Events 2014

We cordially invite you to the launch of the book “Conceptualizing Culture in Social Movement Research” (Palgrave Macmillan 2014). The book will be presented by two of the editors with a comment by Professor Jeffrey P. Broadbent.

Inputs by

Peter Ullrich (editor, co-author, TU Berlin)
Priska Daphi (editor, co-author, University of Frankfurt/Main)
Jeffrey P. Broadbent (University of Minnesota)

The intensification of climate change and its accompanying geophysical and social disasters pose enormous future risks for the human species. Societies around the world have already exhibited significant differences in their recognition of these risks and in their efforts to cut emissions. The international research project on Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks, with cooperating research teams in 17 countries, studies the causes of this cross-national variation in degree of risk recognition and in consequent intentional policy-driven emission cuts.

Smart City ist die Vision einer intelligent vernetzten Stadt. Die Idee steht auch für das Zusammenspiel von Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft, Politik und Kreativen, um gemeinsam Lösungen für eine effiziente Infrastruktur, umweltfreundliche Mobilität oder nachhaltiges Wirtschaften zu entwickeln. Welchen Beitrag leistet die Sozialforschung im Labor der Zukunft? Wo stößt sie soziale und technische Innovationen an? Wie kann sie selbst Inkubator für Neues sein?

The impact of the economic crisis on Europe’s labor markets has directed particular attention to the situation of labor market entrants, who, in general, tend to suffer most from economic turmoil. A common explanation is that in tight labor markets, employers are reluctant to employ younger people because they have limited experience and are presumed to be less productive.

Education is an often ideologically charged notion that has been the object of many expectations and at times also cause for disenchantment. It is sometimes thought of as the means of reducing structural inequalities within societies. Nevertheless, access to education itself can be distributed in unequal ways, contingent on the very structures it is supposed to even out. Furthermore, the question of which forms of knowledge are recognized as education can be
fundamentally contested.

No other cultural phenomenon has excited audiences and makers in recent memory as much as the rise of the epic TV series. Fascinating viewers with stories of previously unseen psychological, moral and social complexity, the epic TV series has been hailed as the most important new art form since the arrival of 19th century music drama. Its birth took place on July 12, 1997, when HBO premiered Tom Fontana‘s phantasmagorical prison drama Oz which would awe American audiences for 56 episodes over six seasons.

This workshop is the sixth in a series fostering the rare dialogue between the arts and economics. It focuses on the revolution that has taken place in TV -  that is as much artistic as it is economic. It will bring together some of the most important players in, and thinkers about, TV series, their ascendancy and increasing economic and artistic importance.

How do constitutions legitimate their claim to authority? In three different ways. The first path is pursued by revolutionary outsiders; the second, by established insiders; the third, by established insiders striking a deal with political elites previously excluded from the system.

Der Workshop beschäftigt sich mit unterschiedlichen Kreativitätsdeutungen in Wissenschaft, Politik und unter Akteuren in Städten. Kontroversen und Konflikte bilden hierfür einen empirischen Zugang, um die unterschiedlichen interpretativen Rahmungen der beteiligten Akteure zu analysieren, mit denen lokale Bedeutungen von Kreativität konstruiert werden und die auf unterschiedliche Deutungen, Diskurse und Praktiken in Städten verweisen. Für den Workshop wurden sechs internationale Forscherinnen und Forscher aus dem Fachgebiet eingeladen und 15 Beiträge aus einem Call for Papers ausgewählt.

Seit 2008 beschäftigen wir uns in der Projektgruppe Zivilengagement (ZENG) am Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung intensiv mit Fragen des zivilgesellschaftlichen Engagements, des Dritten Sektors und der Spendenbereitschaft. Mit dem altersbedingten Ausscheiden des Projektgruppenleiters, Dr. sc. Eckhard Priller, muss die Projektgruppe ihre Tätigkeit beenden.

The lecture develops a research programme for the historical comparison of different stages of capitalism. Starting from historically comparative theories of capitalism, Andreas Nölke will sketch a model that draws especially on Polanyi and theories of organized capitalism. He validates this model by discussing the current crisis of the liberal stage of financialization, as well as the contemporary economic model of state capitalism in large emerging economies as a potential model for a new stage of non-liberal capitalism.

Deirdre McCloskey is a Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Her main contributions are to the economic history of Britain, the quantification of historical inquiry, the rhetoric of economics, the rhetoric of the human sciences, economic methodology, virtue ethics, feminist economics, heterodox economics, the role of mathematics in economic analysis, and the use (and misuse) of significance testing in economics.

A public conference of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (www.CSES.org) will take place at the Maritim proArte Hotel Berlin on October 9-10, 2014.

Gute Bildung ist heute wichtiger denn je für die gerechte Verteilung von Erwerbs- und Lebenschancen. Wie kann das Bildungssystem durchlässiger werden? Wie können Potenziale aller Kinder und Jugendlichen besser genutzt werden? Wie erreichen wir mehr Chancengleichheit in der Bildung?

Über diese und andere Fragen tauschen sich junge Sozialforscherinnen und Sozialforscher des WZB mit der Bundesministerin für Bildung und Forschung aus.

Gute Bildung – Gute Chancen
Herausforderungen der Bildungs- und Wissenschaftspolitik

Structural equation models (SEM) are loved and loathed. SEM combine Path Analysis with Confirmatory Factor Analysis. That is, they are directed dependencies between several variables, which may entail latent variables, that are estimated in one model. Particularly researchers who work on attitudes favour SEMs for their easy combination of confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis in one model. Many also fancy that the presentation of SEM estimates highly resembles diagrams of our theoretical models.

Michael Hannan is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and
Professor of Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is one of the most-cited American sociologists and a founder of the influential organizational ecology approach in the sociology of organizations. His current work theorizes organizational categories and typecasting processes and empirically investigates the dynamics of categories in the wine and restaurant industries. From 22 September to 3 October he will be at the WZB as a guest researcher.

Until recently, social inequalities had been declining continuously. However, the current economic climate and major demographic changes in Europe threaten to trigger an increase in existing social inequalities and prompt the emergence of new forms of social inequality. This conference addresses questions about recent changes in social inequality across Europe. What kinds of welfare states and social policies will still be able to effectively keep inequalities low or at least prevent a resurgence of social inequality?

She is widely known as one of the pioneers of ethnic competition theory and does research on armed conflict, ethnic violence, collective action, and social movement organizations. From 22 September to 3 October she will be at the WZB as a guest researcher.

Although economic inequality and uneven development exist across the United States, poverty has historically been higher in the South. Accordingly, this study investigates the relative contributions of four theoretical explanations in understanding the higher poverty in the South relative to the Non-South: 1) family demography, 2) economic structure, 3) race composition, and 4) power resources. The four most recent U.S. waves (2000, 2004, 2007, and 2010) from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) provide the individual-level data for this study.

The lecture examines how, in the course of modernization, Japan learned from Germany and Britain about ideas and institutions concerning social reform, and attempted to implement and develop them at home. It focuses on Fukuda Tokuzo, a pioneering liberal economist and social

The global rise of non-standard employment is often cited as one of the most important reasons for increasing levels of insecurity over the last 40 years. Yet, non-standard work is also one of the most underdeveloped factors in the literature on perceived worker insecurity. In this paper, we seek to understand the relationship between the most common form of non-standard employment, part-time work, and perceived worker insecurity.

In the last 20 years, the study of matching markets has seen great innovations and marked progress. The theory has matured to a point where matching theorists are able to make policy suggestions for real-life markets. The theory is supplemented by experiments examining how to operate such markets. Notable applications are matching markets such as medical labor markets for interns, college admissions procedures, school choice programs, social housing assignments, and kidney exchange programs for patients all over the world.

In 2011, female nurses in Germany made 87 Cent for every 1 Euro a male nurse made. Using data from the BIBB/BAuA-Employment Survey, we examine how much of this female-male earnings gap can be explained by differences in human capital characteristics and selection into work settings, and how much of this earnings gap can be accounted for by occupational selection. First, we estimate a Mincer wage regression with an extensive set of demographic and work characteristics.

Barbara Thériault, Université de Montréal, presents her new book entitled

"The Cop and the Sociologist.
Investigating Diversity in German Police Forces"

Introduction: Ines Michalowski, WZB

Commentary: Jérémie Gauthier, CMB

Presentation in German within the Marc Bloch Forum

The workshop will offer a unique opportunity to discuss the first drafts of the chapters for the volume on the Enforcement of EU Law against Member States, a book to be edited by András Jakab and Dimitry Kochenov, to which all of the panelists have agreed to contribute. The questions addressed are of wider interest and lend themselves to be discussed in a wider public forum.

It is well-known that, with an unrepresentative sample, the estimate of a causal effect may fail to characterize how effects operate in the population of interest. What is less well under- stood is that conventional estimation practices for observational studies may produce the same problem even with a representative sample. Specifically, causal effects estimated via multiple regression differentially weight each unit’s contribution. The “effective sample” that regres- sion uses to generate the causal effect estimate may bear little resemblance to the population of interest.

The world map of science is being redrawn as the emergent economies of East Asia join the established science powers of the West by creating world-class research infrastructures. After decades of application-oriented S&T policy, China and South Korea, for instance, now look for excellence in basic research. What are the implications of this reshuffling for global R&D?

Vertrauen – kaum ein anderer Begriff ist in den vergangenen Jahren von Politik und Wirtschaft so häufig und so häufig missbräuchlich verwendet worden, dass er vielfach zur Phrase verkommen ist. Dabei ist Vertrauen wie Gerechtigkeit oder Würde fundamental für das Zusammenleben in der Gesellschaft. Auf dem Symposium werden die Bedingungen, unter denen Vertrauen entsteht, der soziale und ökonomische Wert des Vertrauens sowie die Auswirkungen von Vertrauensverlust genauer untersucht.

This event is part of the colloquium series “Rethinking Law in a Global Context”, which this summer semester focuses on “Violence, Surveillance, Secrecy: Constitutionalism and the 'Deep State'”, sponsored by the WZB Rule of Law Center and convened by Prof. Dr. Mattias Kumm (WZB and New York University).

Moshe Halbertal is Gruss Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and Professor, at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Gabriel Abend will give a lecture about his new book "The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics".

Sex segregation by occupation and field of study is often presumed to reflect fundamental differences in men’s and women’s intrinsic natures and aspirations. But historical and cross-national comparisons reveal a great deal more variability than such a simple narrative would suggest. Moreover, this variability often takes on surprising patterns.

Cognitive skills are a major component of economic decisions. Many of these decisions take place in strategic contexts which require thinking about others’ behavior and which are cognitively complex. The aim of the workshop is to advance our understanding about the interplay of strategic sophistication and cognitive skills.

What comes after postcolonial criticism? In addressing this question, the lecture will critically assess the origins and achievements of postcolonial theory and offer some thoughts regarding its relevance to the contemporary world. Can notions of modernity, history and social science, dominated by Eurocentric thinking, still be applied to the developing world? Has the historical turn of 1989 and globalization also turned the perception of modernity rooted in European thinking around?

Der Umbruch kam überraschend. Wer aus der Geschichte zu lernen versucht hatte, sah sich getäuscht. Wie verarbeitet man das als Sozialhistoriker? DDR-Zusammenbruch und Wiedervereinigung ermöglichten politisches Engagement und zwangen zu wissenschaftsinstitutioneller Arbeit. Als Historiker in der Politik - was blieb davon übrig? National-, europa- und weltgeschichtlich war 1989-91 eine tiefe Zäsur. Wie haben  sich dadurch das Denken und die Praxis in der Geschichtswissenschaft verändert? Ein persönlicher Rückblick.

As sections of the East Side Gallery were removed in spring 2013 to accommodate a luxury residential development, protestors rallied to demand their right to “experience” the cultural heritage represented by this aesthetically enhanced, 1.3-km strip of the former Berlin Wall.

Die frühen Wissenschaftlergemeinden nannten sich „Gelehrtengesellschaften“, die sich in Akademien zusammen fanden. Die erste wissenschaftliche Akademie war die accademia della crusca, die 1583 in Florenz als Sprachgesellschaft gegründet wurde. Erst die zweite italienische Akademie widmete sich der Naturwissenschaft, die 1603 gegründete „Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei“. Ihre Mitglieder – unter ihnen Galilei - nannten sich „die Luchse“, was schon ein bestimmtes Selbstverständnis ausdrückt:  Wir sind die Schlauen!

This event is part of the colloquium series “Rethinking Law in a Global Context”, which this summer semester focuses on “Violence, Surveillance, Secrecy: Constitutionalism and the 'Deep State'”, sponsored by the WZB Rule of Law Center and convened by Prof. Dr. Mattias Kumm (WZB and New York University).

Talk by Prof. Eric Widmer, University of Geneva

Lecture by Prof. Michael J. Handel, Northeastern University, Boston

Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Kolloquiums-Serie “Rethinking Law in a Global Context”, die sich in diesem Sommersemester dem Thema “Violence, Surveillance, Secrecy: Constitutionalism and the 'Deep State'” widmet. Das Kolloquium wird vom WZB Rule of Law Center gesponsert und von Prof. Dr. Mattias Kumm (WZB und New York University) organisiert.

Kaum eine gesellschaftliche Domäne scheint heute mehr zu existieren, in der man nicht partout erfolgreich zu sein hat. Woher rührt der Siegeszug dieser Leitorientierung? Welche sozialen Voraussetzungen und Folgen hat das zusehends allgegenwärtige Motto: Erfolg um jeden Preis? Diesen Fragen geht das Buch nach. In 16 Beiträgen beleuchtet es die Herausbildung der Erfolgsmaxime, erörtert feld- und organisationsspezifische Konstellationen, in denen diese ihre Wirkmacht entfaltet und zeichnet berufsgruppen-, geschlechts- sowie milieutypische Muster ihrer individuellen Adaption nach.

This event is part of the colloquium series “Rethinking Law in a Global Context”, which this summer semester focuses on “Violence, Surveillance, Secrecy: Constitutionalism and the 'Deep State'”, sponsored by the WZB Rule of Law Center and convened by Prof. Dr. Mattias Kumm (WZB and New York University).

Germany’s state-owned banks (“Landesbanken”) have been central actors in the country’s economic success since the mid-19th century. Yet, during the recent economic crisis, Germany’s state-owned banks performed far worse than their private sector counterparts. Although they comprise 21 percent of all bank activity in Germany prior to the crisis, Landesbanken accounted for 41 percent of the financial losses. In addition, a number of well-established and large Landesbanken fell into conservatorship, closed, and were taken over by other institutions.

Professor Craig Calhoun, Direktor der London School of Economics (LSE)

Der globale Klimawandel ist aufgrund seiner Reichweite und seines Katastrophenpotenzials in besonderer Weise geeignet, der Frage nachzugehen, welche Rolle die Wissenschaft  in der Diskussion über eine ökologische Neuausrichtung der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung spielen soll. Worin besteht die gesellschaftliche Verantwortung der Klimaforschung? Ist sie Teil umfassender gesellschaftlicher Transitionsprozesse oder soll sie Distanz zu gesellschaftspolitischen Erwartungen und wissenschaftliche Neutralität wahren?

Frauen und Männer wünschen sich eine gute Balance zwischen Beruf und Familie: Junge Frauen wollen Kinder, aber auch berufliche Herausforderung. Junge Männer möchten ihre Kinder nicht nur im Schlafanzug sehen. Die Wirklichkeit sieht anders aus. Noch immer leisten Frauen neben ihrem Beruf zu Hause die meiste Arbeit. Pflege und Kindererziehung sind bis heute ihre Domäne. Die meisten Männer unterbrechen ihren Vollzeitjob für die Kindererziehung nur kurz.

Choosing aggregation methods - A comparative analysis
Liv Bjerre, Friederike Römer, Malisa Zobel (WZB)

Every day, families negotiate and adapt to an array of institutions and social processes, one of the most powerful of these is the market. Although parents may strive to separate them, the intimate world of caring, nurturing, and raising children takes place in the context of another imperative – employment. There is much at stake in how families and nations handle the connections between family care and earning income, raising children and a strong economy: gender equity is one, the generation and distribution of wealth another, and both are connected to health. Dr.

The changing character of jobs is a perennial question in the social sciences. With regard to the requirements associated with employment, i.e. the qualities of the tasks that are to be carried out, various scholars have at different times argued for a) a successive demeaning of jobs, b) a continuous increase in the complexity of jobs, and c) a growing dualization of jobs. Despite the attention garnered by these contrasting visions, evidence on the actual development of skill requirements is surprisingly scant.

R is a powerful, free and open source programming language for data manipulation, analysis and graphing. The course provides a basic understanding of the guiding principles of data analysis with R. Participants will learn the basics of R’s syntax and grammar. By the end of the course, they will be able to perform their own data analysis including data exploration, visualization and simulation.

Resources:

This talk takes its cue from Hacker’s & Pierson’s observation that politics is first and foremost organization: “organized combat”. If we want to understand the outcomes of politics, we have to look at how it is organized on a long-term basis: by whom and with what resources? Sweden is taken as an example of how politics as organized combat has changed quite dramatically in the last couple of decades.

Panel data - i.e. the observation of multiple variables over multiple time intervals for the same units of analysis - often suffer from various violations of the Gauss-Markov assumptions. For example, in many settings it can hardly be assumed that repeated measurements within units are independent of each other. In contrast to seminal pooled time-series models, multilevel approaches can directly model such dependencies by allowing for varying intercepts and slopes. This enables us to disentangle temporal from cross-sectional variation and to study their cross-level interactions.

Testing the causality of our claims has become more important over the recent years. But how to do so with a cross-section of observational data? One potential solution is a regression discontinuity design: RDD exploits a cutoff on a linear variable after which a treatment is assigned. An example might be a special training program that pupils who surpass a certain math grade are assigned to. The intuition is that values close to the cutoff are random, i.e. whether one just passes the cutoff or just misses to pass is not systematic.

The purpose of this conference is to bring together leading international scholars from different perspectives (economics, political science, sociology, industrial relations) to further develop an emerging research area:  the dynamics of financialization and their impact on the employment relations and industrial relations at the company level. A special focus will be on developments since the financial crisis.

Agricultural biotechnology (ABT) has become a major issue of concern in global politics. Since the first commercialization of biotech crops, global acreage, market value, private and public research and intellectual property rights concentration have increased considerably. Yet, the worldwide spread of agricultural biotechnology has been contested both globally and locally.

Western perceptions of Pakistan tend to be uniformly negative – corrupt,
dysfunctional and dangerous are only a few adjectives that come to
mind. For years, Pakistan has been perceived by many observers of global affairs as a stumbling block towards regional and global security and peace. With this dominant biased view, many dimensions of Pakistan’s developments have been overlooked. What actually constitutes Pakistani society and which powers define its politics?