White collar unions in Switzerland

Swiss trade unionism differs from that of other countries: lower strike incidence, lower trade union density and organisational segregation of blue and white collar employees. The author reviews and explains these differences and reports on the attitudes towards trade unionism of the German-speaking members of Switzerland's biggest white collar trade union organisation.     

Einzelbesprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

MMT: assume a can opener

Business Economics - The key assumptions in the debate between MMTers and CMEers are about the relationship between monetary and fiscal institutions. CMEers assume the Treasury and the Fed are...     

Organizational Prospects, Influence Costs, and Ownership Changes

We augment efficiency-based theories of ownership by including influence costs. Our principal conclusion is that the prospect of organizational decline and layoffs creates additional influence costs in multiunit organizations that would be absent if there was no prospect of layoffs and would be lessened or eliminated in focused organizations. This helps explain the tendency of firms to divest poorly performing units, as well as the pattern of sales of such units to firms already in businesses related to that of the divested unit.     

Investment coordination and demand complementarities

Summary. This paper establishes necessary conditions for demand complementarity to imply investment coordination failure and explores the welfare implications of coordinated investment. Our main results caution against demand complementarities as a motive for investment coordination. We find that: 1) generally, a strict notion of complementarity (Hicks) is necessary for the existence of an investment coordination problem and 2) that when the problem does exist, coordination lowers social welfare without countervailing sectoral asymmetries. Received: June 19, 1996; revised version: December 5, 1997     

Community development and research: Participatory learning and action ‐a development strategy in itself

For any development facilitator or change agent, a potential paradox can arise when, assisting with self‐reliant participatory development. This paradox occurs when the change agent tries to help and encourage people to develop themselves and, in so doing, undermines their self‐reliance and sustainability, the very aim of development. The theoretical basis for the meaning of development is often at the root of such a paradox: it is argued that theory and the concept of development are in actual fact incompatible within the realm of social reality. It is further argued that Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), which rejects theory as the foundation for development and embraces human consciousness, can offer an appropriate strategy that can avoid such a paradox. This article is inspired by the tenacious efforts of resource‐poor people. It is largely based on PLA initiatives undertaken in the Little Karoo, South Africa and Odibo, Namibia, as well as in various communities in Zambia, and on numerous RDP capacity‐building training initiatives in the Northern Cape Province. South Africa.     

Kurzevaluation des Energie- und Klimapakets der EU-Kommission vom 23. Januar 2008

The main features of the European Commission’s “Climate Action and Renewable Energy Package” from January 23rd, 2008, have been implemented in the GINFORS model. In 2007 various alternative paths for achieving the EU’s climate targets were analysed on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Economy and Technology (BMWi) using GINFORS. The results basically point in the same direction as those found by the model-based Impact Assessment put out by the European Commission. The macro-economic costs of the package are below 1 % of the EU’s annual GDP. In particular the new member states will be affected above average, which justifies redistribution mechanisms. The yearly growth rates though will remain almost unchanged until 2020. The disproportionately high reduction targets for the ETS sector cannot be reproduced by GINFORS. They cause higher macro-economic costs than necessary. Altogether this does not yet result in a coherent traceable overall picture of the EU package, especially in comparison to analyses of the German energy and climate change policy.     

Asian management research needs more self-confidence

The challenges faced by Asian businesses merit scholarly investigation, both to help local business and to enrich the global scholarly discourse. Such research should be able to make major contributions, for instance by explaining context-specific variables and effects, and by drawing on traditional Asian thought in developing new theories. Yet, recent work, in part due to a lack of self-confidence to analyze the implications of indigenous contexts, seems to have made little progress on this agenda. I first discuss how Asian management research could potentially contribute to global management knowledge. On this basis, I outline institutional constraints that may suppress indigenous and innovative research and thus inhibit the potential impact of local work. I conclude that Asian scholars ought to be more careful in applying theories developed in other contexts, and they can be more self-confident in exploring locally relevant research issues, and in developing theories that explain Asian phenomena.