The 10 most recently published documents
The Eigen-Sinn of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Argentina (1950-1984) and under the Nazis (1933-1945)
(2024)
How can we understand the social behavior of Jehovah’s Witnesses under the persecution they suffered during the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983)? Were they part of the resistance to the regime? What is the substantial historiographical contribution of a comparison between National Socialism and the last military dictatorship in Argentina? These are the questions which shape this dissertation. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were the only Christian religious group which was banned and persecuted by the militaries in the 1970s. This research reconstructs their experiences and, most important, how they perceived them. In other words, it is the aim of this research to describe the Eigen-Sinn of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Coined by Alf Lüdtke to analyze the ambiguous behavior of the German working class during the first half of the XX century, Eigen-Sinn is a concept for understanding individual behaviors and actions in relation with power and domination. The NS Regime was a central element in the Eigen-Sinn of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Argentina in 1970s. For them, the hostile measures of the military regime was a revival of the persecution suffered by their coreligionists in Europe under the NS Regime. Based on this interpretation, the European experiences shaped the social behavior of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Argentina by providing them an interpretative framework which was central at the moment of facing the military regime.
This parallel between the European and Argentinean experiences is specially relevant for the Argentinean historiography, where the discussion about the nature of the military regime is still open. Due to the atrocities committed by the Argentinean militaries, this dictatorship is categorized, by some scholars, among the genocides of the XX century. This research shares light in this open discussion by comparing the military regime in Argentina with the NS dictatorship not from a theoretical approach but from an empirical research about the historical experiences of Jehovah’s Witnesses under both regimes.
Modeling the complex relationship between task difficulty, accuracy, response time, and confidence
(2024)
Confidence, a subjective evaluation about the correctness of one's own decision, is influenced by many aspects of the decision itself, for example the level of difficulty. Empirically, the time it takes to make a decision is also related to confidence, such that faster decisions are usually accompanied with higher confidence compared to slower decisions. The mathematical framework of sequential sampling models offers a way to formalize a unified theory of the complex relationship between task difficulty, response times, and confidence judgments. The three studies in this thesis utilized the sequential sampling framework to yield insight into the decision dynamics and computations that give rise to confidence judgments in perceptual decisions.
In Study 1 and 2, a variety of dynamical confidence models are compared with respect to their fit to empirical data from experiments comprising different visual discrimination tasks with a difficulty manipulation. In Study 1, I formulated the dynamical weighted evidence and visibility (dynWEV) model and in Study 2, I refined the model to the dynamical visibility, time, and evidence model (dynaViTE) model. The dynaViTE model describes the decision process as a drift diffusion model. In addition, dynaViTE assumes a period of post-decisional accumulation of evidence and a parallel accumulation of visibility evidence, which accrues evidence about task difficulty. In dynaViTE, confidence is determined by a combination of decision evidence and visibility evidence in the form of a weighted sum, penalized by the duration of evidence accumulation.
In Study 1, I compared different dynamical confidence models, which are based on either a race of accumulators or the drift diffusion model, on their fit to data from two experiments comprising different visual discrimination tasks with a difficulty manipulation. The newly proposed dynWEV model outperformed all competitors suggesting that confidence is not only determined by evidence about stimulus identity but is influenced by independent evidence about task difficulty, which is conveyed by choice-irrelevant stimulus features.
Study 2 examined the role of the duration of evidence accumulation in the computation of confidence. Theoretically supported by a formal analysis of confidence in a Bayesian optimal observer model, I generalized the dynWEV model to include a penalization of the time it takes to accumulate evidence and form a decision in the computation of confidence, resulting in the dynaViTE model. The dynaViTE model is compared against three of its special cases that either ignore accumulation time, visibility evidence, or both accumulation time and visibility evidence in the computation of confidence. We used previously published empirical data from four experiments, three visual discrimination tasks with a difficulty manipulation, and one visual two-alternative forced choice task with a difficulty and a speed-accuracy manipulation. The results suggest that human observers indeed explicitly consider accumulation time when making confidence judgments. However, depending on the task at hand, either visibility accumulation or accumulation time may be less relevant in the formation of confidence, which suggests that some stimuli or experimental tasks leads to different strategies in confidence computations. The third study showcases the R package dynConfiR, which includes an implementation of several dynamical confidence models together with high-level functions for parameter estimation and prediction of response time distributions. The package offers an efficient and intuitive model fitting function, which simplifies the workflow for modeling studies with confidence and response time data to calling a few lines of code. Thus, the dynConfiR package provides useful tools for analyzing response time and confidence data across a variety of experiments.
In sum, the dynaViTE model forms a computational model, which formalizes the relationship between task difficulty, choice, response time, and confidence judgment. The dynaViTE model extends previous theories of confidence by including the parallel assessment of independent evidence about task difficulty and the incorporation of accumulation time in the computation of confidence. The studies presented in this thesis deliver substantial evidence in supporting both features, the parallel accumulation of visibility and the incorporation of accumulation time in the computation of confidence. This thesis thus forms an important contribution to the growing research on decision mechanics and confidence and thereby improve our understanding how confidence arises in perceptual decisions.
This cumulative dissertation contributes to the research stream Future of Work and focuses on alternative workplace arrangements, especially when employees rely on information and communication technologies to communicate virtual feedback. More specifically, this dissertation addresses (1) the various conceptualizations and terminologies which researchers use for analyzing alternative work arrangements since the 1970s, (2) the multidimensional nature of virtual feedback, its effects on an individual and team level as well as the underlying cognitive processes when receiving virtual feedback, and (3) the effect of feedback on performance improvement when teams receive in-person or virtual feedback. This results in the following three manuscripts:
Manuscript 1: Schäfer, B., Koloch, L., Storai, D., Gunkel, M., & Kraus, S. (2023). Alternative workplace arrangements: Tearing down the walls of a conceptual labyrinth. Journal of Innovation & Knowledge, Vol. 8, 100352.
Manuscript 2: Koloch, L., Goldmann, P., Schäfer, B., & Ringlstetter, M. (2023). Feedbacking research on virtual feedback: A literature review.
Manuscript 3: Koloch, L. (2023). Is virtual feedback less effective than in-person feedback for improving team performance? An experimental study.
This thesis discusses the #MeToo movement as a political and social protest movement that responds to the dynamics of sexualized violence with collectivized autobiographical narratives. It is a response to the processes of de-placing, which are perhaps most visible in the properties of shame. De-placing is a key concept in this thesis, describing an (affective) inability to speak or be heard. A feminist analysis of shame outlines it as a mechanism of hegemonic patriarchal power dynamics, facilitating the placelessness of victims of sexualized violence. However, a feminist analysis of both shame and power also demands room for resistance. The possibilities of resistance are explored as processes of re-placing. This analysis is placed in the center of a (feminist) tension between disempowerment and empowerment, proposing a conceptual approach that embraces a productive tension in the #MeToo movement.
The #MeToo movement constructs itself on the basis of autobiographical narratives; some as short as a Tweet and others as long as a memoir. Thus, this thesis explores the productive ambivalence between narratives of shame/de-placing and agency/re-placing through literary analysis. These readings focus on how #MeToo literature negotiates narratives of shame and shame resistance – powerlessness and empowerment – through digital spheres, the courtroom, and the site of abuse.
The autobiographical narratives that dynamically construct the #MeToo movement dismantle the de-placing properties of shame in their collectivized demand to (agentically) be in place. Yet, these narratives reveal the limits of (affective) agency vis-à-vis the hegemonic patriarchal power dynamics they respond to. As this tension remains unresolved, it can only lead to a discussion of and need for pure feminist rage.
Eine Anpassung an sich verändernde Rahmenbedingungen ist ein wesentlicher Treiber für die Entwicklung von Wirtschaftsräumen und nimmt auch bei der Entwicklung von touristischen Destinationen eine wichtige Rolle ein. Neben kurzfristig auftretenden Ereignissen (z.B. Umweltkatastrophen) tragen auch die globalen Megatrends wie der digitale, demografische oder der Klimawandel zu einer Veränderung der Destinationsstrukturen bei. Dennoch zeigen empirische Studien, dass eine dauerhaft angelegte Anpassung bislang eher in den Hintergrund des strategischen Destinationsmanagements rückt und Probleme häufig in der Implementierung von Prozessen zu finden sind. Problematisch daran ist jedoch, dass eine strategische Anpassung häufig erst dann Dringlichkeit erlangt, wenn die Veränderungen bereits eingetreten oder unumkehrbar sind. Diese Ausgangssituation wird zusätzlich dadurch verschärft, dass Veränderungen nicht einzeln, sondern parallel zutage treten, deren Auswirkungen sich wechselseitig verstärken können. Setzt man den Einfluss einer stetigen Dynamik voraus, so muss angenommen werden, dass sich auch die Anpassungserfordernisse in Destinationen kontinuierlich über die Zeit verändern. Um die bestehenden Strukturen einer Destination an die Veränderungsdynamiken anzugleichen, bedarf es somit an Flexibilität, Lernbereitschaft und eines gewissen experimentellen Verständnisses. Ein solcher Zustand der Reflexivität ist aber nur dann zu erreichen, wenn auch die Strukturen und Prozesse im Governance-System offen angelegt sind und eine laufende Abstimmung sowie kritische Reflexion von Entscheidungen ermöglichen. Adaptive Governance-Formen gelten demnach als wichtige Einflussparameter einer flexiblen Anpassung. Um die Problematik zur Gestaltung von Anpassungsprozessen tiefer zu erforschen, nähert sich diese Dissertation aus Sicht der Adaptive Governance-Forschung an und versucht die zentralen Erkenntnisse auf die Destinationsforschung zur übertragen. Im Fokus steht hierbei die Untersuchungsfrage: Welche Eigenschaften einer Adaptive Governance lassen sich im Destinationskontext identifizieren und inwieweit tragen sie dazu bei, den Prozess der Anpassung dauerhaft zu bewältigen?
Mit der Beantwortung dieser Frage möchte die Dissertation die Relevanz des Adaptive Governance Ansatzes für die Tourismusforschung untersuchen. Ziel ist es zu prüfen, inwieweit das Konzept der Adaptive Governance zur Bewertung und Gestaltung von Anpassungsprozessen auf Destinationsebene geeignet ist. Die auf Grundlage der Literaturstudie ermittelten Bestimmungsfaktoren einer Adaptive Governance dienen aus empirischer Sicht als analytischer Rahmen zur Beschreibung der bestehenden Strukturen und Gestaltungsprozesse und unterstützen dabei, die destinationsspezifischen Anforderungen abzuleiten.
Für die Durchführung der empirischen Untersuchung wurde die vergleichende Fallstudie als qualitativ-interpretative Forschungsmethode ausgewählt. Verschiedene Anpassungsprozesse im Untersuchungsraum Bayern bilden hierbei den Untersuchungsgegenstand. Das Untersuchungsdesign folgt einem zweistufigen Vorgehen: Erstens, diente eine explorative Vorstudie dem Ziel geeignete Untersuchungsfälle zu identifizieren und relevante Anpassungsthemen in der Praxis bayerischer Destinationen zu ermitteln. In der zweiten Stufe erfolgte die Mehrfallstudie basierend auf den vier ausgewählten Fällen Fränkisches Seenland, Bad Hindelang, Chiemsee-Chiemgau und Fichtelgebirge. Für die Auswertung der 31 qualitativen, leitfadengestützten Interviews wurde das Analyseverfahren GABEK® eingesetzt, die es ermöglicht, Einflussfaktoren und Kausalmechanismen zu identifizieren. Die Ergebnisdarstellung erfolgte sowohl Einzelfallspezifisch als auch fallübergreifend.
Die zentralen Untersuchungsergebnisse zeigen, dass die Funktion eines handlungsfeldübergreifenden Kümmerers, der den Wandel aktiv begleitet sowie Aspekte des Lernens und Reflektierens eine große Rolle im Destinationsgeschehen Bayerns einnehmen. Jedoch mangelt es vielfach an Kontinuität und eines adäquaten institutionellen Rahmens, solche Lernmechanismen zu unterstützen. Der Mehrwert zur Berücksichtigung der Adaptive Governance Prinzipien im vorherrschenden Destination Governance Verständnis besteht also darin, dieses um ein stärker reflexives Verständnis zu erweitern und dadurch die Anpassungsfähigkeit einer Destinationsgemeinschaft dauerhaft zu stärken. Die Arbeit macht aber auch deutlich, dass Destinationen nur dann eine Adaptive Destination Governance hervorbringen können, wenn es ihnen auch gelingt, den Kompromiss zwischen langfristiger Kontinuität sowie dynamischer Flexibilität zu finden.
Ausgehend von der Beobachtung, dass sich in der Figur der Fußballschiedsrichter*in Situativität und Organisationalität des Sozialen in anregender Weise vermischen, untersucht die Arbeit die situative Platzordnung des Fußballspiels und das Schiedsrichterwesen des Verbands mit organisationsethnografischen Mitteln. Das Fußballspiel wird so mikro- und kultursoziologisch neu erschlossen von ihrer Schiedsrichter*in und ihrer eigentümlich umstrittenen und situationistischen Bürokratie aus. Praxistheorie wird auf Probleme der Organisationssoziologie hin orientiert, wobei Erving Goffmans Konzept der Schnittstellen von Interaktionsordnung und Sozialstruktur eine Schlüsselrolle zugewiesen wird.
This cumulative dissertation examines the phenomenon of employee silence in professional service firms (PSFs). Although both research streams are independently well-established areas of organizational research, there has been a lack of research investigating the withholding of information, problems, or concerns in the knowledge-intensive context of PSFs. This thesis starts the academic and practitioner discourse about it and opens a multitude of further research opportunities.
The first manuscript draws on a literature-based and conceptual approach to examine the intersections of PSF and silence research. It identifies characteristics of PSFs that lead to employee silence and derives research propositions about the links between PSFs and silence. By applying a multi-method research approach, the second manuscript empirically investigates the extent to which employee silence is prevalent in PSFs. It determines PSF-specific antecedents fostering the unfavorable phenomenon and professionals' motives to remain silent. The third manuscript takes a grounded-theory approach to examine how employee silence in PSFs can be prevented or reduced. It develops overarching fields of action and concrete measures that help practitioners overcome employee silence.
Adopting a combination of Usage-based Construction Grammar and New Englishes approaches, the present study explores the constructional competition between preposition stranding (What is he talking about?) and pied-piping (About what is he talking?) in 12 varieties of English at different stages of Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model in order to gain more insights into the cognitive principles underlying the evolution of postcolonial Englishes. Analyzing 10,079 tokens from the International Corpus of English (ICE) and using mixed-effects logistic regression analysis, the study investigates whether the strength of processing factors and stylistic variables is correlated with Dynamic Model stages. Moreover, drawing on Hierarchical Configural Frequency Analysis (HCFA) and Large Number of Rare Events (LNRE) models, it tests Hoffmann’s (2021) Dynamic Model Productivity hypothesis, which predicts that more advanced varieties should exhibit a higher productivity of constructional slots, while varieties at lower stages of evolution should rely more on a small set of prototypical fillers.
The results are largely in line with Hoffmann’s (2011) analysis of preposition placement, which found that Kenyan English is more strongly affected by processing constraints than British English, while stylistic variables have a weaker effect in the L2 variety. Even though processing constraints turn out to strongly affect the constructional choices of speakers of all varieties, less advanced varieties are more likely to use pied-piped WH-interrogative constructions with adjunct PPs, which suggests that varieties at lower stages of evolution have a stronger preference for constructions that facilitate parsing in contexts in which the processing load is not maximal. Furthermore, in line with the frequent claim that New Englishes are characterized by a lack of register distinctions, the strength of stylistic variables turns out to be correlated with Dynamic Model stages. While Phases IV and V have formal pied-piped and informal stranded finite WH-relative clause constructions, Phase III only has the pied-piped variant. This effect can be attributed to two factors: the formal input that is typical of postcolonial Englishes, and the processing complexity of stranding constructions. That preposition stranding is less deeply entrenched in varieties at lower stages is also indicated by the fact that the slots of stranding constructions show a higher productivity in varieties at higher developmental stages, whereas less advanced varieties rely more on entrenched verb-preposition strings (e.g. refer to) and WH + P combinations (e.g. what…about). At the same time, earlier Dynamic Model phases exhibit more variation in the preposition slot of pied-piped finite WH-relative clause constructions, which can be attributed to the weaker entrenchment of constructions and a preference for explicit and transparent form-meaning pairings in these varieties. In sum, the results suggest that differences between the construction networks of varieties at different evolutionary stages result from a complex interplay of processing factors, input effects, second-language learning principles and, at least to a certain degree, cross-linguistic influence. In addition, the study shows that varieties of the same phase pattern very similarly in terms of their constructional choices, which provides support for Schneider’s (2007) classification of varieties according to Dynamic Model stages.
The study of nonlocal energy-based models has proliferated in the last decades
due to their relevance in applications and the novel mathematical challenges that they provide. Within this context, the thesis addresses a wide variety of aspects concerning variational problems involving nonlocal gradients. These have been proposed for modeling the emergence of cracks and cavitations in materials, and can be used in image denoising applications to preserve sharp features. The contributions of the thesis are concerned with several families of nonlocal gradients and can be divided into the following overarching themes:
(i) Development of nonlocal Sobolev spaces;
(ii) existence theories for minimizers of nonlocal integral functionals;
(iii) asymptotic analysis of parameter-dependent problems.
In the context of (i), we extend and unify the results established for the Riesz and finite-horizon fractional gradient by considering more general nonlocal gradients with radial kernels. Precisely, based on a delicate analysis of the Fourier symbol of the nonlocal gradient, we present minimal assumptions on the kernel function such that Poincaré inequalities and compact embeddings hold. Moreover, we provide sharp embeddings into Orlicz spaces and spaces with prescribed modulus of continuity, that refine the fractional Sobolev and Morrey inequalities.
With these tools at hand, the goal in (ii) is to establish rigorous existence results for minimizers of integral functionals depending on nonlocal gradients. We develop a translation mechanism that connects the nonlocal gradients with their local counterpart and use this to characterize the lower semicontinuity of the nonlocal functionals in terms of the classical notion of quasiconvexity. Based on this, we establish the existence of minimizers via the direct method under Dirichlet or novel Neumann-type boundary conditions. The latter conditions necessitate the study of functions with zero nonlocal gradient, which surprisingly constitute an infinite-dimensional vector space, and we employ recent results regarding pseudo-differential boundary-value problems to characterize them. We also tackle linear growth functionals, which lack the usual coercivity requirement, and provide an explicit formula for their relaxation in the space of functions with bounded fractional variation. This reveals insights about the behavior of minimizing sequences and is based on a careful analysis of the concentration effects of the fractional gradient by using tools from Young measure theory.
Building upon the existence results, the focus in (iii) lies on studying the dependence of the minimizers on parameters in the problem, specifically, the fractional parameter s and the interaction range δ. We establish using Gamma-convergence that the minimizers depend continuously on s and converge to the local solutions as s → 1. In parallel, we prove that localization also occurs in the vanishing horizon limit δ → 0, while the diverging horizon regime δ → ∞ leads to the models based on the Riesz fractional gradient. A crucial ingredient for the proofs of these results are uniform compactness statements, which are established by studying the dependence of the Fourier symbols on the respective parameters. In terms of applications, we develop an abstract framework for the well-posedness of bi-level optimization problems for parameter learning in image denoising. The results of the thesis show that the models involving nonlocal gradients fit into this framework, where the fractional parameter is tuned in order to obtain the optimal degree of smoothing.
The objective of this cumulative dissertation is to mitigate cognitive bias in human expert judgments intending to increase accuracy of judgments. The latter is important as it is known to be essential for business success. The approach for this purpose is to combine the strengths of humans and machines by giving the expert feedback generated by a statistical model (the machine) based on previous errors of the expert. Based on this concept of collaborative intelligence, a Decision Support System (DSS) is developed and tested in several experiments. The cumulative dissertation consists of three articles. Article 1 and Article 2 investigate different aspects of the DSS and Article 3 merges and supports the statements thereof. Article 1 considers the impact of personal error pattern feedback on further point estimates. The error feedback is based on personal prior judgments originating from different categories, assuming that experts selectively apply the feedback and are able to reduce bias and error. Thereby it is examined, how the feedback is used to change the direction of error and to reduce bias and error. This is investigated in general disregarding categories as well as selectively regarding difference between categories. Article 1 also covers the comparison between human corrected bias and machine auto-corrected bias. Article 2 deals with experiments with the same DSS, but focusing on certainty (confidence) interval estimation and decreasing overprecision (overconfidence) and over- and underestimation biases. Here, the DSS requires users to indicate a 90% certainty interval as an answer to estimation questions. It is investigated how feedback based on own error patterns can help to reduce overprecision by broadening certainty intervals. Moreover, aiming to mitigate over- and underestimation biases, shifts of the intervals are examined. Article 3 supports the statements of Article 1 and 2 by taking into account additional experiments with a larger sample size with the same categories as well as new categories to make the results more robust and generally valid. Article 3 also includes a further analysis regarding the comparison between human corrected bias and machine auto-corrected bias.
