Open Access

Globalization is altering the international economic environment. To remain competitive and gain future competitive advantage, corporations need to operate successfully in an international context. Exploiting the potential offered by the increasingly global economy requires the effective capture of markets. Although the world economy is becoming globalized, some international markets continue to have high entry barriers and are thus closing themselves off to foreign companies. These barriers impede access to these markets and thus hamper corporations from adequately exploiting them. However, corporations should by no means allow these markets to lie fallow since this would deprive them of the possibility to participate in prospective growth markets. Corporations must consequently promote adequate internationalization and engage in market exploitation strategies to remain successful in an internationally competitive environment. It is the aim of this research to support corporations within the processes of internationalization and market exploitation. Therefore, the research explicitly focuses on developing an encompassing model that supports corporations in identifying markets, which, in order to be exploited effectively, require local production activities. Typically, this entails markets that show foreclosure tendencies. A decision-making process model for corporations’ internationalization and market exploitation strategies structured in different phases is developed, and relevant influencing factors are compiled and assigned to the appropriate phases. The process model, which aims to enable corporations to follow a structured internationalization and market exploitation approach by analyzing the most decisive influencing factors at respective process phases, is thereby targeted at empowering corporations to adequately exploit the potential the globalizing world economy offers. The aim of this research is thus to develop a comprehensive decision-making process model to effectively support corporations during the process of internationalization.

While there is a great sense of urgency in the scientific community to act now in order to slow the imminent negative effects of global warming, most organizations continue to run their operations as though the external context has not changed significantly. For the banking sector, in particular not much research has been conducted in the area of their strategic engagement with climate change (CC), despite the fact that the engagement of this sector is crucial for the transition to a low-carbon economy. This is why this thesis focuses on the banking sector. Through an exploratory comparative case study of four banks, this thesis investigates mechanisms that have led to, or have been prevented from, the integration of climate change in the respective bank’s corporate strategies. In particular, it answers the following questions: How are banks interpreting climate change in their organizational context? To what degree does the initial individual interpretation influence the attentional distribution through structures and communication of the issue internally? Can this explain the variance in observed strategic choices? In order to answer those questions, a multi-level analysis was conducted using three different theoretical perspectives: the macro, meso and micro. 1. The macro lens, grounded in institutional theory, is important in order to generate understanding about the perception of current institutional pressures possibly influencing corporate responses. 2. The meso lens, grounded in the Attention Based View of the Firm, serves to analyze how attention structures inside the banks influence the distribution of attention towards the topic and influence the degree of integrating climate change-related aspects across the organization. 3. The micro lens, based on the concept of moral intensity (Jones, 1991), serves as an alternative interpretation model to explore how managers make sense of climate change as individuals. Further, the concept of “issue selling” investigates what language managers use to generate attention regarding climate change while using different attentional structures explored through the meso lens. The findings are based on four case studies of banks located in Europe, each of which show a different degree of climate change integration in their corporate strategy. The case studies drew upon field research including 23 semi-structured interviews with senior managers and members of the executive teams from those four banks, six interviews with stakeholders and a comprehensive analysis of publicly available corporate documents, company-related media releases, videos and further interviews, but also confidential corporate material that was made available to me. Through analysis of the data, the following findings can be made: Most banks perceive climate change in terms of pressure: coercive pressure from clients, very limited pressure from regulators in the area of risk and as mimetic pressure to respond. Some banks, however, also perceive climate change to be a moral issue that demands their contribution to act. In those banks, climate change is regarded as a morally intense issue — this term being defined as a commonly accepted phenomenon with extreme consequences for the future of the society they are embedded in and that they serve. One bank mainly had a scientific view on climate change as a human-induced natural phenomenon. Depending on these first interpretations, the findings suggest that different languages are deployed to further distribute the issue across the organization. In the case of scientific and institutional interpretations, the main language used to sell the issue inside the organization and to justify its incorporation as part of strategy was economic. climate change was translated into financial risk, business opportunity or a potential for cost reduction. Banks that mainly interpreted climate change as a moral imperative to act, communicated this issue differently. They proffered moral arguments that were grounded in the organization’s mission to serve society and based their strategic engagement on this mission. Economic arguments were only deployed at the stage of operationalization of climate change. These different languages influenced the arenas where conversations linked to climate change took place and how widely attention was subsequently distributed across the organization. In the case of a scientific language, climate change was not incorporated into strategy and remained as a topic of general interest, managed by the corporate social responsibility (CSR) function. In the case of an economic language, climate change was strictly contained to a few of already existing governance channels and sometimes even ignored entirely. No further attention to the issue within the companies could be observed. Strategic engagement and change were strictly related to fields where economic impact could be generated at the lowest transaction cost possible. In the instances where moral language was used within governance channels, conversation yielded a different level of engagement. In these cases, governance structures provided a platform for generating a common and more holistic understanding of the phenomenon and its impacts. The attentional engagement with the complexity of the issue grew across the organization and led to creation of new governance communication channels to help address emerging issues. As a result, the strategic integration of climate change was more holistic and comprehensive. The thesis makes theoretical contributions to institutional theory, Attention Based View of the Firm, the issue selling literature and Governance Ethics. Its results also have important implications for practice.

Confidence judgments and decision making are part of everyday life. In an ideal world, people would assess their skills and knowledge accurately and base their decisions only on rational deliberations. Yet, this is often not the case. Confidence judgments in own skills or performance are often biased (e.g., Dunning, 2011; Moore & Healy, 2008; Moore & Schatz, 2017; Sanchez & Dunning, 2018; Pikulina, Renneboog, & Tobler, 2017; Michailova & Schmidt, 2016). Also, people tend to deviate from rational decision strategies (e.g., Achtziger & Alós-Ferrer, 2014; Alós-Ferrer, Hügelschäfer, & Li, 2016, 2017; Charness, Karni, & Levin, 2010; Erev, Shimonovich, Schurr, & Hertwig, 2008; Fiedler, Brinkmann, Betsch, & Wild, 2000; Tschan et al., 2009). Therefore, the research aim of the present dissertation was twofold. In the first chapter of the present dissertation I investigated confidence judgments in own skills and the confidence bias, the processes underlying these confidence judgments, and the influences of gender and monetary incentive on confidence judgments. The second aim was to investigate the influence of goal and implementation intentions on rational decision making and how this influence is reflected in the neural correlate of reinforcement learning. A common finding in research on confidence judgments is the confidence bias (e.g. Moore & Schatz, 2017; Moore & Healy, 2008; Pikulina et al., 2017; Sanchez & Dunning, 2018; Lebreton et al., 2018). In most cases, the confidence bias reflects overconfidence, which means that people’s subjective confidence exceeds their actual ability or performance (Fischhoff, Slovic, & Lichtenstein, 1977). In some cases, there is also evidence for underconfidence, suggesting that people underestimate their abilities (Kruger & Dunning, 1999; Kruger & Burrus, 2004). Gender is an important predictor of the confidence bias. Underconfidence is more prevalent in females, whereas males often display overconfidence (e.g., Barber & Odean, 2001; Hügelschäfer & Achtziger, 2014; Niederle & Vesterlund, 2007). In Study 1, I investigated the processes underlying confidence judgments and the confidence bias by means of response times, and I examined potential gender differences. Participants answered general knowledge questions and judged their confidence on the correctness of each answer. Participants had overall a good sense of whether their answer was correct or incorrect. This was reflected by higher confidence judgments on correct answers compared to incorrect ones. The analysis of response times on the confidence judgments revealed that male participants who took longer to judge their confidence were made more accurate judgments than males who responded quickly. This relationship was not found for females. In Study 2, half of the participants received a monetary incentive for good performance in the general knowledge test. The monetary incentive for performance increased the time invested in both tasks (the knowledge questions and the confidence judgments). However, this increased effort did not lead to better performance on the knowledge questions, nor did it yield more accurate confidence judgments. The response times suggested that males who invested more time in the confidence judgments were more accurate (as in Study 1). However, the opposite was true for females. The more time females invested in their judgment the more underconfident they were. This influence of the response time on the confidence bias was only found for incentivized participants. In Study 3, the accuracy of the confidence judgment was incentivized. Contrary to the expectations, the monetary incentive did not reduce the confidence bias but led both males and females to be overconfident. In this study, the response time on the confidence judgment did not predict the confidence bias. On the whole, the results demonstrate that (a) the processes of confidence judgments differ between females and males, and (b) the effectiveness of monetary incentives for improving the accuracy of confidence judgments depends strongly on the incentive being contingent on the performance in the task at hand. The second chapter of the present dissertation investigated the influence of goal and implementation intentions (P. M. Gollwitzer, 1999) on rational decision making (see also Hügelschäfer & Achtziger, 2017). The impact of intentions was examined by the neural correlate of reinforcement learning, i.e. the feedback-related negativity (FRN; Holroyd & Coles, 2002). Participants worked on a probability updating task in which the optimal strategy to maximize the expected payoff was to follow Bayes’ rule by integrating new information with prior probabilities (Bayes & Price, 1763). The optimal decision rule conflicted with a simpler suboptimal decision strategy, i.e. the reinforcement heuristic (see Achtziger & Alós-Ferrer, 2014; Charness & Levin, 2005). The goal and implementation intention manipulation was proposed to control the automatic process of the reinforcement heuristic and hence foster rational decision making. The results showed that the goal intention and the implementation intention had no influence on the number of reinforcement errors (in contrast to the findings of Hügelschäfer & Achtziger, 2017). However, both, the goal and implementation intentions increased the amplitude of the FRN which, on the neural level, indicated a stronger reliance on the reinforcement heuristic than in the control group. The findings shed some light on the impact of goal and implementation intentions on rational decision making. They demonstrate that careful consideration of the use of intentions as an intervention for improved decision making is required to avoid undesired side-effects. Taken together, the present dissertation provided new insights into the processes underlying confidence judgments, the confidence bias, rational decision making, and its neural correlates.

Die Digitalisierung schreitet voran und verändert unsere Welt. Sie bietet unzählige neue Chancen und Möglichkeiten aber sicherlich genauso viele Risiken und Herausforderungen. In Bezug auf Unternehmen sind diese Chancen und Risiken der Digitalisierung jedoch sehr ungleich zwischen kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen (KMU) und Großkonzernen zu Ungunsten der KMU verteilt. Gleichzeitig besitzen KMU zudem diverse Nachteile im Bereich der Ressourcenausstattung im Vergleich zu Großkonzernen (Demary u. a. 2016). In Deutschland ist diese Tatsache deswegen von immenser Bedeutung, da mehr als 99% aller Unternehmen der Klasse der KMU angehören und fast zwei Drittel aller Erwerbstätigen innerhalb eines KMU beschäftigt sind (Statistisches Bundesamt 2016a). KMU sind somit zentral für die wirtschaftliche Prosperität Deutschlands. Die Bundes- und Landesregierungen haben in diesem Zusammenhang beschlossen, die KMU bei der unternehmensinternen Digitalisierung zu unterstützen und nicht alleinig die Kräfte des freien Marktes über den Unternehmenserfolg entscheiden zu lassen. Basierend auf dem Governancekonzept (Bevir 2011; Stoker 1998) bietet diese Arbeit dann Einblicke in die politischen Prozesse, Inhalte und die Resultate politischen Handelns (Anheier 2013) im Zusammenhang mit der unternehmensexternen Unterstützung der Digitalisierung in KMU. Die Erkenntnisse basieren zum einen auf inhaltsanalytischen Auswertungen der digitalen Agenden Deutschlands (Bundeskanzleramt und Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Wirtschaft 2016), Baden-Württembergs (Ministerium für Inneres, Digitalisierung und Migration des Landes Baden-Württemberg 2017) und Bayerns (Bayrisches Staatsministerium für Wirtschaft und Medien, Energie und Technologie 2015) sowie auf Primärdaten einer Online-Befragung von KMU in Baden-Württemberg und Bayern. So kann gezeigt werden, dass an den digitalpolitischen Governanceinstrumenten der Bundes- und Landesregierungen neben staatlichen auch mannigfaltige nichtstaatliche Akteure beteiligt sind. Länderübergreifend lassen sich diese Governanceinstrumente den Bereichen Infrastruktur, Bildung, Ordnungs- und Rechtsrahmen, Verwaltung und Wirtschaft zuordnen, wobei die befragten KMU den Bereichen Infrastruktur und Ordnungs- und Rechtsrahmen eine herausgehobene Stellung in Bezug auf die Relevanz für ihr Unternehmen beimessen. In diesem Zusammenhang bewerten die KMU insbesondere den flächendeckenden Breitbandausbau sowie die Verbesserung der Cybersicherheit und Cyberabwehr als relevant für den Erfolg ihres Unternehmens. Jedoch kann über clusteranalytische Verfahren auch gezeigt werden, dass teils erhebliche strukturelle Unterschiede in Bezug auf die Relevanzbewertung der Governancebereiche und Instrumente vorliegen. Zudem kann diese Arbeit auf Basis einer theoretisch, interdisziplinären Synthese politik- und wirtschaftswissenschaftlicher Theoriestränge unter dem Dach des Governancekonzeptes und anschließender Verwendung regressionsanalytischer Verfahren einen ersten Hinweis darauf geben, dass die Relevanzbewertung unternehmensexterner digitalpolitischer Governanceinstrumente innerhalb deutscher KMU teils maßgeblich von der Ausgestaltung der unternehmensinternen Wertschöpfungskette der Unternehmen abhängt. Für diese Synthese ist auf politikwissenschaftlicher Seite die Governanceordnung nach Anheier (2013) maßgebend, wobei im Bereich der Wirtschaftswissenschaften auf die Transaktionkostentheorie (Coase 1937; Williamson 1975; Williamson 1985; Williamson 1996), den Resource-Based View (Barney 1991; Penrose 1959; Wernerfelt 1984), den Market-Based View (Porter 1979; Porter 1980; Porter 1985) sowie die Resource-Dependence Theory (Pfeffer und Salancik 1978; Pfeffer und Salancik 2003; Selznick 1949) zurückgegriffen wird.

Den Künsten wird spätestens seit der Renaissance eine besondere Vertrautheit mit der Welt zugesprochen; ein Wissen, das auf Gefühl, eine tiefe Empfindsamkeit und einen persönlichen Weltbezug zurückgeht. Ihre Erfahrung und ihre Sicht der Dinge verstehen sie in Materialien, Objekten, Musik und performativen Gesten zu transportieren und zu speichern. Künstlerische Praktiken und Produktionsformen verbinden darüber hinaus Wissen mit Tätigkeit. Auf dieser Grundlage wird ihnen in unterschiedlichen Bildungskontexten eine besondere Wirkung hinsichtlich personaler und interpersonaler Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten zugesprochen. Sie haben daher sowohl im Kontext handlungsorientierter Managementtheorien, allgemein- und zivilgesellschaftlicher Bildungskonzepte als auch in Bezug auf die Ausbildung von Forschungskompetenzen im wissenschaftlichen Umfeld Konjunktur. Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich unter diesen Gesichtspunkten mit der Vermittlung künstlerischer Episteme an Hochschulen und Universitäten. Dabei werden Hochschulprogramme in den Blick genommen, welche Kunst- und Design-Praktiken in Lehrformate jenseits künstlerischer Ausbildungsgänge integrieren. So wird insbesondere gefragt, auf welche Weise sich ökonomische und betriebswirtschaftliche Fachdiskurse Konzepte künstlerischer Wissensproduktion aneignen und mit welchen Begründungen und Praktiken der Transfer geschieht. Nicht zufällig rücken gerade in Zeiten des Kreativimperativs künstlerische und damit Individuum-bezogene Wissensmodelle in den Fokus von Hochschulbildung. Die dazugehörigen Formate, Theorien und Vermittlungsformen sind jedoch vielfältig. Es stellt sich die Frage, ob hier tatsächlich neue Ausbildungskonzepte zum Einsatz kommen oder ob sich lediglich die Strategien verändert haben, durch welche ökonomisches Handeln und Führung gerechtfertigt werden. Die Untersuchung legt das Augenmerk dabei nicht nur auf Didaktik und Rhetorik, sondern auch auf die Untersuchung sozialer Räume, als welche Hochschulen und Universitäten begriffen werden.