Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School
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9/2018
This thesis takes the core concept of valuation beyond the market and looks at it from three different angles: (1) a field-level study that investigates how domination becomes naturalized and thus, the role of systemic power in determining how practices, beliefs and attitudes become the dominant or valued way of working in an emerging field, (2) a literature review that organizes concepts from valuation studies by approaches to generate non-economic value and raises questions about the relationship between organizations and the value they create, and (3) an organization-level study that investigates how categorization, a valuation process, can be a way to scale social impact and create institutional change.
The first paper is called “Systemic Power in the Field of Impact Investing: Pathways to domination and emerging field ideologies”. It is an equal authored paper with Lisa Hehenberger and Johanna Mair. It is an empirical study of the emerging field of impact investing in Europe. In it, we investigate the power dynamics that mark the trajectory of a field in an emergent stage and identify the process of suppression and three modes by which field ideologies take shape. We ask: How is domination naturalized? How can we surface underlying sets of ideas held by groups of actors in emerging fields of practice in order to study the process of domination? The study traces the emergence of a field ideology that values certain ideals, for example, scaling over local solutions and measuring impact vs. telling stories. We introduce the concept of field ideologies and aim to contribute to organizational theory discussions of domination and institutional theory more broadly.
The second paper is called “The Vocabulary of Valuation: Tools for investigating the changing nature of social purpose organizing”. It structures and relates valuation studies concepts to non-market settings and develops the concept of the born-rational organization and a research agenda for what valuation does to organizations and what valuation can mean for this type of organization. In it, I ask: What areas of future research emerge from an integration of valuation literature with management work on socially- and environmentally-driven organizations? The paper establishes the need for empirical research that investigates valuation topics at social purpose organizations. It aims to contribute to organizational research on non-market value creation and highlights the need to investigate value- or impact- creation strategies.
Lastly, the third paper is called “Categories as Impact Drivers: How a social-purpose organization enables the emergence of a new category as a means to scale and as a mode of institutional change”. It is an empirical study of a national nonprofit organization in the United States and how it seeks to maximize its impact. In it, I ask: How does an organization create a category as an impact driver? The study investigates how a ‘born rational’ organization acts and organizes and ultimately, how it adopts a unique approach to scaling and change through a category. I develop a process model of category creation for impact that involves two interlinked processes: impact reactivity and category impact work. The study aims to contribute to organizational theory discussions of approaches to social challenges, scaling and change. It also calls for attention to categories in non-market strategy.
17/2021
Urban Governance Processes in the Making: The Unfolding of Cycling Policies in London and Berlin
(2021)
With the growing variety of stakeholders involved and different interests that need to be reconciled, policymaking in the city can be sometimes slow or even run into deadlock. This dissertation addresses this complexity of urban governance with a process view. It strives to investigate how complex urban governance processes unfold and what might enable or impede joint action throughout. Accordingly, it surveys the field of urban transport, which provides a prime example of the struggle of cities to move complex policies forward. This becomes particularly apparent in the redesign of urban streets, which requires careful retrofitting of existing infrastructures and an alignment of previous plans with new political priorities. This struggle has recently been reignited by the renaissance of the bicycle in cities and the related rollout of new cycling infrastructure. The promotion of cycling has moved up the urban political agenda almost universally and become a cross-sectoral priority of transport, public health, and environmental policies. Yet, the creation of space for the safety of cyclists, for instance in the form of separate cycle lanes, has initiated fierce debates with strong supporters and opponents in nearly all major cities. This dissertation explores how, in spite of this controversy, urban stakeholders move ambitious cycling programs forward based on the comparative analysis of cycling policies in London (2012-2016) and Berlin (2016-2021). With a methodological and theoretical approach rooted in network research, this dissertation explores the evolution of the actor-networks and the policy debate of these case studies over time. The analysis draws on a qualitative database that was created for this dissertation and consists of interview data and documents. The findings suggest that next to structural and cultural properties, stylistic features should be taken into account to fully comprehend how complex urban governance processes unfold and, thus, deserve a more prominent position in the urban governance field.
01/2024
In the past decade, social media has revolutionized how governments create public value through online communication and collaboration with citizens. Despite this, academic literature still lacks a comprehensive understanding of how public value is disseminated via social media. This research delves into the process of public value creation on social media in New Zealand, a leading country in leveraging social media for government-to-citizen communication, particularly during crises.
The study seeks to answer two questions about creating or eroding public value over social media. The first question investigates the socio-demographic factors correlating with citizens' varying perceptions of public value from social media adoption. The findings suggest that citizens with similar public value perceptions share common socio-demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, education, trust in government, platform usage, and following government accounts. The study also reveals differences in public value perceptions based on the platform type, with platforms like Twitter garnering more positive public value perceptions than Facebook.
The second question examines how using social media in government can enhance or diminish public value perceptions among citizens. The research constructs a causal model where specific social media practices during peaceful and crisis times, along with the engagement of external stakeholders, lead to increased perceptions of public value creation. The study also uncovers two causal mechanisms for the erosion of public value. In the first model, government reactions to opposing opinions on social media, such as hiding or removing comments, result in low public value perceptions. The second model shows that over-posting or posting irrelevant information can reduce citizens’ trust in the government, limit government posts' reach, and lower public value perception.
This research encourages future studies to replicate the experiment across various platforms and countries to better understand how public value can be created or eroded over social media.
04/2023
This dissertation explores corporatization–the provision of public services by publicly-owned companies–as a specific public management reform that has strongly been endorsed in the last decades. However, despite the significance of corporatization in public administration and the controversy over its viability as a strategy for enhancing public service provision, there is limited empirical research on its trajectory and associated effects. This dissertation fills this important gap in the literature by examining the causes, dynamics, and consequences of corporatization. It challenges the claim that we are witnessing a resurgence of the state in recent years, resulting in a pendulum shift from the private to the public sector. A mixed-methods approach is employed to analyze three original datasets from English and German local government contexts. Theoretical perspectives rooted in rational choice are complemented by those accounting for irrational ambiguity to capture the unique ambidexterity of corporatization. After clarifying the theoretical background in Chapter 1, this exploration unfolds across three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 investigates what drives corporatization. It reveals that ownership structures in corporatization have become increasingly complex and political–rather than economic–incentives may explain shifts toward indirect municipal ownership. Chapter 3 examines what causes corporatization to reverse. It shows that a return of services to the core local government after a company closes is less likely than other forms of service provision, while the type of service is the factor that matters most for termination decisions. Chapter 4 analyzes how local governments experience and cope with reverse corporatization. Local governments and their employees evidently and mutually impact the return process, which can induce private sector-informed change within the bureaucracy, albeit with limited transformative power. Ultimately, this dissertation finds no clear evidence of a pendulum shift toward the local public sector. This conclusion follows from conceptual and empirical differentiation and depends on how corporatization is framed, as well as on the specific country, service type, and dimension of public influence considered. It also suggests that the notion of the pendulum shift needs reevaluation. For practitioners, this holds several implications that encourage optimism about reform, and advise against an arbitrary approach to diversifying costs.
02/2024
This thesis is a comprehensive study of trust. The study rests on the argument that all forms of trust stem from the same universal concept. Once trust has been defined at its core, the concept can be specified within a wide variety of contexts, such as trust in your friends and family, in your fellow citizens, or in different kinds of institutions within your country. Although trust is an increasingly popular topic within the social sciences, a lack of consensus on the true meaning of the concept remains. One the one hand, this can be attributed to diverging conceptualisations in a rich and multidisciplinary conceptual literature. On the other, to empirical studies where quantifiable measures do not spring from a clear conceptual account, but rather take survey responses directly at face value. Based on this fundamental issue, the overarching goal of my thesis is to bridge the gap between the conceptual and empirical literature.
I achieve this goal with three contributions. Firstly, I conduct a conceptual analysis of trust, which results in a unifying conceptual framework. The framework acknowledges and combines different conceptual understandings from political science, psychology and sociology, thereby representing a move towards clearer consensus on the meaning of trust within the conceptual literature. Secondly, I develop a new measurement model for trust, which is directly rooted in the conceptual framework. The model reflects an alternative approach to empirical research, where quantitative measures of trust are derived from a conceptual argument on the appropriate structure and dimensionality. Thirdly, I identify a typology of citizens who trust in fundamentally different ways. The typology acts as a complementary perspective on the meaning of trust, studied from the viewpoint of citizens in a heterogeneous population.
As a whole, I argue that the thesis represents a new approach to trust research, where conceptual and empirical methods are closely intertwined. In order to advance our understanding of this fundamentally important concept, it is crucial to bring the two strands of the literature closer together.
14/2021
This dissertation is about how democracies can respond to economic crises. At its centre is the dilemma that political elites, and societies as a whole, face after such an event –whether to focus exclusively on forward-looking policies that secure a recovery or whether to also address the underlying causes of the crisis, learning the lessons of the past but also weathering the divisiveness and recrimination this exercise is likely to elicit.
To engage with this dilemma, this research takes inspiration from the field of transitional justice on how societies can deal with the past, and learn from it. Of special interest are the mechanisms of transitional justice. Truth commissions most prominently, but also prosecutions, reparations, and constitutional reforms. The analysis moves from a cross-country comparison of truth commissions deployed in Iceland, Ireland, and Greece after the Great Recession, to a case study of a comprehensive range of mechanisms deployed in Iceland, to an impact assessment of the most effective of the three truth commission.
I will argue that the transitional justice framework brings helpful and practical insights when applied to the study of economic crises in established democracies. It challenges the conventional wisdom that ‘business as usual’ will prevail after an economic crisis; it also yields principles for designing mechanisms that promote learning from the past and building-in better practices in the future.
11/2022
This dissertation examines recent contestation surrounding the status of emerging economies in international trade politics. In particular, it looks at the ways in which the rise of Brazil, India and China – the BICs – has shaped special rights for developing countries at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The primary focus of the thesis is the WTO’s principle of Special and Differential Treatment (SDT), which provides developing countries with exemptions from certain liberalization commitments, implementation flexibilities, and pledges of technical assistance. At the WTO, access to such special rights is based on individual members’ selfdeclaration as developing countries. However, as the BICs have risen, the ‘North’- ‘South’ binary that underpins SDT has become less clear. The continued use of a legal norm based on the strict bifurcation of WTO members into sets of developed and developing countries has thus been called into question, most notably by the United States.
At the outset, the dissertation develops a conceptual framework for delineating the different ideal typical pathways along which special and differential treatment can develop. An overall process of fragmentation is then outlined, characterized by the unmaking of special rights for developing countries, in parallel to the resilience of differential treatment for the smaller sub-group of Least Developed Countries (LDCs). The thesis continues by examining the contestation at the heart of these processes more closely. In doing so, it sets up a novel theoretical framework to analyse the potential adaptation strategies that emerging economies can adopt in response to contestation of their special rights. Significant strategic variation amongst the BICs comes to the fore in a series of case studies, as well as two chapters on China’s strong defence of its developing country status and Brazil’s recalibration of its (previously held) Southern leadership role. The thesis closes with an in-depth case study of negotiations on intellectual property rights. While the divergence of emerging economy positions and the fragmentation of SDT have marked the WTO era, the final chapter shows that in areas where BICs unity is still possible – such as on LDC rights – normative erosion is slowed.
03/2023
At least since the 2016 presidential elections in the United States and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, misinformation has gained increasing prominence in the public discourse. Only four years later, the COVID-19 pandemic emerged and was accompanied by an “Infodemic”, misleading individuals about the origin of the virus, its severity, and the intentions of governments coping with the virus. Misinformation was itself deemed a considerable threat to public health. Although COVID-19 misinformation was widely circulating at that time, and continues to do so, a substantial share of individuals did not believe this misleading information. That begs the question, why do people fall for misinformation?
This question is at the heart of this dissertation project, which explores the role of social media, trust, and values in individuals’ susceptibility to false information. Through comparative research, the project investigates how these variables affect the reception of misinformation and attempts to combine multiple levels of analysis and consider different forms of misinformation.
The core of this dissertation consists of three chapters, each of which addresses the research question from a different but complementary perspective. Chapter 2 provides the conceptual basis for the subsequent empirical chapters. The chapter investigates how individual, group, and system-level variables contribute to social media’s role as a vector for misinformation. In the third chapter, I employ an experimental research design to assess whether superficial characteristics of different social media platforms affect users’ credibility judgements regarding manufactured news. Contrary to existing literature, the experiment’s results suggest that social media platforms do not differ in their effects on perceived credibility of news. The fourth chapter builds on data from a multinational research project that explored the role of values during the COVID-19 pandemic and their impact on individuals’ propensity to believe in COVID-19-related conspiracy theories. Through a comparative design, using samples from Germany and Poland, the chapter finds considerable differences in the pattern of influential values and trust concepts on the adoption of conspiracy beliefs.
Although the findings of this dissertation project come with limitations, the research nevertheless highlights the importance of comparative research designs in the study of misinformation. The dissertation concludes by discussing avenues for further research.
03/2024
This dissertation comprises three essays. Although their titles make clear their self-contained nature, all essays share a common motivation: to combine economic theory with modern tools of causal inference to understand applied problems.
The first chapter studies honesty when the costs to behave honestly change. Using field data from a snack delivery company that employs an honesty payment system, the chapter presents an event study to analyze how price increases affect pay rates. The honesty payment system expects customers to pay a listed price for each consumed snack. This allows me to measure honesty with the pay rate that compares consumption to payments. The results, which draw on deliveries from several thousand firms, show that price increases that make honest behavior more costly cause more cheating. Price increases of 15% trigger a fall in pay rates of 11%.
The second chapter studies a recent legal reform in Germany, which aims to lower commission rates of real estate agents by raising the cost salience of sellers. I find that the reform has backfired and real estate agents have exploited the transition to increase their commission rates. The findings document that in some regions real estate agents increase their commission by up to 2 percentage points, adding over e6,000 in transaction cost to the average home sale. As explicit collusion is unlikely in this setting, I argue that this arbitrary increase points to seller ignorance instead. To verify if and why sellers fail to induce price competition, I run a pre-registered survey experiment with 1,062 real estate agents. Although commission rates should be negotiated independently for each sale, the survey confirms that 85% of sellers do not attempt to negotiate lower commission rates. The randomized experimental questions suggest that real estate agents may cater to the low willingness of sellers to negotiate by providing misleading reference commission rates and shrouding the economic incidence for sellers.
The third chapter is co-authored with Christian Traxler and Carsten Burhop and examines the causal effect of beer on crime based on unique panel data from Germany between 1882 and 1913. Using exogenous variation in the yield of spring barley, a key input in beer production, we identify a quantitatively and qualitatively significant effect of beer on violent crimes. This effect is mainly driven by a positive effect on assaults, where our findings suggest that a 1% increase in beer production raises assault rates by the same percentage. These findings are corroborated using a complementary empirical design that exploits a brewing tax reform in Prussia.