Suchergebnisse

"If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions." Following the premise of this quotation attributed to Winston Churchill, varying perceptions of the European crisis by academic economists and their structural homology to economists' positions in the field of economics are examined. The dataset analysed using specific multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) comprises information on the careers of 480 German-speaking economists and on statements they made concerning crisis-related issues. It can be shown that the main structural differences in the composition and amount of scientific and academic capital held by economists as well as their age and degree of transnationalisation are linked to how they see the crisis: as a national sovereign debt crisis, as a European banking crisis, or as a crisis of European integration and institutions.

Suffrage activities that take place in Panama every five years for defining new Government authorities reflected a high level of absenteeism by the younger population during the year 2009. As a response to these results, a research initiative was formalized to allow the description of the behavior, level of knowledge and commitment of young people within this range of age with regard to their civic duty of exercising their right to vote. The research presents a multivariate analysis in order to assess whether the instrument applied allows identifying the commitment of college students within 18 to 25 years old from the civic responsibility of voting since they should have participated in the 2009 elections. The multivariate techniques used to achieve better characterization, best level of reduction in dimensions and reach appropriate association in categories were the Factor Analysis, Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Principal Component Analysis with Categorical Data. The multivariate methods applied for this assessment allowed identifying that two groups explain the existence of commitment toward the responsibility of voting: (1) knowledge of civic and electoral education, and (2) citizen participation. ; Las actividades de sufragio que se realizan en Panamá cada cinco años para definir los cargos de elección popular reflejaron un alto nivel de abstencionismo en la población más joven durante el ejercicio efectuado en el período 2009. A consecuencia de estos resultados, se formalizó una iniciativa de investigación que permitiera describir el comportamiento, el nivel de conocimiento y compromiso de los jóvenes dentro de este rango de edades con respecto a su deber cívico de ejercer su derecho al voto. La investigación presenta un análisis de tipo multivariante con el objetivo de evaluar si el instrumento aplicado permite identificar el compromiso de los estudiantes universitarios entre los 18 a 25 años de edad ante la responsabilidad ciudadana del sufragio ya que debieron haber votado en las elecciones del año 2009. Las técnicas multivariantes utilizadas para lograr la mejor caracterización, el mejor nivel de reducción en dimensiones y alcanzar la adecuada asociación en categorías fueron el Análisis Factorial, el Análisis de Correspondencia Múltiple y el Análisis de Componentes Principales con Datos Categóricos. Los métodos multivariantes aplicados permitieron, de manera comparativa entre ellos, identificar dos grandes grupos que explican la existencia de compromiso de la muestra ante el sufragio: (1) conocimiento sobre educación cívica electoral y (2) participación ciudadana.

Ein in den letzten Jahren verstärkt in den Vordergrund tretendes Verfahren zur grafischen Darstellung und Analyse zweidimensionaler Kontingenztafeln ist die (einfache) Korrespodenzanalyse. Durch die Sichtung der entsprechenden Literatur zeigt der vorliegende Beitrag, daß die Grafiken oftmals nicht richtig interpretiert werden, weil ungleiche Punkte miteinander verglichen werden. Der Autor klärt, was bei der grafischen Darstellung von Kontingenztafeln in der Korrespodenzanalyse eigenlich gezeigt wird und welche Strukturen sich in den Grafiken widerspiegeln. (pmb)

Quality assurance in higher education is one of the cornerstones of the Bologna agenda and the Lisbon strategy, which aims at establishing the world's most competitive knowledge economy. Extensive literature up to now has addressed quality assurance as a regulatory and policy mechanism and has presented quality assurance and market forces as antagonistic. However, what policymakers in the field fail to see is that the 'official' quality assurance processes also have implications in terms of competition. Indeed, higher education institutions are using the results of these, in principle aseptic, non-market-related evaluation processes, as a way to achieve competitive advantage. This paper analyses the case of higher education institutions in engineering in France. The institutional websites of 163 higher education institutions have been analysed through code-based content analysis techniques and Multiple Correspondence Analysis. This study shows that the analysis of institutional websites can be used as a tool to gauge the importance of the different dimensions of quality assurance for higher education institutions in a given national system. Furthermore, a clear association has been found between the ranking position of an institution and its communication behaviour. The results have been interpreted in the light of Neoinstitutional Theory and Porter's generic competitive strategies. Practical implications for quality assurance practitioners and managers at higher education institutions have been highlighted.

Abstract  The early history of correspondence analysis is reviewed. It is shown that K. Pearson came very close to discovering correspondence analysis in 1906. That he did not actually discover it may be because he was not familiar with the singular value decomposition, which is the basic existence result in correspondence analysis.

Stakeholder participation is a fundamental component of many states' and local agencies' fisheries legislations worldwide. The European Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), as one example, increasingly adopted a holistic approach to managing marine living resources. An important component of such an ecosystem-based management approach is the consideration of knowledge, values, needs and social interactions of stakeholders in decision-making processes. However, despite that stakeholder participation is a widely used term, a great variety of definitions exist, which often cause misunderstanding. Stakeholder participation is often used as part of conducting research on stakeholders but not in the context of their participation in resource management. Here, we present the results of a comprehensive literature review on the topic stakeholder participation in coastal and marine fisheries. We identified 286 scientific publications in Web of Science of which 50 were relevant for our research questions. Publications were analysed regarding (i) definition of stakeholder participation, (ii) analysis of participating stakeholders, (iii) applied participatory methods and (iv) intention for participation. Stakeholder types addressed in the publications included, e.g. fishery (fishers and direct representatives, N = 48), politics (policymakers and managers, N = 31), science (N = 25) and environmental non-governmental organizations (eNGOs, N = 24). In total, 24 publications labelled their studies as stakeholder participation, while stakeholders were only used as a study object. We conclude that improving science and the practice of including stakeholders in the management of coastal and marine fisheries requires definitions of who is considered a stakeholder and the form of participation applied.

This is a sociological study of the views of officers in the Swedish Army and its Amphibious Forces on tactics in Irregular Warfare (IW), in particular, Counterinsurgency (COIN). IW comprises struggles, where the military weaker part uses an indirect approach with smaller units and integrates the civilian and military dimensions in a violence spectrum including subversion, terrorism, Guerrilla Warfare and infantry actions. IW is the main armed warfare style in insurgencies. COIN is the combined political, military, economic, social and legal actions in counter insurgencies. Data has been collected by means of interviews with almost all (n =43) officers, who were either commanding battalions or rifle and manoeuvre companies while undergoing training for general warfare and international operations. The main theoretical and methodological inspiration is the traditional one for research on social fields, inaugurated by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The statistical technique used is Multiple Correspondence Analysis. As a background and context base, an inquiry inspired by the Begriffsgechichte (Conceptual History) tradition explores the genesis and development of understandings of the term Irregular Warfare. The research question is outlined as; "how can contemporary Swedish military thought on tactics in Irregular Warfare be characterized using descriptive patterns, mapped in relation to background factors and normative standards? The most significant findings are that there are two main opposing notions separating the officers' views on tactics in Irregular Warfare: (1) a focus on larger, combat oriented and collectively operating military units versus smaller and larger, more intelligence oriented and dispersed operating units, and (2) a focus on military tasks and kinetic effects versus military and civilian tasks as well as "soft" effects. The distribution of these views can be presented as a two-dimensional space structured by the two axes. This space represents four categories of tactics, partly diverging from normative military standards for Counterinsurgency. This social space of standpoints shows different structural tendencies for background factors of social and cultural character, particularly dominant concerning military backgrounds, international mission experiences and civilian education. Compared to military standards for Counterinsurgency, the two tactical types characterized by a Regular Warfare mind-set stands out as counter-normative. Signs of creative thought on military practice and theory, as well as a still persistent Regular Warfare doxa are apparent. Power struggles might thus develop, effecting the transformation to a broadened warfare culture with an enhanced focus also on Irregular Warfare. The result does not support research results arguing for a convergence of military thought in the European transformation of Armed Forces. The main argument goes beyond tactics and suggests sociological analysis on reciprocal effects regarding strategy, operational art, tactics as well as leadership, concerning the mind-set and preferences for Regular, Irregular and Hybrid Warfare.