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A major share of Europe’s knowledge about its incumbent energy cultures is pre-defined in closed spaces of negotiations. One such space are the negotiations surrounding the European Union´s research and innovation Framework Programmes, which are the focus of this thesis. With these programmes, the European Union not only funds energy research across Europe, but likewise produces guiding energy research narratives that act beyond their scope into the research agendas of its Member States. Energy research governance, considered as the wider scope surrounding the Framework Programmes negotiations in the European Union, takes place in hybrid spaces, were science and politics meet and are influencing each other, inheriting limiting, and enabling effects on both sides.
This study aims to determine how these spaces are organised, who is participating under which conditions, and how decisions on energy research agendas and research funding conditions are taken. Therefore, this thesis enfolds the emergence history of energy policy, research policy and the governance of its overlap, namely energy research. It then examines in depth the negotiations that took place during the reform process of the Frame-work Programmes between its seventh and eighth repetition. The perspective of scientific, political and hybrid social worlds is taken to draw an encompassing picture of the situation of energy research governance of the European Union. The methodological background of this study is a situational analysis, which was conducted based on narrative expert interviews, participant observations and documents, drawing on sensitizing concepts from the fields of Science and Technology Studies, sociology, and political sciences.
The investigated hybrid spaces revealed the importance of historical rooted (energy) re-search narratives, that are combined with a set of standards and standardized governance practices making the Framework Programmes a robust governance tool, despite changing political climates. Moreover, the role of so far largely overlooked boundary social worlds became apparent. Whereas strategies of narrative governance were found to be a structuring element across all social worlds and hybrid spaces. The newly developed continuum of implicatedness disclosed movements of visibility and agency among the participating negotiators of energy research governance. These results have in common that they bear diverse forms of ambivalences a collective, an individual or a group of collectives is confronted with. The author concludes that these the ambivalences must be met with strategies of disclosure and debate, rather than with vain attempts to resolve irresolvable contradictions.
Organizational Learning: A Conceptualization in the Framework of the Relational Economics Theory
(2023)
In this research, a relational conceptualization of organizational learning (OL) is proposed. Following relational economics (Wieland 2020), this research conceptualizes the organization as a nexus of stakeholders' resources and interests. Stakeholders are either within or outside the institutional boundaries of the organization, which implies a view of the organization that goes beyond the intra-organizational context, coherent with an open systems view of the organization. Although the organization forms a nexus of stakeholders, it is an entity in its own right, i.e., it exists independently of individual stakeholders and is therefore ontologically real. Following the existing literature on the theory of the firm and institutional economics (e.g., the works of Commons, Coase, Williamson), transactions are considered as the unit of analysis in organization theory. Consequently, the organization as an entity is defined as a governance structure used by stakeholders to conduct transactions. Stakeholders contribute different rationalities that should be relationalized to carry out transactions. This view of the organization elucidates the ontological nature of organizations in this study and is the starting point for the conceptualization of OL as a relational process. In this framework, OL would be a process for the relationalization of rationalities for enabling the completion of multi-contextual transactions in the context of organizations intended as entities in their own right. Such a conceptualization would provide a new perspective on OL to existing theories. Indeed, much of the existing OL learning implicitly or explicitly relies on a neo-classical view of the organization and a focus on employees when conceptualizing OL (intra-organizational view of organizations and OL). Although the relevance of these theories to the field of OL, the emphasis on employees in OL models and elaborations has led to some epistemological and ontological problems in the OL literature, such as the OL paradox (can an organization actually learn? Is OL a mere metaphor?) and anthropomorphism (applying human characteristics such as the mind to inanimate entities such as organizations). This paper argues that a fundamental methodological change is required to conceptualize OL within the framework of relational economics: from methodological individualism to methodological relationism. By defining OL as a process focusing on individuals in the organization, existing OL literature can be placed within the meta construct of methodological individualism because the learning process focuses on the components of the organization. In methodological relationism, OL is defined as a micro-meso-relational process in which both the stakeholders (components of the organizational system) and the organization as an entity learn. The argument that the organization learns implies that the organization as an entity is capable of learning. This would then mean that OL is not a purely cognitive process, but a relational process which, in turn, would mean that learning could be conceptualized beyond human cognition.
This thesis studies the question: Why are developed countries rich and developing countries poor? I asked myself this question for the first time during my volunteer service in Central America. Therefore, I analyze the role of governance and violent conflicts in society and economics. It consists of four scientific papers: The first paper investigates the impact of governance on inward foreign direct investment. FDI is important for socioeconomic development because it represents a significant channel of capital, knowledge, and technology transfer. The second paper examines the effect of financial development and ethnic heterogeneity on regional consumption risk-sharing in Ukraine. Consumption risk-sharing is a relevant socioeconomic approach to smoothen negative income shocks. The third paper reviews the impact of governance on populist rhetoric. This is crucial because populist trends can be obstructive to socioeconomic development. Finally, the fourth paper correlates the drug war with regional social capital in Mexico. Social capital, i.e., trust, is a foundation for socioeconomic development.
The results show:
(1) Governance indicators are important determinants of inward FDI for 38 developed countries. In comparison, for 79 developing countries, another country characteristic – the mean tariff rate – is more important than the institutional setting.
(2) In Ukraine, regional consumption risk-sharing is significantly higher in the regions with a large Russian minority. In contrast, the degree of financial development does not affect the regional degree of consumption risk-sharing.
(3) Governance indicators are important determinants of mitigating populist rhetoric for 40 developing and developed countries. Moreover, we document a positive spatial correlation for populist rhetoric.
(4) In Mexico, regional social capital is significantly lower in regions that experience a high degree of violence due to the drug war. Moreover, we document a positive spatial correlation for social capital.
Overall, it can be stated that governance is an important determinant for economic development and the well-being of the society, whereas violent conflicts lead to a deterioration in economic and social welfare as the case studies of Ukraine (War in Donbas) and Mexico (drug war) show.
The retail industry is continuously confronted with new challenges and experiences a transformation from a supplier’s market to a buyer's market. It is, thus, essential for the retail industry to consequently focus on, anticipate and fulfil consumer’s demands. Technologies and innovative business solutions can help to support to establish a required customer experience and, thereby, gain a competitive advantage. A multitude of new services and products, channels as well as players can already be identified which drive the transformation. Therefore, retailers need to understand current trends and technologies and identify as well as implement relevant solutions for their transformation since otherwise, new players will dominate the market.
Hence, this dissertation aims to review and analyse new technologies which are coupled with innovative business activities in order to provide customer-centric retailing. For this purpose, this dissertation consists of five articles and derives four major contributions which introduce different approaches to establishing consumer satisfaction. Firstly, a core technology for retail is artificial intelligence (AI) which can be meaningful applied along the entire value chain and improve retailers’ positions. Two focus areas have been identified in this context which are (i) the optimisation of the entire retail value chain with the help of AI with the aim to derive transparency and (ii) the improvement of consumer satisfaction and relationship. Secondly, focussing on the consumer-retailer relationship in the digital era, a concept with a data architecture is proposed based on a real use case. The outcome was that a specific customer orientation based on data can increase the brand value and sales volume. Thirdly, the work presents that new shopping concepts, named unmanned store concepts, gain continuous growth. Unmanned store concepts employ a variety of new technologies, are characterised by attributes of speed, ease, as well as comfort, and are deemed to be the new ideal of the expectations of modern buyers. Two different directions have been deeper analysed: (i) walk-in stores and (ii) automated vending machines. The critical success factors for the usage of unmanned store solutions are distance as well as high consumer affinity for innovations. In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has a huge impact on retail, a continuous innovation capability still needs to be established. Finally, this work introduces a tool for systematic innovation management considering the current circumstances. Taken as a whole, this dissertation with its five articles deals with significant research questions which have not been approached so far. Thereby, the literature is extended by the introduction of novel insights and the provision of a deeper understanding of how retailers can transform their business into a more consumer-oriented way.
Throughout the last decades, investigations on market linkages and investor behavior in times of turmoil and uncertainty have received the attention of researchers and financial practitioners alike. This dissertation offers five distinct research papers which contribute to the existing literature on this overarching topic. First, we provide a thorough analysis of the time-varying linkages between regional and global equity markets. Second, and in line with the notion of increasing equity market integration over time, we investigate different types of flights to quality in times of stock market turmoil. Third, we provide novel empirical evidence on the usefulness of new sources of information on investor behavior towards the measurement of financial market linkages. Fourth, building on the increasing relevance of these new sources of information, we demonstrate that different measures for online investor attention do not necessarily constitute equivalent proxies for the latent variable. Last, we contribute to the strands of financial literature dealing with the estimation of dynamic linkages between financial markets and variables in the form of time-varying correlations. More specifically, we propose a score-driven extension to the well-known dynamic conditional correlation model which provides a means to quantify the time-varying influence of news on correlation dynamics. Taking the severe impact of recent and current crisis events on financial markets into consideration, the research papers comprised in this dissertation are of uttermost importance for financial market participants.
For over 80 years the idea of self-driving cars has influenced our perception of the future transport mode. While in 1939 people were excited, they did not believe it would ever become reality. In 2021 we are now closer than ever to bringing these cars on the road. But the vast number of stakeholders and the various aspects that must be considered for the execution of self-driving cars makes it even more complex than at first glance. The creation of a proper artificial intelligence infrastructure, the integration of AI within the automotive industry and lastly, getting society to accept self-driving cars, are the focus of this dissertation. Through a literature review, a qualitative and a quantitative study these key aspects have been considered. At the centre is the over one century old German, and European, automotive industry. The European automotive manufacturers and suppliers need to act together, take risks, educate future self-driving car users and overall see the European automotive industries as allies. Europeans would benefit from pooling financial capabilities and data gathering to execute technological improvements faster and better. To bring autonomous vehicles on the road, and to create a transport mode capable of competing with Chinese, American and other competitors’ products, and to simply not be outsmarted by them, Europeans have to work together and become strategically bold. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, integrating AI within our automotive industry may not be on companies’ minds, but we need it now more than ever. Through AI, processes, such as information gathering and handling, can be improved and machinery supporting workers can be introduced. In addition, the fundamental assumptions on which our future mobility world is based have changed and, as a result, strategies must be reassessed. While the introduction reflects on pre-COVID-19 times, the papers included in this dissertation highlight the changes and the opportunities the virus brought upon the industry and tries to encourage it to expand AI integration and self-driving vehicle execution. The pandemic may have resulted in lower financial capabilities for the research and creation of self-driving cars, but it has also allowed for an increased acceptance rate of this future transport mode. Overall, it is time for the automotive industry to reconsider its self-driving vehicle deployment approach drastically in order to reinvent itself and usher in a new era where AI within automobiles is not feared but preferred.
With pressure rising in the global economy for companies to adopt AI, responsible business conduct and the consideration of stakeholder interests become more challenging. Since scholars have repeatedly highlighted the gap for research on AI governance, this thesis presents a theoretical contribution to this young research field. Due to the recent emergence of the field, hardly any publications examine AI governance from a theoretical perspective. Therefore, the thesis initially examines the problem structure AI governance seeks to address, defining it as wicked, exceptionally complex, and characterised by high uncertainty levels. Based on this need-oriented analysis, it chooses the Relational Economics as a suitable approach to develop a theoretical AI governance model. Subsequently, it introduces and conceptualises AI within the Relational Economics in the form of an autopoietic system. Building on this first theoretical contribution, the thesis proceeds to specify the Relational Governance approach inherent to the theory for AI and to complement it with self-developed inductive categories, subsuming main research streams AI ethics literature. Lastly, it conducts a systematic literature review of advances in the field of AI governance, with particular regard to the private sector. As a result, the thesis provides a structured overview, within which it clusters its review’s findings, addressing their research focus and level of analysis. With this, it allows for the positioning of the presented theoretical contribution within the research field. The thesis closes with implications for both theory and practice and a discussion of its findings.
Public sector reforms have made the corporatization of public services a global phenomenon. Worldwide, public corporations provide critical services and infrastructures for citizen’s daily lives. In many countries, public corporations represent a substantial portion of both gross domestic product and employment. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the high societal relevance of public corporations in areas such as social/health care, mobility, and digitalization. The United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development emphasizes public corporations as key actors with role-model functions in the promotion and implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Standing midway between in-house provision and privatization, the corporatization of public services has high potential to improve public service performance by enhancing managerial autonomy and professionalism while maintaining political control. However, the independent corporate status of public corporations and their operations outside the traditional administrative system induce far-reaching governance challenges.
Being a substantial research and practice area, public corporate governance aims to provide perspectives on how public authorities could exercise their ownership function in order to ensure that public corporations act in accordance with public interest. It is executive directors in particular—occupying positions of great autonomy, power, and discretion—who play a key role in the governance of public corporations. This field, however, still has significant research gaps—one of which is the significant lack of theoretical understanding about how far different governance mechanisms could effectively mitigate critical issues in public corporate governance that are associated with the higher autonomy of executive directors operating in either profit-making or not profit-making public corporation forms.
The overarching research connections of this dissertation aims to enhance the theoretical understanding of instrumental and personnel governance of executive directors in corporatized public service provision and to derive theoretical perspectives on governance differences between profit-making and not profit-making public corporation forms.
Overall, this dissertation makes three key contributions. First, it elaborates novel perspectives of different governance mechanisms in the public corporation context by introducing a conceptual differentiation of instrumental and personnel governance. In this context, the dissertation enhances theoretical understanding and provides empirical findings on the effects of self-regulation and law as well as on the role of executive director characteristics in recruitment, pay, and turnover. Second, the presented work broadens the theoretical understanding of the interdependencies between different personnel and instrumental governance mechanisms, providing insights regarding their critical impact on the realization of policies and good public corporate governance at the executive director level. Third, this dissertation enriches the recent theoretical debates about the governance of decentralized public sector organizations by focusing on the increasingly relevant but still widely neglected organizational type “public corporation” and by accounting for governance differences between profit-making and not profit-making public corporation forms.
Road crashes play a substantial role in depressing GDP, especially in low- and
middle-income countries. The economic welfare of countries is adversely affected,
and governments must try to correct this market failure. The conditions that
obtain in Turkey, Costa Rica, and the European Union are conducive to analyzing
regulatory policies in the field of traffic accidents. Since Turkey and Costa
Rica introduced periodic technical inspections recently, data from before and
after their introduction is available and can be compared. I obtained exclusive
inspection data from Turkey for the analysis. For Costa Rica, I derived cost-unit
rates that had not been calculated before, which allowed me to rank and evaluate
regulatory measures that may be adopted in the future. The Covid-19 pandemic
made it possible to study another set of policy interventions. That study
complements the first two papers. The observed effects are examined in the
context of the efforts of the European Union to reduce deadly traffic accidents
over the last few decades. By analyzing data from before and after government
interventions, I show the impact as well as the shortcomings of specific policies
in different countries or regions and discuss their welfare effect. Furthermore,
this dissertation provides evidence for the claim that introducing periodic technical
inspections, a policy intervention that can tackle the problem of frequent
traffic accidents, is cost effective and thus exerts a positive effect on the economy.
The recurrent business scandals of the past decades have been a wakeup call for research and practitioners regarding the crisis organizational ethics is in. In an effort to remedy the situation many organizations have relied on the implementation of compliance- and/or integrity-oriented ethics programs. However, observations from practice and research show that the results of such programs are mixed, and it is still unclear when and why they are effective to reduce misconduct and promote ethical behavior. In this dissertation an answer to this question is sought. Building on literature that considers the overall organizational ethical context, I hypothesize that ethical culture can explain when and why compliance and integrity strategies are successful at preventing misconduct and promoting ethical behavior. To examine the proposed relationship, two new measures for ethics strategies and ethical culture are developed and validated. The Ethics Strategy Measure (ESM) is the first validated instrument to measure the strategic focus of ethics programs (compliance vs. integrity). The German Ethical Culture Scale 2.0 (GECS 2.0) is a 10-dimensional advanced measure of ethical culture. In three studies the psychometric properties, convergent and predictive validity of the two instruments are shown. Consequently, in four consecutive studies the new measures are applied to test whether the dimensions of ethical culture mediate the relationship between compliance and integrity strategies and (un)ethical behavior. The results show that the effects of compliance and integrity strategies on unethical behavior can fully be explained through their effect on the dimensions of ethical culture. Further, it is shown that compliance strategies are not able to inspire ethical conduct, while integrity strategies are. This relationship is also fully mediated by the dimensions of ethical culture. Different ethical culture dimensions emerge as drivers of different mediated effects. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
