity. Drawing on research in behavioral economics, in the sections that follow, we review three sets of possible interpretations for understanding the empirical facts related to the entry into, and persistence in, entrepreneurship. Differences in risk aversion provide a plausible and intuitive interpretation of entrepreneurial activity. In addition, a growing literature has begun to highlight the potential importance of overconfidence in driving entrepreneurial outcomes. Such a mechanism may appear at face value to work like a lower level of risk aversion, but there are clear conceptual differences—in particular, overconfidence likely arises from behavioral biases and misperceptions of probability distributions. Finally, nonpecuniary taste-based factors may be important in motivating both the decisions to enter into and to persist in entrepreneurship

Global IT Multisourcing: Objectives, Challenges And Requirements In Multinational Insurance Companies

In recent times, information technology (IT) multisourcing has emerged as a key strategy in the field of IT outsourcing. Most of the current scholarlyand practitioner-related literature acknowledges the importance of multisourcing, but linear extensions of the dyadic client-vendor relationship are insufficient to capture its nuances. Multinational financial services providers (such as banks and insurance companies) have been pioneers in the fieldof IT outsourcing. However, there is a lack of experience-based research about the implementation of global IT multisourcing. In this article we present findings from a cross-case study investigating the implementation of global IT multisourcing in four leading insurance companies. First, the article presents the objectives of the insurers in pursuing global IT multisourcing. Second, the researchreveals challenges the companies are facing in implementing global IT multisourcing. Finally, requirements for implementing IT multisourcing are derived. The insights of these real-life examples extend existing literature on IT outsourcing and provide helpful orientation for organizations that are implementing global IT multisourcing

Einstellungen zum Wohlfahrtsstaat: Vorbereitungen zu einer interkulturell vergleichenden Sekundäranalyse und einige Ergebnisse

Anhand der im Kölner Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung gespeicherten Daten wird die Frage untersucht, inwieweit die Erwartungen und Einstellungen zum Wohlfahrtsstaat sich in der Bundesrepublik verändert haben. Die Einstellungen zum Wohlfahrtsstaat werden operationalisiert als Einstellung zu spezifischen sozialpolitischen Leistungen. Es werden mehrere Verfahren dargestellt, mit deren Hilfe Indikatoren für diese Fragestellung aus dem Z.A.R.-Rückgewinnungssystem gewonnen werden können. Probleme ergeben sich bei einem Vergleich der Daten über längere Zeiträume und bei internationalen Vergleichen. Man findet selten Indikatoren, die über mehrere Länder auch nur annähernd vergleichbar sind. (GB

Deriving a Research Agenda for the Management of Multisourcing Relationships Based on a Literature Review

There has been considerable development in Information Technology (IT) outsourcing during the last two decades. Nowadays, practitioner-related as well as scholarly literature have identified multisourcing as an emerging key strategy. Multisourcing is described as the blending of services from multiple internal and external vendors. Especially in the case of multisourcing the management of relationships is complex. For a certain field of research it is important to have an overview of the existing literature and a common understanding of basic terms. In this article we identify and analyze the body of knowledge in the area of managing multisourcing relationships. We hence conduct a structured literature review based upon an established literature review framework. It can be observed that the current literature lacks depth in terms of management of multisourcing relationships and that only a few articles cover the aspects of multisourcing in detail. Particularly regarding performance management, governance and knowledge management of multisourcing relationships we propose further research. We subsequently deduce a detailed research agenda for future research options