Being Good Parents or Being Good Citizens: Dilemmas and Contradictions of Urban Families in Middle‐Class Enclaves and Mixed Neighbourhoods in Germany

In recent years, cities have become ever more attractive to middle‐class families. On the one hand, middle‐class families tend to withdraw into (often newly built) socially homogeneous middle‐class neighbourhoods. On the other hand, they are also known to move into inner‐city and socially mixed areas, thus triggering processes of gentrification. Academic literature has often denounced these housing choices as being either ‘separatist’ or ‘revanchist’, more broadly categorized as strategies of ‘middle‐class disaffiliation’. Although there is a grain of truth in these interpretations, the reality is certainly more complicated. In our research on middle‐class parents’ housing and neighbourhood choices as well as their patterns of neighbourhood use, carried out in each of the two types of residential area mentioned above, we have only very rarely found an explicit desire to draw boundaries that exclude those ‘beneath’ them. We rather argue that the housing choices and neighbourhood‐related activities of middle‐class family households are heavily influenced by the specific dilemmas the interviewees face as (working) urban parents. While a significant number of respondents worry about the social sustainability, justice and cohesion of urban society, they are also concerned about the future prospects of their children. Many find it difficult to reconcile these conflicting normative demands under the prevailing circumstances.     

Gesundheitsfonds — effizientere Steuerung des Gesundheitssystems?

In 2009 the German central health fund was implemented. It was the result of a political compromise. One political party intended to equalise the risk structure among 130 different health care funds, and the other wanted to intensify competition and to improve efficiency among the different health insurances. The fund is flanked by a health-based risk adjustment and is aimed at sustainably ensuring the funding of the statutory health insurance system. It also constitutes the basis for competition among statutory health care funds, securing quality and efficiency in health care provision. To cover additional expenditures, health insurers had to charge flatrate premiums. A new law, which will come into effect in January 2015, will oblige health insurers to charge income related contributions. It is not clear how this will change competition among insurers. The federal government will not need to finance subsidies to low income individuals anymore. Income redistribution will only take place within the public health insurance system, exempting the privately insured and public servants from supporting low income individuals. The authors claim that the health care fund will not succeed in its aim of securing a sustainable financial basis for the statutory health insurance system. Most of the authors argue that there is no evidence of greater efficiency thus far, and they offer proposals on how to achieve improved performance.     

Children between the age of 5 and 11: what “don’t know” answers tell us

Children are increasingly seen as competent informants on their activities, views and needs. Different abilities of children can lead to inadequate (formally or regarding the content) answers or to the misunderstanding of proceedings during an interview process. One inadequate or at least unintended (on the part of the researcher) response is a “don’t know” answer (DK). To study when and why DK answers occur, a possible cause for them in the cognitive process and their relation to age, we analysed the DK answers given in qualitative semi-structured interviews with children aged 5–11, conducted face-to-face and on the telephone. Each of 56 children was interviewed twice, once face-to-face and once via telephone. The results show that age had an effect on DK responses due to the cognitive state of the respondent and their communicative intent, but there was no difference in the number of DKs due to problems with the research instrument or due to an adequacy judgement in respect of respondent age.     

Employment Growth Determinants in New Firms in Eastern Germany

The unification of both Germanies and the introduction of the market economy in eastern Germany came as a shock to existing firms and led to an enormous boom in the establishment of new firms. The first section of this paper shows that during the period under observation (January 1991--June 1995) the number of firms nearly doubled and in 1995, nearly 50% of all jobs were to be found in firms established after 1991. Shortly after unification, a kind of "start- window" existed during which the conditions for establishment, growth and survival of firms were extraordinarily good. The next section deals with the determinates of the growth of these newly founded firms. Most determinants have been selected on the basis of the most recent studies by Brüderl, Preisendörfer and Ziegler (1996), and Storey (1994). The analysis included not only establishment characteristics but also strategic factors such as the technological status of the establishment, the proportion of sales in interregional markets, and a corporate competitive strategy indicator. A comparison of these results with other studies shows that the determinants that affect employment growth in new firms in eastern German are apparently the same as in western Germany and Britain, albeit to different extents.     

Humanising Business Through Ethical Labelling: Progress and Paradoxes in the UK

Labelling schemes are practical arrangements aimed at making ‘ethical’ products widely available and visible. They are crucial to expanded development of ethical markets and hence to the addition of moral dimensions to the normally amoral behaviour linking consumers and retail and production businesses. The study reported here attempts to assess the contribution of UK ethical, social and environmental certification and labelling initiatives to ‘sustainable’ consumption and production. The research sought to assess the overall potential of initiatives to inject human values into the supply-distribution chains, through a qualitative survey of 15 of the 26 main UK initiatives: in social justice, animal welfare and environmental sustainability from the agriculture, food processing, timber, aquaculture, textiles and personal care sectors. By analysing the basic characteristics and concepts of these labels and investigating the emergence of labelling initiatives, we assess whether labels help add an ethical dimension, or whether, in some respects, they also reduce such missions to the technical management of adding only another ‘utility’ to a product. The analysis assesses whether the gradual ‘mainstreaming’ of ethical initiatives such as ‘Fairtrade’ risks subsuming ethical goals within business participants’ competitive and profit-oriented logics. However, the contrasting perspectives revealed between rival labelling initiatives show that the scope and functions of labelling projects go beyond the manifest ones of information communication between consumers and producer and actually introduce elements of socio-political regulation. These are essential for more sustainable and ethical business practices and are an integral part of any humanisation of business involvement.