Accounting als Teil der Management Forschung

PRAXIS | Magazin

Accounting als Teil der Management Forschung Konferenz-Review     

The Impact of Land-Use Change on Ecosystem Services,Biodiversity and Returns to Landowners: A Case Study in the State of Minnesota

Land-use change has a significant impact on the world’s ecosystems. Changes in the extent and composition of forests, grasslands, wetlands and other ecosystems have large impacts on the provision of ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation and returns to landowners. While the change in private returns to landowners due to land-use change can often be measured, changes in the supply and value of ecosystem services and the provision of biodiversity conservation have been harder to quantify. In this paper we use a spatially explicit integrated modeling tool (InVEST) to quantify the changes in ecosystem services, habitat for biodiversity, and returns to landowners from land-use change in Minnesota from 1992 to 2001. We evaluate the impact of actual land-use change and a suite of alternative land-use change scenarios. We find a lack of concordance in the ranking of baseline and alternative land-use scenarios in terms of generation of private returns to landowners and net social benefits (private returns plus ecosystem service value). Returns to landowners are highest in a scenario with large-scale agricultural expansion. This scenario, however, generated the lowest net social benefits across all scenarios considered because of large losses in stored carbon and negative impacts on water quality. Further, this scenario resulted in the largest decline in habitat quality for general terrestrial biodiversity and forest songbirds. Our results illustrate the importance of taking ecosystem services into account in land-use and land-management decision-making and linking such decisions to incentives that accurately reflect social returns.     

The iLUC dilemma: How to deal with indirect land use changes when governing energy crops?

Due to land use effects, bioenergy use may cause adverse effects on biodiversity, soil and water and may even fail to guarantee a GHG emissions reduction compared to fossil fuel use. Accounting methodologies and policy instruments were elaborated to prevent these effects, but there is still no sound and consensual methodology to take into account indirect land use change that substantially contributes to GHG emissions as well as a loss of biodiversity. While the iLUC hypothesis, that is the potentiality of adverse effects arising from indirect land use change related to biomass cultivation, is hardly subject to dispute, the quantification of these effects and especially their policy implications are however contentious. Hence, bioenergy policies worldwide face a dilemma: Neglecting iLUC effects that do in fact exist or taking them into account although no sound methodology is available? The article covers the current state of the discussion and also analyses the approaches developed for taking indirect land use change into account. Assessment criteria for coping with the iLUC dilemma are developed and policy recommendations are derived from that.     

THE BIAS OF THE MULTIPLIER MATRIX WHEN SUPPLY AND USE TABLES ARE STOCHASTIC

The literature on stochastic input–output (I–O) analysis has paid considerable attention to the bias in the Leontief inverse. This paper extends previous studies by assuming supply and use tables (SUTs rather than I–O tables or input coefficients matrices) to be stochastic. This is a natural starting point because SUTs have become the basic data sources for I–O applications. In a Monte Carlo simulation experiment, a given SUT is randomized in two different ways and the effects are determined for eight different multiplier matrices. The analysis is carried out for Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Finland, using their SUTs for 2006. The findings indicate that, in general, biases are statistically significant but negligibly small. This corroborates earlier findings obtained for stochastic I–O tables.     

Digitale Perspektiven in der Kommunikations- und Mediengeschichte

In the discussion about the future of communication and media science in digital times, this article focuses on the position and perspective of communication and media history. The challenges, problems and potentials associated with digitization are illustrated using the example of historical press research. Within the media ensemble of classical mass communication, the periodic press in particular benefits from the retrospective digitization of historical media and their digital edition in databases and portals. For historical press research, digitized newspapers and digital newspaper portals represent an originally new, because increasingly digital research situation: Digital newspaper portals as a novel, originally digital world for newspapers not only facilitate the path to newspapers and their contents, they also open them up as digital resources machine-readable and thus open up completely new paths for research—not least supported by digital methods.The main objective of this article is to discuss the epistemological-methodological problems and the practical operationalization of digitally framed or supported research processes in historical press research and to present concrete perspectives of knowledge and research strategies for practice. With this aim in mind, the paper discusses three points:(1.) Methodological and practical consequences of historical press research in digital research environments. With the digitization of newspapers and their digital reproduction in newspaper portals, their source character shifts essentially in three dimensions: They are edited and indexed digitally and their complete content is made accessible through optical character recognition. This makes previously unimportant technical aspects such as data formats, portal interfaces, search algorithms and programming interfaces very relevant for the methodology of historical press research. A primary methodological effect of the digital reorganization of newspapers in data and portals is the reversal of the usual reading practice: from “top down” to “bottom up”. With the help of “keyword searching”, newspapers can now be searched comprehensively and transversely to the order of the newspaper original. Nevertheless, there is a warning against an all too naïve and uncritical usage of digitized newspapers and newspaper portals. In practice, some problems and risks are crucial for the conception of historical newspaper research in digital research environments: Besides a hardly standardized and in large parts “wild”, because often uncoordinated and selective digitization of newspapers, the newspaper portals are different in their conception as well as characterized by different content, technical, legal and entrepreneurial conditions.(2.) Historical newspapers as digital sources in practice. The methodological and technical framework are fundamental and far-reaching for the further practical use of newspapers as digital sources in research. In each research step, it must be considered that digitized newspapers are genuinely new and, depending on the quality and depth of digitization, very complex sources with information gains and losses compared to the originals. Newspapers are not simply digitized, they are digitally constructed and differ in this construction from each other. In this respect, historical press researchers are increasingly becoming “users”. However simple and uncomplicated newspaper portals may be in practice, one must incorporate the implicit functions (hidden in algorithms, data and code) and the limits of these knowledge engines and their “correct” use into the research process. Combining and mediating classical hermeneutic methods with search technologies is an essential moment in the practical handling of digitized newspapers.(3.) Historical press research and digital methods. In the light of the new research situation which is emerging with digitized newspapers and newspaper portals, it is obvious that historical press research should increasingly open up to the possibilities of digital methods. In the digital method discussion of historical press research, one concept in particular forms a central point of reference: Franco Moretti’s concept of “Distant Reading”. Basically, “Distant Reading”—and this is what makes this perspective so interesting for historical press research in dealing with the considerable metadata and full text volumes of digitized newspapers—is about the quantitative-automatic indexing of large text corpora using methods and techniques of “Text Mining”. Digital text methods are thus seriously changing the way we look at texts and the research practice with texts such as newspapers: In parts, they automate and accelerate reading processes, produce “new” text extracts by the computer, generate new interpretation contexts between individual text, corpus and condensate, and thus set new orientation points for “close reading”. Computers and digital text methods thus do not relieve researchers of interpretation. Rather, they constantly challenge them to interpret in a continuous interplay in order to give meaning to the text patterns discovered by machines.In spite of all these advantages, digital methods have so far only been used sporadically in historical press research. For this reason, finally a digital workflow for research processes in historical press research will be presented, which illustrates and summarizes essential challenges, problems, solutions and potentials of digitally framed or supported research in press history.     

Why has China’s vertical specialization declined?

Vertical specialization (VS) is quantified by the VS share, which measures the average import content per dollar of exports. A characteristic of China’s export trade is its strong dependence on assembly and processing activities. To take proper account of this, China’s VS shares should explicitly distinguish processing export production from other production. We estimate China’s annual VS shares from 2000 to 2012—the latest year for which a special input–output table is available that makes such an explicit distinction. We find that VS shares increased from 2000 to 2004 and subsequently started to decrease. To explore why it has declined, we introduce a new structural decomposition approach. We find that the decrease of the VS share appears to have been driven mainly by the substitution of imported intermediates by domestic products. This occurred in particular in the production of exports, which implies an upgrading of China’s position in global value chains.     

The impact of purchasing strategy-structure (mis)fit on purchasing cost and innovation performance

The organizational design literature strongly supports the notion of “structure follows strategy”, and suggests that a misfit between the two has a negative effect on performance. Building on this line of argument, we examine to what extent the (mis)fit between purchasing strategy and purchasing structure impacts purchasing performance. We focus on cost and innovation purchase category strategies, and examine how the deviation from an ideal purchasing structure defined along three dimensions (centralization, formalization, and cross-functionality) impacts purchasing performance. Analysing data collected from 469 firms in ten countries, we demonstrate that a strategy-structure misfit negatively impacts purchasing performance in both cost and innovation strategies. We also find that purchasing proficiency is a mediator in this relationship between misfit and performance. Our findings aid managerial decision making by empirically validating the necessity of having the right purchasing structure for successfully executing different purchasing strategies.     

Déjà lu: On the limits of data reuse across multiple publications

Scholars in our field, Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM), are under high pressure to show research productivity. At most schools, this productivity is measured by the number of journal articles published. One possible response to such pressure is to improve research efficiency: publishing more journal articles from each data collection effort. In other words, using one dataset for multiple publications. As long as each publication makes a sufficient contribution, and authors ensure transparency in methods and consistency across publications, generating more than one publication from one data collection effort is possible. The aim of this Notes and Debates article, however, is to draw attention to inappropriate reuse of empirical data in OSCM research, to explain its implications and to suggest ways in which to promote research quality and integrity. Based on two cases of extensive data reuse in OSCM, eighteen problematic practices associated with the reuse of data across multiple journal articles are identified. Recommendations on this issue of data reuse are provided for authors, reviewers, editors and readers.     

On commodification: volunteer experiences in festivals†

This paper is about the creation of non-commodified volunteer experiences, for tourists and local volunteers participating in festivals. How is the tourist experience created when most of the traditional tourism demands are not fulfilled? And what are the experiences and how do they relate to different ‘regimes of value’? The experience context includes tourists who work together with locals voluntarily in a festival, where the volunteers pay for their own travel, food, overnight stay, and work for free. To gain more knowledge on the volunteers is important because local cultural life becomes more festivalized, most festivals are reliant on the involvement of volunteers, and the festivals gain an important role in an economy where even small places are engaged in branding [Löfgren, O. 2003. The new economy: A cultural history. Global Networks, 3, 239–254]. This paper uses a qualitative approach. Interviews were conducted (n?=?23) and participants were observed during four festivals in Finnmark, Norway. Nothing in the experiences was facilitated, and the experience creation occurred in the work tasks together with volunteer colleagues. It was like a holiday experience, without a stream of commodified moments. It was a value creation that could be seen as authentic and real, created in the interaction between the local and visiting volunteers.