Suchergebnisse

The lure of the associative elixir -- Democracy, fascism, and civil society / E. Spencer Wellhofer -- The limits of civil society within a divided community : the case of Northern Ireland / Feargal Cochrane -- European civil society : institutional interests and the complexity of a multi-level policy / Stijn Smismans -- Welfare through organizations / William A. Maloney and Sigrid Rossteutscher -- The position of interest groups in Eastern European democracies : maturing servicemen or trojan horses? / Umut Korkut -- Activating participation : generating support for campaign groups / Emma L. Clarence, Grant Jordan and William A. Maloney -- Tracing the contradictions : associational life versus informal networks in a third world context / Nadia Molenaers -- Churches as voluntary associations : their contribution to democracy as a public voice and source of social and political involvement / Joep de Hart and Paul Dekker -- Women's power under threat? voluntary organizations in transition / Dag Wolleb�k and Per Selle -- Civic communities and multicultural democracy / Meindert Fennema and Jean Tillie.

Annotation

Abstract.  Values have long played a major role both in the analysis of political culture and as an explanatory concept relating to human attitudes and action: in fact, their scientific significance depends crucially on their explanatory function. After more than three decades of debate about the rise of postmaterialism and Inglehart's particular value measure, this rationale appears at times to be lost. This article examines the crucial issue of value's potential to explain political phenomena. How much can the postmaterialism‐materialism instrument explain? Are there alternative operationalisations of values that have greater utility? The empirical analysis, based upon a representative survey conducted in Germany in 1992, leads to the surprisingly unambiguous result that among different value measures, Inglehart's variant explains the least.

Introduces a symposium on social capital that presents new research rooted in empirical evidence.

Abstract. This article is an empirical investigation into the question of West German national identity. On the basis of 187 qualitative interviews we distinguish five structural types and seventeen different narratives of individual identity building. We show that national identity is an inevitably contested concept because it is comprised of a diversity of emotions and attitudes and is based on different individual needs. This article evaluates the particularity and normality of West German national identity in the context of universal developments like globalisation and individualisation. The exposure of the tremendous crimes of the period of Nationalsozialsimus and the subsequent construction of a 'morally correct' identity have to be understood as a particularity of the German case. In other respects German national identity seems to be more normal than deviant.

Defence date: 27 June 1997 ; Examining board: Prof. Stefano Bartolini (EUI) ; Prof. Klaus Eder (Humboldt-Universität Berlin - Supervisor) ; Prof. Max Kaase (Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin) ; Prof. Jan W. van Deth (Universität Mannheim) ; First made available online on 23 June 2017 ; Why art we interested in societal value orientations? Squeezed between utilitarianists, structuralists and constructionists the preoccupation with values and guiding ideals seems to be awkward, old-fashioned, even conservative, and certainly not at the forefront of academic fashion. The idea of values communicates the notion of settled beliefs and change resisting attitudes formulated in early childhood or adolescent experiences as well as suggesting continuity and stability of human conduct They refer to the unbroken transmission of attitudes and culture across generations and offer themselves as the explanation for the development of social and political lifestyles. Values also promise coherence and reliability. Too much stability? Too much pre-determination? Too much boredom for the contingency- trained post-modern brain? Values are supposed to be basic and powerful, but can this really still be convincing? Why do we not think of human beings as individualised rational choosers who act in pure accordance with preformulated and calculated interests? Why can we not see the world as a universe of contingency open to be re-interpreted and re-structured at any given point of time and space? What we have to prove, therefore, is the simple fact that values - or rather societal value orientations - still play a central role in the development of modem societies and the political conflicts that take place within these societies. Furthermore, we have to show that an emphasis on values can explain contemporary phenomena in a way that is superior or at least complementary to explanations resting on structural, constructionist or rational choice assumptions.