The 10 most recently published documents
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.
Unveiling the digital mindset: theoretical foundations, conceptualization and scale development
(2024)
This cumulative dissertation examines an individual’s digital mindset including its theoretical foundations. While the construct receives growing attention from academics and practitioners, research is still in its infancy with limited and heterogeneous conceptualizations.
The first manuscript conducts a systematic literature review on mindset definitions and conceptualizations prevalent in the management and business literature, contributing to the clarity of the mindset construct.
The second manuscript follows a multi-grounded theory approach to systematically define and conceptualize an individual’s digital mindset, posing an essential competency in the context of digital transformation.
The third manuscript builds on this definition and develops and validates a scale (DIMI-scale) to measure the construct throughout five phases.
The present cumulative thesis is based on 6 papers concerning 3 topics: Balian-Low theorems, exponential bases and neural network approximation.
Various extensions of the Balian-Low theorem are proved for Gabor spaces spanning strict subsets of the space of square-integrable functions on the real line.
Concerning exponential bases, we show that a partition of the unit interval into subintervals with rationally independent endpoints admits a so-called hierarchical Riesz spectral set.
Finally, in terms of neural network approximation, quantitative rates for the approximation of complex valued functions with Sobolev (real) regularity via complex valued neural networks are obtained. Additionally, a network architecture is provided for approximating classifier functions with Barron boundaries without the curse of dimensionality.
Sustainable food supply
(2024)
The present cumulative dissertation was written from 2020-2023 at the Professorship of Christian Social Ethics and Social Policy at the Business Faculty of the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. All papers in this dissertation represent independent contributions to scientific journals in the fields of Sustainable Consumption, Sustainable Food, and Sustainable Consumer Behavior. They examine consumer behavior regarding sustainable food by analyzing various factors that influence consumers’ decision-making.
Paper I: Winterstein, J., & Habisch, A. (2021). Organic and local food consumption: A matter of age? Empirical evidence from the German market. ABAC Journal1, 41(1), 26-42.
Paper II: Winterstein, J. (2022). Nudging and Boosting towards Sustainable Food Choices–A Systematic Literature Review of Cognitively Oriented Measures. Products for Conscious Consumers: Developing, Marketing and Selling Ethical Products1, 113-132. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80262-837-120221014
Paper III: Winterstein, J., Frank, F., & Habisch, A. (2024) Desire for exploration beats price: Empirical study on customer motives for using digital monetary food sharing platforms. International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development1,2. DOI: 10.1504/IJISD.2023.10055067
Paper IV: Winterstein, J., Zhu, B., & Habisch, A. (2024). How personal and social-focused values shape the purchase intention for organic food: Cross-country comparison between Thailand and Germany. Journal of Cleaner Production1,3, 434, 140313. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2023.140313
