Open Access

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.

Organizations that aim at delivering essential goods and services to low-income populations a the base of the pyramid increasingly blend the social welfare and the commercial logics in an effort to create financially sustainable solutions to social problems. Scholars have portrayed these cross-sectoral hybrid organizations as particularly agentic and resilient in institutionally complex settings, highlighting their ability to turn institutional voids into opportunity spaces. At the same time, the reconciliation of two antagonistic goals, namely poverty alleviation and financial value creation, as well as the multiple institutional voids that hybrid organizations face at the base of the pyramid (BoP) expose them to severe tensions. By investigating eight hybrid organizations in four countries, namely Colombia, Mexico, Kenya and South Africa, the present study contributes to a better understanding of cross-sectoral hybrid organizations in BoP settings in two ways. First, it shows that hybrid organizations not only face tensions between sector logics, but also between formal and informal, as well as between “Western-style” and “local style” strategic action fields. In settings which do not effectively provide guidance on the prioritization of social vs. financial objectives, these institutional voids manifest as tensions over goals and tensions over means in hybrid organizations. Second, the study sheds light on how field-level dynamics influence the ability of hybrid organizations to strategically employ factors that spur legitimacy advantages in an effort to turn institutional voids into opportunity spaces. Two different scenarios have been identified. One scenario refers to Colombia, Mexico and Kenya, which have been classified as fields that don’t effectively enforce a dominant sector logic concerning the legitimate way that health services should be provided to low-income populations. The present study has shown that in such fields, an organization’s logic of origin as well as the personal background of founders are factors that may spur legitimacy advantages in hybrid organizations. In effect, organizations which strategically employ these factors can select more freely from competing logics and ultimately overcome the prevailing tensions. This resonates with previous research, which has suggested that in fields with a dominant logic, hybrid organizations may take advantage of legitimacy advantages if their logic of origin corresponds to the dominant logic at the field level (Pache and Santos, 2012). However, the present study suggests that the factors leading to legitimacy advantages are more complex in fields with no effective dominant logic regarding social service provision. Here, the dominant logics among funding organizations, possible legitimacy spill-over effects from other market players, as well as the specifications of the commercial and the social welfare logics become important sources of possible legitimacy advantages. However, the study suggests that an organization’s ability to employ them strategically is dependent on their time of founding and their size. In addition to these findings, the study also provides insights on cross-sectoral hybridization in fields with a weakly enforced dominant logic, which is the second scenario that has been identified in South Africa. In particular, the study suggests that in such settings, hybrid organizations are more restricted to freely draw from competing logics, given that they face effective, normative imperatives about the goals they should pursue. However, the empirical investigation also indicates that an organization’s resource dependence structure is more influential than the encountered normative claims of audiences in health fields at the BoP. Further research is needed to refine these insights and explore cross-sectoral hybridization in social service provision fields in contexts of a weakly enforced dominant logic. Based on these findings, the author derives a range of practical recommendations that may themselves be interpreted as paradoxical. As the empirical study suggests, blended value creating hybrid organizations in Colombia, Mexico and Kenya currently face legitimacy advantages when originating from a commercial origin. The researcher is thus, on the one hand, inclined to recommend them to position themselves as commercially oriented organizations as to take advantage of the legitimacy advantages that the commercial logic currently entails. On the other hand, she cautions actors in the field of blended value creation, particularly funding entities, not to neglect the actual role of nonprofit organizations. The establishment of (health) markets that provide low-income populations in developing and emerging economies with affordable, high-quality products and services is likely to require significant unprofitable efforts. Finally, hybrid organizations in South Africa need to be more careful when adopting structures or practices from the commercial logic given the low legitimacy that this logic has in the health market at the BoP. There, organizations need to thoroughly analyze the institutional claims in the specific context of post-Apartheid South Africa.

Today, transportation is a central element of a society’s welfare in terms of economic, political and social success. It creates jobs, allows international cooperation between firms and countries, contributes to firms’ productivity, and enables social participation and interaction. It has become an essential intermediate. Consequently, changes in transportation affect many more sectors. Therefore, transportation of goods and persons has been growing immensely within the past decades. Against this background, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) gain importance in improving and changing transport. Technology can cover all modes (e.g. advanced driving systems, cooperative vehicle systems as vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, or mobile and multimodal information and ticketing systems). The deployment of ITS substantially changes our transportation system. These changes concern several elements and stakeholders of mobility, e.g. infrastructure, technology, users, providers, public institutions, or regulatory frameworks. Up to now, research on ITS strongly focused on technical aspects, i.e. technical development and feasibility. However, these aspects can only represent part of a comprehensive analysis of ITS. This dissertation gives systematic analysis of elements that in the end have a strong impact on the successful market introduction of ITS. It discusses different aspects of intelligent transportation systems providing a view on the framework conditions for intelligent transportation systems. This work, hereby, focuses on passenger transportation. It shows that the successful deployment of ITS requires multiple actors. Each of them can positively or negatively influence the success of ITS-deployment. This work specifically analyses the investment decisions of public authorities on the example of socio-economic cost-benefit analysis, the users’ willingness to accept a multimodal information and ticketing system and its impact on modal choice, and finally the municipalities’ role in providing mobility for specific user groups on the example of immigrants showing the potential and limitations of ITS. The work picks up research questions that have not been addressed before and contributes to a deeper understanding of the interplay of ITS as a technology and the society.

With the ripple effects of the global financial crisis of 2008 exhibiting enduring rifts in the global economy to date, an assessment of the crisis as being rooted in both market and regulatory failure sheds light on the significance and the severity of the challenges cross-border financial capitalism presents nation states with in the wake of globalization. As externalities increase, the threats the unprecedented interdependence and instability of the modern financial system pose are unlikely to recede; on the contrary, they are bound to become more pressing. This is of considerable significance for financial governance, implying that sovereign nation states – formally legitimized to conduct regulatory functions – must construct robust cross-border structures to cope with the challenges of governing an inherently crisis-prone system. In an attempt to address the underlying shortcomings exposed by the crisis – among them that the regulatory and supervisory architecture was not commensurate with the complexity and sophistication of financial markets – the European Union embarked on an ambitious reform path. The potential capacity of European integration in this regard, though central in the academic debate, has yet to be analyzed systematically with respect to systemic risk in terms of both its systemic qualities and political embeddedness. Drawing on a refined definition thereof set out by Willke et al. (2013), this research aims to shed light on how these themes resonate in the European context to inform the critical analysis of conducted reforms. Based on the assumption that cross-border finance requires integrated governance schemes to ensure its integrity and efficacy, the central goals are to (i) assess both systemic-risk related reform measures and the challenges they are confronted with, and (ii) illuminate the significance of reform, while underpinning the case for enhanced integration. Drawing on a broad theoretical framework combining insights from various EU integration theories to trace the rationale and assess the potential and significance of supranational integration, and constructing an analytical framework within which to assess the order-, legitimacy- and expertise-related challenges current structures are confronted with, i.e. factors inhibiting governance capacity, the research concludes that though substantive reforms have largely failed to address the core systemic issues exposed by the crisis, there has indeed been substantial progress in terms of the reform of the institutional governance architecture at the European level. While monumental challenges remain, it would be premature to discredit the response in its entirety. The analysis highlights the European Union’s remarkable capacity to adjust, with institutional responses essentially at the boundaries of legal and political feasibility. Given what is at stake, however, it contends that – with a view to future challenges – supranational governance regimes remain short of optimal scope and must be strengthened to forestall the gradual erosion of governance capacity vis-à-vis an increasingly interdependent and fragile financial system.

Die vorliegende Arbeit liefert eine erste empirische Untersuchung zum Einsatz digitaler Medien in der Aus- und Weiterbildung von Fahrlehrern und zeigt anhand einer Fallstudie zur internetgestützten Videoreflexion auf, welche Chancen, aber auch Hürden hier bestehen. Die Hauptaufgabe von Fahrlehrern ist es, Fahrschüler zu sicheren, verantwortungsvollen und umweltbewussten Verkehrsteilnehmern auszubilden. Dafür benötigen Fahrlehrer Lehrkompetenz, die sie bereits in ihrer Ausbildung erwerben sollten. Jedoch fehlen in der Fahrlehrerausbildung bislang bewährte, standardisierte Methoden der Lehrkompetenzförderung. Aus dem Kontext der Lehrerbildung ist bekannt, dass die Reflexion eigener und fremder Unterrichtsvideos eine gute Methode darstellt, die Lehrkompetenz (angehender) Lehrpersonen zu fördern. Digitale Medien ermöglichen eine schnelle und einfache Bereitstellung der Unterrichtsaufnahmen über Online-Plattform sowie eine internetgestützte Videoreflexion mittels Videoannotation. Die Implementation solcher moderner Ansätze gestaltet sich in der Praxis jedoch oft schwierig: Innerhalb einer Einrichtung müssen unterschiedliche Dimensionen, Ebenen und Einflussfaktoren berücksichtigt werden, um eine nachhaltige Implementation einer Innovation zu ermöglichen. Gerade in der Fahrlehrerausbildung stellt dies eine Herausforderung dar, weil bislang keine empirischen Erkenntnisse zum Einsatz digitaler Medien in diesem Kontext vorliegen. Vor diesem theoretisch erarbeiteten Hintergrund wird im empirischen Teil der Dissertation anhand einer qualitativen Fallstudie mit vier Fällen aus drei Ländern die Implementation der internetgestützten Videoreflexion in der Fahrlehrerausbildung untersucht. Es wird betrachtet, inwiefern sich das Konzept zum Einsatz der internetgestützten Videoreflexion in der Aus- und Weiterbildung von Fahrlehrern implementieren lässt und welcher individuelle sowie organisationale Mehrwert daraus entsteht. Die Ergebnisse der Fallstudie zeigen, dass in keinem der vier untersuchten Fälle die internetgestützte Videoreflexion nachhaltig in die Aus- und Weiterbildung von Fahrlehrern implementiert wurde, obwohl alle Beteiligten einen Mehrwert in der Videoarbeit sehen. In der Praxis zeigten sich unterschiedliche Schwierigkeiten und Hürden: Oftmals gab es keine klare Struktur der Einsatzkonzepte und keine feste Integration der Videoarbeit in den Lehrplan der Ausbildung. Darüber hinaus hat keine der beteiligten Einrichtungen ein ökonomisches Modell entwickelt und ihre Strukturen und Rahmenbedingungen dauerhaft so verändert, dass eine nachhaltige Implementation der internetgestützten Videoreflexion in die Aus- und Weiterbildung von Fahrlehrern möglich wäre. Letztendlich stellt die Struktur der Fahrlehrerausbildung eine Hürde dar: Die gesetzlichen Vorgaben lassen kaum Spielraum, neue Angebote in die Ausbildung zu integrieren, gerade wenn es um virtuelle Elemente geht.