applications

The project aims at identifying external and internal pressure that lead to changes in the organizational properties of business interest associations. For the time being, the project examines associations in the chemical industry (including biotechnology, life sciences, and genetic engineering) and the information and communication technology industry (ICT) in Germany, the UK and the US. Besides, changes in the organizational settings of business associations in the dairy industry in Switzerland, Austria, Germany and the UK are analyzed.

External pressure is being put on business interest associations in part via processes of economic and political europeanization and internationalization. Internal pressure may in part be induced by external developments, but it essentially concerns the ways of how individual firms and members react to the performance of "their" association. Both pressures, we submit, have had and have substantial impacts on the organizational properties of business interest associations, and it will be part of our tasks to disentangle these and identify their relative importance.

Methodologically, the project combines quantitative and qualitative approaches. To begin with, quantitative surveys are carried through with all business interest associations acting in a concerned sector. The used questionnaires contain questions about the development and change of their organizational properties as well as network-analytical questions, referring to reputation, information exchange and joint activities of different corporate actors in the sector. These data are being analyzed with visone. In a second step, a focal set of associations is defined which is afterwards examined by qualitative in-depth interviews.

Centrality visualization of information exchange in one sector

The main research interest within the project focuses on the question what institutions evolved to transform the East German economy and what institutional and organizational responses were developed to cope with the often devastating consequences of the rapid detoriation of the East German industrial base which was triggered by the monetary union of July, 1st 1990. This question is studied in detail by comparing the governance of the privatization processes of two crisis ridden sectors, the steel and the shipbuilding sector. The analysis combines theoretical concepts of the ongoing discussion on governance forms (Williamson, Powell, Kenis/Schneider), steering (Mayntz, Scharpf, Luhmann) and interest intermediation (Schmitter/Lehmbruch). During the project relational data was collected in interviews and through questionnairs (types of tie: confidential communication, consideration of interest, obligation of report, political support, strategic collaboration). The data was analyzed with quantitative network analysis (UCINET) and visualized with visone.

The aim of the project is to describe the structures of the persecutory apparatus directed at the Jews and to study the effects of these structures on the persecutory and destructive capacity of the National socialist regime in German-occupied Western Europe in the years between 1940 and 1944. The countries to be compared are France, Belgium and the Netherlands. These countries display stark differences during the period under study in terms of victim rates in the Jewish population (deportation rate in France 25%, in Belgium 43%, in the Netherlands 76%), and also great differences in the occupation regimes and the formal position of the SS and Gestapo. The occupation regimes are understood as inter-organizational systems of German and indigenous actors. In the project, a method has been developed to collect information about the relations between the German and indigenous actors. So far, a case study on the persecution of Jews that had previously converted to one of the Christian congregations in the Netherlands in 1942/1943 has been conducted as pretest. The results were visualized and analyzed with visone.