Patrick Frottier, Franz König, Teresa Matschnig, Michaele‐Elena Seyringer and Stefan Frühwald
The decision whether admitted inmates should be placed in solitary cells or shared cells has to take place immediately after intake. This decision can have major impact on the…
Abstract
The decision whether admitted inmates should be placed in solitary cells or shared cells has to take place immediately after intake. This decision can have major impact on the occurrence of suicide in custody. The ‘Viennese Instrument for Suicidality in Correctional Institutions’ presented here is based on the results of a case‐control study examining suicide prevention in general and within the prison population in particular. The administration of this instrument helps the officers to decide about the accommodation without an immediate psychiatric or psychological assessment. The screening of newly admitted offenders to prison for suicidality is necessary to better estimate the suicide risk.
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Gilbert Ahamer, Karl A. Kumpfmüller and Michaela Hohenwarter
The aim of this article is to present the development‐oriented Master's curriculum “Global Studies” (GS) at the University of Graz, Austria, as an example of interdisciplinary…
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this article is to present the development‐oriented Master's curriculum “Global Studies” (GS) at the University of Graz, Austria, as an example of interdisciplinary academic training with the purpose of fostering inter‐“cultural” understanding. It aims to show that scientific disciplines can be understood as “cultures of cognition” producing own views of realities.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a decade of previous experiences, the communication and assessment functions of e‐learning platforms and e‐journals are used to facilitate stepwise approximations among the various “cultures of understanding”.
Findings
Despite severe financial limitations, peer‐oriented planning and lecturing efforts since 2004 have resulted in a bundle of electives and in a new Master's curriculum elaborated cooperatively by the faculties of the legal, economic, historic, cultural, natural and communication sciences at Karl‐Franzens‐University Graz. Both the bundle of electives and the Master's curriculum appear to offer a truly “m:n type” interdisciplinary and intercultural design which assumes various stakeholder‐dependent perspectives of multi‐faceted realities.
Research limitations/implications
The wealth of interdisciplinary and intercultural thought and practice can be best “proceduralised” through dialogue‐oriented educational technologies.
Practical implications
In practical terms, hundreds of students may follow these web‐enhanced curricula that are based on the materialised results of their founders' ethical systems.
Originality/value
This is the first paper that outlines the Global Studies curriculum at Graz University.
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Anthropologists have long discussed the ways in which their discipline has been entangled, consciously and unconsciously, with the colonized populations they study. A foundational…
Abstract
Anthropologists have long discussed the ways in which their discipline has been entangled, consciously and unconsciously, with the colonized populations they study. A foundational text in this regard was Michel Leiris' Phantom Africa (L'Afrique fantôme; Leiris, 1934), which described an African ethnographic expedition led by Marcel Griaule as a form of colonial plunder. Leiris criticized anthropologists' focus on the most isolated, rural, and traditional cultures, which could more easily be described as untouched by European influences, and he saw this as a way of disavowing the very existence of colonialism. In 1950, Leiris challenged Europeans' ability even to understand the colonized, writing that “ethnography is closely linked to the colonial fact, whether ethnographers like it or not. In general they work in the colonial or semi-colonial territories dependent on their country of origin, and even if they receive no direct support from the local representatives of their government, they are tolerated by them and more or less identified, by the people they study, as agents of the administration” (Leiris, 1950, p. 358). Similar ideas were discussed by French social scientists throughout the 1950s. Maxime Rodinson argued in the Année sociologique that “colonial conditions make even the most technically sophisticated sociological research singularly unsatisfying, from the standpoint of the desiderata of a scientific sociology” (Rodinson, 1955, p. 373). In a rejoinder to Leiris, Pierre Bourdieu acknowledged in Work and Workers in Algeria (Travail et travailleurs en Algérie) that “no behavior, attitude or ideology can be explained objectively without reference to the existential situation of the colonized as it is determined by the action of economic and social forces characteristic of the colonial system,” but he insisted that the “problems of science” needed to be separated from “the anxieties of conscience” (2003, pp. 13–14). Since Bourdieu had been involved in a study of an incredibly violent redistribution of Algerians by the French colonial army at the height of the anticolonial revolutionary war, he had good reason to be sensitive to Leiris' criticisms (Bourdieu & Sayad, 1964). Rodinson called Bourdieu's critique of Leiris' thesis “excellent’ (1965, p. 360), but Bourdieu later revised his views, noting that the works that had been available to him at the time of his research in Algeria tended “to justify the colonial order” (1990, p. 3). At the 1974 colloquium that gave rise to a book on the connections between anthropology and colonialism, Le mal de voir, Bourdieu called for an analysis of the relatively autonomous field of colonial science (1993a, p. 51). A parallel discussion took place in American anthropology somewhat later, during the 1960s. At the 1965 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Marshall Sahlins criticized the “enlistment of scholars” in “cold war projects such as Camelot” as “servants of power in a gendarmerie relationship to the Third World.” This constituted a “sycophantic relation to the state unbefitting science or citizenship” (Sahlins, 1967, pp. 72, 76). Sahlins underscored the connections between “scientific functionalism and the natural interest of a leading world power in the status quo” and called attention to the language of contagion and disease in the documents of “Project Camelot,” adding that “waiting on call is the doctor, the US Army, fully prepared for its self-appointed ‘important mission in the positive and constructive aspects of nation-building’” a mission accompanied by “insurgency prophylaxis” (1967, pp. 77–78). At the end of the decade, Current Anthropology published a series of articles on anthropologists’ “social responsibilities,” and Human Organization published a symposium entitled “Decolonizing Applied Social Sciences.” British anthropologists followed suit, as evidenced by Talal Asad's 1973 collection Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. During the 1980s, authors such as Gothsch (1983) began to address the question of German anthropology's involvement in colonialism. The most recent revival of this discussion was in response to the Pentagon's deployment of “embedded anthropologists” in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. The “Network of Concerned Anthropologists” in the AAA asked “researchers to sign an online pledge not to work with the military,” arguing that they “are not all necessarily opposed to other forms of anthropological consulting for the state, or for the military, especially when such cooperation contributes to generally accepted humanitarian objectives … However, work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another violates professional standards” (“Embedded Anthropologists” 2007).3 Other disciplines, notably geography, economics, area studies, and political science, have also started to examine the involvement of their fields with empire.4
This chapter outlines how the academic field in Germany, particularly universities as institutions of research and education, became a constitutive element in the process of…
Abstract
This chapter outlines how the academic field in Germany, particularly universities as institutions of research and education, became a constitutive element in the process of digitalization. Institutions in higher education created long-lasting networks not only by scientific relations in the academic field but also by the establishment of business-oriented and application-oriented disciplines. This chapter focuses on the case of business information systems (BIS) and reconstructs the structural conditions under which BIS evolved from an initially marginal data-centric subfield of business administration into an independent discipline. This discipline has had a major influence on the transformation of work processes in recent decades and is an important player in the digital transformation in Germany. This chapter therefore also outlines the far-reaching implications of the paths taken, which are eventually not limited to the academic field but manifested in transformed work processes in almost all professional fields.
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Hansruedi Müller and Christian Moesch
The aim of this paper is to develop procedures that make it possible to evaluate appropriately the economic infrastructure repercussions of a mega sports event, aiming at both…
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to develop procedures that make it possible to evaluate appropriately the economic infrastructure repercussions of a mega sports event, aiming at both theoretical and practical scientific targets. On the one hand, this involves developing exegeses while, on the other, the focus is on problem‐led structuring. To fulfil both requirements means following objective‐cum‐analytical as well as empirical strategies.
Design/methodology/approach
Staging mega sports events necessitates the availability of appropriate infrastructure, both for specific events and for general purposes. Investments in infrastructure triggered by mega sports events are often of considerable importance for any calculation of their economic impact. The scale of the impacts identified largely depends on the basic demarcation between event‐related and non‐event‐related investments. Developed in former literature the six models derived from procedures are used as potential demarcation approaches. Their application is shown in four case studies.
Findings
The application of the six different models to four case studies shows that event‐related investment varies considerably depending on the model selected, thus decisively influencing impact study results. The determining effect of the choice of model is illustrated by applying the case of UEFA Euro 2008. The results differ from 63.2 million CHF at the minimum to 196.4 million CHF at the maximum.
Research limitations/implications
None of the six evaluated models manages to reflect reality truthfully and totally comprehensively. However, this is due not so much to faulty theoretical design as to the fact that reality is always more complex than the model which therefore can never fully mirror it. Every model provides its own specific information and so – depending on the basic situation and the actual problem – is justified in its own right.
Originality/value
The paper attempts to close the gap in connection with the demarcation of event‐related investments. As the studied demarcation problem remains the same, irrespective of the type of event, the scope for applying these models goes far beyond the case studies looked at here. The models in their final form are new. The findings obtained can also be adapted to other types of events.
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Reinhard Schumacher and Scott Scheall
During the last years of his life, the mathematician Karl Menger worked on a biography of his father, the economist and founder of the Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger…
Abstract
During the last years of his life, the mathematician Karl Menger worked on a biography of his father, the economist and founder of the Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger. The younger Menger never finished the work. While working in the Menger collections at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, we discovered draft chapters of the biography, a valuable source of information given that relatively little is known about Carl Menger’s life nearly a hundred years after his death. The unfinished biography covers Carl Menger’s family background and his life through early 1889. In this chapter, the authors discuss the biography and the most valuable new insights it provides into Carl Menger’s life, including Carl Menger’s family, his childhood, his student years, his time working as a journalist and newspaper editor, his early scientific career, and his relationship with Crown Prince Rudolf.
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This work concerns William Norman Illingworth [1902–1980]. Disillusioned with teaching in conventional schools and inspired by Rudolf Steiner [1861–1925] he founded Sangreal…
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Purpose
This work concerns William Norman Illingworth [1902–1980]. Disillusioned with teaching in conventional schools and inspired by Rudolf Steiner [1861–1925] he founded Sangreal School, in 1947, and operated this until the early 1970s. Sangreal was what I describe as a “conservative alternative school”, employing methods and pursuing goals not found in most British schools of the period but, unlike avowedly progressive establishments, guided by socially conservative principles. The purposes of the work are both to rescue his/Sangreal’s story from obscurity and to encourage research to establish if other such schools have existed and, if so, to describe and analyse them in an effort to give the category conservative alternative school the recognition it properly deserves.
Design/methodology/approach
The method is a combination of life history/biography and case study of a specific school.
Findings
The story is interesting in its own terms and points to the existence of a hitherto unnoticed category in history of education.
Research limitations/implications
This work may lead to the proper recognition of a neglected category.
Originality/value
This work deals with a school hitherto unknown to most people and may lead to the recognition of a new category.
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The purpose of this paper is to introduce librarians, faculty, and other interested individuals to contemporary German literature in English translation.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to introduce librarians, faculty, and other interested individuals to contemporary German literature in English translation.
Design/methodology/approach
German‐language authors born in 1950 or later and listed on the Contemporary Living Authors Comprehensive List developed by the German vendor Otto Harrassowitz are searched in OCLC's WorldCat database to determine the existence of English translations. A bio‐bibliographical list is then developed featuring all contemporary German‐language authors who have achieved an English language translation of at least one of their literary works.
Findings
Of the approximately 1,400 writers on Harrassowitz's comprehensive list, a surprisingly large number of almost 80 authors of the younger generation (born in 1950 or later) have been translated into English.
Originality/value
This bio‐bibliography of contemporary German belles lettres (of the younger generation) in English translation is the first of its kind. It can be used by librarians to check their current library holdings and to expand their collections of German literature in English translation.