Das Land der Wirklichkeit und Das wirkliche Deutschland. Die kulturkritischen Transfers des Oskar A. H. Schmitz (1873‑1931) zwischen Krieg und Frieden

Der Schriftsteller Oskar A. H. Schmitz (1873–1931) reiste um die Jahrhundertwende oft nach Frankreich und vermittelte dem deutschen Publikum im späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert kulturelles Wissen von Frankreich. Während er vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg Frankreich den Deutschen als Vorbild empfahl, um die Krise der Moderne zu überwinden, distanzierte er sich im Ersten Weltkrieg von Frankreich. An den Texten von Schmitz lässt sich zeigen, dass die Kulturkritik nicht nur ein national selbstbezügliches Phänomen darstellt, sondern dass sich deutsche Kulturkritik auch im internationalen Kontext und in der Auseinandersetzung mit Frankreich herausbildet. Während des Ersten Weltkriegs nationalisierte und politisierte sich die Kulturkritik von Schmitz. Die Politisierung der Kulturkritik blieb auch nach 1918 erhalten, aber Schmitz öffnete sich nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg wieder international.Au tournant du siècle, l’écrivain Oskar A. H. Schmitz (1873-1931) a souvent voyagé en France et transmis sa connaissance de la culture française au public allemand de la fin du XIXe et du début du XXe siècle. Avant le début de la Première Guerre mondiale, il a conseillé aux Allemands de prendre la France comme modèle pour vaincre la crise de la modernité, mais pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, il a pris ses distances par rapport à la France. Les essais de Schmitz permettent de démontrer que la « Kulturkritik » est non seulement un phénomène national autoréférentiel, mais que la « Kulturkritik » allemande s’est aussi constituée dans un contexte international et en conflit avec la France. Pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, la « Kulturkritik » de Schmitz s’est nationalisée et politisée. La politisation de la « Kulturkritik » s’est poursuivie après 1918, mais après la Première Guerre mondiale, Schmitz s’est de nouveau ouvert aux tendances internationales.At the turn of the century the German author Oskar A. H. Schmitz (1873–1931) frequently travelled to France and brought knowledge of French culture to the German public in the late 19th and early 20th century. Before World War I he recommended France as a role model to the Germans, so as to help overcome the crisis of modernism. However, during World War I he distanced himself from France. Schmitz’ essays can be read as evidence of the fact that German “Kulturkritik” is not just a national self-referential phenomenon, but is embedded in an international context and grows out of the conflict with France. During World War I Schmitz’s “Kulturkritik” nationalised and politicised itself more and more. After 1918 the politicised “Kulturkritik” persisted, but Schmitz once again became receptive to international currents of thought

Information Flow in Stochastic Optimal Control and a Stochastic Representation Theorem for Meyer-Measurable Processes

Stochastic control theory determines intervention policies optimizing the evolution of a system subject to randomness. Delicate issues arise when the considered system can jump due to both exogenous shocks and endogenous controls. Here one has to specify what the controller knows when about the exogenous shocks and how and when she can act on this information. Classical optimal control resolves this issue simply by restricting to predictable controls where the controller can only react after an exogenous shock has hit the system. It is perfectly conceivable though that the controller at times receives a signal on impending exogenous shocks that she can use for a proactive intervention and then still react after the shock is fully revealed. The present thesis provides a mathematically rigorous framework to formulate and solve such stochastic optimal control problems with enhanced information flow. Specifically, we propose to use Meyer-σ-fields as a flexible tool to model information flow and illustrate the possibilities of this approach by an in-depth study of a fairly general singular stochastic control problem of irreversible investment with inventory risk. Without signals on significant exogenous shocks the precise timing of control interventions does not matter and the problem can be solved as in Bank and Riedel (2001) via a representation problem studied in Bank and El Karoui (2004). In our setting with shock signals we find optimality of làdlàg controls whose jumps from the left reflect the controller’s reaction to her signals and whose jumps from the right her reaction to the fully revealed shock. To obtain this result, we provide a considerably refined version of the representation result studied in Bank and El Karoui (2004). For a wide class of Meyer-measurable processes this representation yields the Meyer-measurable optimal control. Technically, the proof of this representation result relies on a thorough analysis of a family of optimal stopping problems over divided stopping times. This most general theory of optimal stopping was developed by El Karoui (1981) and relies on the studies by Lenglart (1980) on Meyer-measurable processes. Our analysis requires us to refine some path regularity and projection results from this part of the general theory of stochastic processes. We illustrate our findings in a first explicitly solved case study for the irreversible investment problem with signals on exogenous shocks. For this, we specify a compound Poisson process setting with a parameter for the signal quality and find our làdlàg optimal policies to interpolate from the classical predictable controls operating without signals to optional ones that fully account for any exogenous shock as it happens

The Knowledge Creation Process in High Reliability Organizations : A case study on intra-team learning at the Lambohov Fire Station

Each organization has its specifics that affect the way knowledge is created and transferred. The existing literature in the field of knowledge creation, studies contemporary organizations and currently does not consider special cases such as high reliability organizations. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to complement the existing knowledge creation model by describing the knowledge creation process for high reliability organizations using the case study of the Lambohov Fire Station. A qualitative case study was conducted and carried out with the help of Lambohov Fire Station through non-participant observations and semi- structured interviews with one of the fire brigades. Our research has revealed that the learning processes in HROs differs from the existing theoretical framework. According to the literature, knowledge is created through conversion of tacit and explicit knowledge, while at the fire station the conversion involves tacit and implicit types of knowledge