Archive Events in 2016

Digitale Methoden der Textanalyse und speziell das Topic Modeling erleben angesichts von Big Data derzeit auch in den Sozialwissenschaften eine gewisse Konjunktur. So fallen in entsprechenden Studien häufig allein aufgrund der schieren Datenmenge herkömmliche sozialwissenschaftliche Methoden aus. Automatisierte Verfahren der Mustererkennung textueller Daten kommen deshalb z.B. als Heuristik zum Einsatz, um qualitative Analysen anzuschließen oder quantitative Inhaltsanalysen zu ersetzen.

Gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen wie der Klimawandel, die Energie- und Mobilitätswende zeichnen sich durch ein hohes Maß an Unsicherheit und Nichtwissen aus. Dabei sehen sich die Akteure über alle Funktionsbereiche hinweg mit komplexen Schnittstellenproblemen konfrontiert. Gesucht werden daher Beratungsmodelle, die zwischen Politik, Wissenschaft und Zivilgesellschaft vermitteln.

Participatory settings and democratic structures in knowledge production are a hot topic in science studies and science policy. Recent developments show that participation is an important factor to increase public and political legitimacy, especially when complex problems are characterized by a large societal impact and technological uncertainty. Still, the question remains open: how do different forms of participation in knowledge production influence and possibly change innovation processes? In this sense, participation can be regarded as an open concept that itself is co-produced.

This workshop explores the causes and effects of cooperative relationships between international organizations in densely populated governance landscapes. It assembles scholars from a variety of policy fields and backgrounds who seek to explain why international organizations have been pulled into ever-tighter relationships with their peers and how these relationships affect the institutional structures surrounding specific policy issues.

For more information, click here

The lecture will explore the transformation of the Chinese model of capitalism in the context of the accelerated introduction of advanced digitalized manufacturing, proposed by the Chinese Government in its report “Made in China 2025” and in various documents related to China’s 13th Five-Year Plan. Based on current field studies in the Pearl-River Delta, we examine prospective pathways of industrial transformation related to the predominant regimes of production in core manufacturing industries.

This two-day workshop will explore the history of the rights to health, well-being and subsistence from the eighteenth century to today from the perspective of governmentality and biopolitics.

Due to capacity constraints, we cannot accept further registrations.

Ebola- und Zikavirus zeigen: Krankheiten machen nicht an Landesgrenzen halt. Internationales Krisenmanagement wird immer wichtiger. Deutschland muss sich global stärker engagieren und gleichzeitig angesichts des zunehmenden Kostendrucks sein nationales Gesundheitssystem stabilisieren. Welche Rolle spielt Deutschland in der globalen Gesundheitspolitik? Welche Herausforderungen gibt es durch die demografische Entwicklung, aber auch durch die steigende Migration im Land? Wie lässt sich gute Behandlung für alle Beitragszahler ermöglichen?

On November 9th, 2016 there was an expert debate with Christina Schildmann. Ms. Schildmann works at the Commission for the Work of the Future (Kommission “Arbeit der Zukunft”) at the Hans Böckler Foundation. She introduced the Commission and its report which will be published in spring 2017.

The first plenary meeting of the doctoral program “Good work” took place on November 2nd, 2016. Prof. Jutta Allmendinger Ph. D., leader of the doctoral program, the coordination team and the supervisors extended warm words of welcome to the doctoral students. After that, there was a presentation of the content and structure of the doctoral program, a Q&A session, and a tour of the house.

Digitale Technologien versprechen die Energiewende intelligenter und effizienter zu machen. Insbesondere die digitale Vernetzung der Sektoren Strom, Wärme und Mobilität birgt neue Möglichkeiten der Energiespeicherung und des intelligenten Lastmanagements, die die Energiewende  dringend  braucht. Diese Chancen lassen sich umtriebige IT-Firmen nicht entgehen. Schon jetzt erobern junge Unternehmen mit neuen Geschäftsmodellen und integrierten Dienstleistungen den Energiemarkt, und die traditionellen Energieerzeuger geraten unter Druck.

Studies of the ‘progressive’s dilemma’ in Canada have tended to paint a rosy picture, concluding that high levels of immigration do not significantly erode social solidarity. However, this happy conclusion is subject to an important qualification: there are dramatic differences in public attitudes towards immigrants and indigenous people, often called Aboriginals. This paper analyses these differences by examining the relationship between perceptions of welfare dependence and support for redistribution, focusing on both groups.

Comment: Prof. Dr. Markus Kienscherf
Moderated by Dr. Tine Hanrieder

The WZB invites interested researchers to participate in the workshop “The Multiple Directions of Social Progress” on October 14 and 15, 2016, co-organized with our French cooperation partner FMSH. 

The workshop brings together leading academics of the “International Panel on Social Progress” (IPSP) that seeks to develop research-based and multi-disciplinary solutions to the pressing challenges of our time. The panel report will be published in spring 2018 and discusses the following leading questions in 22 different chapters:

Mit der Bündelung individueller Trackingdaten und ihrer Zuordnung zu einzelnen Verkehrsmitteln werden Verkehrsströme sichtbar und eine bisher nicht gekannte Genauigkeit in der Darstellung von Mobilitätsmustern bis hin zu Verkehrsprognosen möglich. Mehr noch: Mit der Digitalisierung von Mobilitätsdienstleistungen werden große Datenmengen generiert, die auch für Forschungszwecke zur Verfügung stehen und neue makro- und mikroskopische Einblicke bieten, wie sich Verkehrs- und Mobilitätsverhalten über die Zeit und unter Maßgabe veränderter Verkehrsangebote und anderer Rahmenbedingungen ändern.

Recent years have seen an increased interest in the use of behavioral nudges and social policy to address a diverse set of issues including tax evasion, charitable giving, environmental responsibility and corruption. This has raised the question of whether, and how, such policy measures can achieve changes in long-term behavior and people’s attitudes. In this workshop, we aim to bring together researchers working on this topic, directly or indirectly, across a broad range of subfields including economic history, behavioral, and development economics, among others.

Discussant: Macartan Humphreys
Moderated by Lena Hipp

Discussant: Swen Hutter, European University Institute in Florence, Italy
Moderated by Michael Zürn

Der Schutz vor Diskriminierung ist ein wesentliches Strukturprinzip der Menschenrechte und des Menschenrechts auf Bildung. Diskriminiert werden darf weder beim Zugang zu öffentlichen Bildungseinrichtungen und -angeboten noch in Hinblick auf angemessene Partizipation, etwa aufgrund von Behinderung, Herkunft, Geschlecht, Religion oder sexueller Identität. Zudem sind die Staaten gehalten, durch Maßnahmen wie Menschenrechtsbildung alle Menschen darin zu stärken, Diskriminierung abzubauen.

Forschungsmetriken sind aus dem institutionellen Leistungsvergleich kaum mehr wegzudenken. Die indikatorenbasierte Vermessung von Wissenschaft stößt aber vermehrt auf Kritik. Alternative Metriken bzw. Altmetrics wurden entwickelt, die sich unter anderem aus Web 2.0-Anwendungen speisen und eine Pluralisierung der Bewertungsdimensionen beinhalten. Altmetrics – die bislang noch keine wirkliche Standardisierung erfahren haben – sollen nicht zuletzt dazu dienen, neben dem wissenschaftlichen Impact auch den gesellschaftlichen Impact von Forschung abzubilden.

Venue: Maison Suger, Paris
16 rue Suger
75006Paris, Paris (75) France

The Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and the Fondation maison des sciences de l’homme (FMSH) invite researchers from France and Germany to participate in the workshop "Rethinking Society for the 21st Century" in Paris.

Der Vortrag beschäftigt sich mit den neuen Trends der metrischen Erfassung und Selbstbeschreibung der Gesellschaft, wie sie sich etwa in Formen von Ratings, Scorings und der Selbstvermessung finden lassen. Dabei wird argumentiert, dass diese Ausbreitung von Quantifizierung nicht einfach nur einer spezifischen Darstellungsform der Gesellschaft den Vorrang gibt, sondern in drei soziologisch relevante Richtungen Wirkung entfaltet: Erstens wird mit der Spezifizierung und Bereitstellung von quantitativen Indikatoren und Daten die Neigung zum sozialen Vergleich gestärkt.

Am 17. September werden in Berlin und sechs weiteren deutschen Städten Hunderttausende auf die Straße gehen, um sich gegen die Freihandelsabkommen der EU mit Kanada und den USA zu stellen. Kurz vor dem SPD-Parteikonvent und den Abgeordnetenhauswahlen in Berlin wollen die Demonstrierenden erneut den Druck auf die politischen Repräsentant_innen erhöhen, beide Abkommen auf Eis zu legen. Aber wer sind die Menschen, die sich in so großer Zahl gegen einen zwischenstaatlichen Handelsvertrag engagieren? Wie ist die massive Mobilisierung zu erklären?

Bei der Analyse von Survey-Daten bekommt man es unweigerlich mit fehlenden Werten zu tun. Ein Ignorieren dieser fehlenden Werte ist selten eine gute Idee und es bedarf daher Verfahren, die adäquat mit fehlenden Werten umgehen können. Ein solches Verfahren stellt die Multiple Imputation dar.

Part-time employment has been increasing in many developed countries. In Germany as well as in Japan, the number of part-time employment has reached one fourth of all the employment, and almost half of the female employments, which means it became a substantial employment form in the society in both countries.

The WZB is planning an international conference on matching markets. The conference "Matching Markets: Combining Theory and Applications," starting in the morning of July 14, 2016, and ending on July 15, 2016, will take place at the WZB in Berlin. The conference is organized by Inácio Bó (WZB), Rustamdjan Hakimov (WZB) and Dorothea Kübler (WZB).

Matching theory has matured to a point where matching theorists are able to make policy suggestions for real-life markets. The theory is supplemented by experiments and empirical analyses examining how to operate such markets.

This workshop brings together distinguished political theorists, legal scholars and political scientists to discussions on how best to understand public reason – understood in a broad and inclusive way - in relation to courts, and in discussion about what practical impact such ideals may have in the context of adjudication

Asked about queer work in international relations, most IR scholars would almost certainly answer that queer studies is a non-issue for the subdiscipline – a topic beyond the scope and understanding of international politics. Yet queer work tackles problems that IR scholars themselves believe are central to their discipline: questions about political economies, the geopolitics of war and terror, and the national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies, not to mention their implications for empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, and terrorism.

Im Spannungsfeld zwischen zentralisierten und dezentralisierten Strukturen stellen sich zurzeit entscheidende Fragen zur Neuausrichtung des deutschen Energiesystems. Verschiedene Systemeigenschaften müssen auf lokaler, regionaler, nationaler wie europäischer Ebene neu ins Verhältnis gesetzt werden. Dies gilt für Fragen der Marktgestaltung wie der Neuausrichtung räumlicher Zusammenhänge sowie den Umgang mit Verteilungsfragen: Welche funktionalen Bezüge sind für verschiedene Energiemärkte sinnvoll? Welche Akteure sind in diese Märkte (nicht) integriert?

Ordinal outcomes are very common in the social and behavioral sciences.The most popular regression method for ordinal outcomes is the cumulative odds model, which requires the restrictive proportional odds assumption.  In this short course, we consider a wide range of regression models for ordinal outcomes that relax the proportional odds assumption to varying degrees and allow one to consider several different probabilities of interest.We also consider formal and informal tests of the proportional odds assumption and the role they play in ordinal model selection.  This course focuses on ex

This two-day conference is dedicated to the issue of making causal claims for macro/institutional effects in cross-country comparative research. Based on empirical examples, the following issues will be discussed:

Veranstaltungsort: Allianz Forum, Pariser Platz 6, 10117 Berlin, Konferenzraum 4022

Am WZB wird seit Längerem über Verfahrensregeln für die Entfristung von Beschäftigungsverträgen wissenschaftlich Beschäftigter unterhalb der Leitungsebene diskutiert. Ende 2014 hat der Wissenschaftliche Rat den Entfristungsleitlinien zugestimmt, die seither die Grundlage für das Verfahren zur Entfristung von Arbeitsverträgen am WZB bilden.

Venue: EUREF-Campus, Torgauer Straße 12-15, 10829 Berlin, Building 16 (InnoZ), Platform

The 12th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference (SOEP 2016) will be held in Berlin, June 22-23, 2016, at the WZB | Berlin Social Science Center.

This interdisciplinary two-day conference explores the role of contexts in the production and reproduction of social inequality.

Contexts matter for individual and aggregate outcomes because they channel opportunities and define choices. Contexts connect individuals or segregate them from each other. Contexts include neighborhoods, networks, families, schools, workplaces, and nations.

This conference brings together economists and sociologists, for an interdisciplinary exchange of theory, evidence, and methodology.

More than ever before, questions of movement, displacement and belonging, equality and inequality, borders and otherness have become hot-button issues worldwide. Public law--whether domestic, European or international--structures practices of inclusion and exclusion, borders and boundaries, and line-drawing in a variety of ways. The analysis and assessment of how that happens, for what purposes and with what effects, is the focus of this conference.

More information: www.icons2016.berlin

Die Neuzeit hat nicht nur souveräne Staatsapparate, international operierende Handelskompagnien, einflussreiche Financiers und dezentrale Märkte hervorgebracht. Es hat sich auch ein spezifischer Machttypus formiert, der weder durch politische Strukturen noch durch ökonomische Strategien hinreichend beschreibbar ist. Er konstituiert sich allein über das Ineinanderwirken beider Pole.

Throughout history persons with power seem to have been convinced that they could influence the people most effectively with visual art and therefore they invested a lot of resources into the visual presentation of power. It is usually argued that the people with their “simple minds” need visual art to understand a complex world. However, it might be more to the truth that not the people but the rulers themselves are the most addicted persons to the messages transported by visual arts.

Digitization has become a catch word to describe the ongoing transformation within different areas of life through the deployment of new information and communication technologies. In the realm of labor, one development has been the reorganization of work through intermediary platforms and their digital communities, the so-called crowd work. Work – from microtasks to creative challenges – is outsourced to a crowd of individuals that is globally dispersed and internet-based.

In the past decade, an ever increasing trend to capture (social) life in numbers became a prominent instantiation of the so-called ‘audit society’ (Power, 1999). Datafication affects many social domains and one of the most noticeable is education. Digital educational data are distinct from pre-digital forms as they may be exhaustive in scope, highly detailed, and can be combined in a flexible manner and at different aggregation levels.

MaD-Colloquium

Cas Mudde and Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler will present their joint book project

Das WZB und das Collège d’Etudes Mondiales / Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (FMSH) laden zur Teilnahme am Auftaktworkshop „Changing Societies: The World We Live In” im Rahmen des deutsch-französischen Forschungsprojekts "Neue Evaluations- und Beurteilungsrahmen zentraler gesellschaftlicher Veränderungen" ein.

Recent political developments in Poland have triggered many questions concerning the reasons and consequences for Poland and Europe. There is a debate as to what the development means for democracy. In his lecture, Radoslaw Markowski will provide some answers and explanations.

We study health related, social and material consequences related to the loss of a partner. The panel data for the current study is based on „Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).“  Causal inferences from observational data concerning the impact of a given treatment are often tricky since the assignment of treatments is typically not random. Matching methods attempt to approximate randomized controlled trials by specifying an “appropriate” control and treatment group.

Welche Informationen verraten Telefonverbindungsdaten über unsere Lebensgewohnheiten? Wie ist die Lage des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses an Universitäten und anderen Forschungseinrichtungen? Und was war vielleicht faul an der letzten Volkszählung? Datenjournalisten hinterfragen Aussagen aus Politik, Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft ebenso wie die amtliche Statistik. Auf der Suche nach relevanten Informationen durchstöbern sie Daten, von denen viele über das Internet frei verfügbar sind – oder sie generieren diese Daten sogar selbst.

We have entered into a new economy that is characterized by the intensive use of information and communication technologies which enable globalized production and distribution of goods and services. The new economy is also characterized by rising inequalities and a labor market polarization. This workshop aims to facilitate a scholarly exchange of research on challenges emanating from various aspects of the new economy for the wellbeing of family and children across nations.

Expertenwissen wird für grenzüberschreitende Governanceprozesse immer wichtiger. Es entstehen transnationale Deutungseliten, deren Autorität aber auch bestehende Machthierarchien reproduziert und verfestigt. Parallel beobachten wir die Entstehung kritischer Gegeneliten. In diesem Vortrag wird nach dem transformativen Potenzial dieser kritischen Professionals gefragt, die im Sinne des Gemeinwohls und demokratischer Werte eine andere Politik verfolgen.

2016 marks the 40th anniversary of the passage of the German Co-determination Act of 1976. This law, which mandates the parity representation of workers in the supervisory boards of companies with more than 2000 employees in Germany, constitutes one of the key pillars of the ‘German model’ of corporate governance and industrial relations. This occasion offers an opportunity for researchers to assess the contribution of co-determination to economic democracy and the social market economy in the context of internationalization, liberalization and digitalization.

Zuwanderung gibt es in Deutschland schon seit Langem. Die Menschen kamen aus den unterschiedlichsten Gründen: als Gastarbeiter und Arbeitsmigranten, als Spätaussiedler oder Asylbewerber. Was wissen wir über die Lebensverhältnisse der Migranten in Deutschland? Wie zufrieden sind sie mit ihrem Leben? Wie gut sind Zuwanderer in Ausbildung und Beruf integriert? Wo liegen die Herausforderungen von Migration und Integration angesichts der aktuell starken Zuwanderung?

Social scientists have generated a large and inconclusive literature on the effect(s) of marriage on men’s wages. Researchers have hypothesized that the wage premium enjoyed by married men may reflect both a tendency for more productive men to marry and an effect of marriage on productivity. To sort out these explanations, researchers have used fixed effects regression models for panel data. This article shows that these models are generally inappropriate for answering the causal questions of interest.

The relationship between processes and time-varying covariates is of central theoretical interest in many social science research questions. On the one hand, event history analysis has been the method chosen to study the relationship between time-varying covariates and outcomes that can meaningfully be specified as simple instantaneous events or transitions.

The rise of big data represents a watershed moment for the social sciences. Not only are we faced with large and multifarious types of data (e.g.

Die Veranstaltung findet am 19. April 2016 in der Villa Neukölln statt, Hermannstraße 233, 12049 Berlin. Beginn ist 19 Uhr.

While much research has explored how to change organisations toward more gender equality, the role of men in those processes is less well understood. Men are often seen as hindering progress on gender equality (Cockburn, 1991; McKinsey, 2012; Prime & Moss-Racusin, 2009). However the United Nations #HeforShe campaign has led to much discussion about men’s involvement in gender equality processes in general and feminism in specific. Men can be understood as change agents for gender equality (Vries, 2015).

Die Tagung von Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Universität Konstanz und des WZB Center for Global Constitutionalism ist den Problemen, Fragestellungen und Perspektiven der Geschichte der Verfassungsgerichtsbarkeit in der Bundesrepublik gewidmet. Die Rechtsprechung des Bundesverfassungsgerichts ist eine bedeutende Quelle der Rechts- und Verfassungsgeschichte, aber auch der politischen sowie der Sozial- und Ideengeschichte der Bundesrepublik.

The 34th International Labour Process Conference

From 4th to 6th April, the WZB is hosting the International Labour Process Conference. The annual conference is a major meeting point for the international research community interested in the developments and transformations of the worlds of work.

The first part of my talk will provide a brief history of the development of 'big data' technology from the perspective of the database systems research community. After that I will give an example of how large web companies successfully use scientific experiments and big data technology in product development. In the second part, I will present ideas on how the sciences can build upon these findings and start to leverage big data technology. I will illustrate the ideas using a side project of mine that studies country-specific differences in the surveillance of web browsing.

Recent historiography has tended to downplay the importance of the family in neoliberal revisions of the social. And yet a closer look at the key economic debates of the 1970s indicates that a focus on private family values was central to the neoliberal project of a free market order. Whether they were looking at the question of welfare reform, inheritance or the financing of higher education, neoliberal thinkers such as Milton Friedman, Gary Becker and James Buchanan were adamant that the private family should replace the social insurance state as the primary source of economic security.

Research on neoliberalism is still divided into social scientific and social history literatures on the one hand, and economic and intellectual history literature on the other hand. Major publications also still suffer from Anglo-Saxon bias due to a focus on English language literature despite a wide range of relevant publications in other major languages.

While migration and ethnicity issues constitute salient political and social issues in various parts of the world, experimental designs have become very popular to unravel the causal processes underlying these issues. A major challenge is that macro level processes (e.g., institutions, policies, context factors) regulate how individuals experience migration and ethnic diversity. Many political, economic and educational interventions (laws, policies) intervene at the macro-level.

How can we change social norms, the standards describing typical or desirable behavior? Because individuals’ perceptions of norms guide their personal behavior, influencing these perceptions is one way to create social change. And yet individuals do not form perceptions of typical or desirable behavior in an unbiased manner. Individuals attend to select sources of normative information, and their resulting perceptions rarely match actual rates of behavior in their environment. Thus, changing social norms requires an understanding of how individuals perceive norms in the first place.

In dem Vortrag werden die langfristig wirksamen Politik‐Schritte zur Aufrechterhaltung des weltwirtschaftlichen Gleichgewichts angesichts der gestiegenen Chancen und Zwänge zur internationalen Wanderung betrachtet. Der Druck auf immer mehr Gleichheit (Tocqueville) erzwingt heute eine Globalisierung der Lebensbedingungen, wie sie in den reichen Ländern (dem „Norden“) vorgefunden werden. Ein Abflauen der Wanderungen aus dem „Süden“ (der Dritten Welt) in den „Norden“ kann nur erwartet werden, wenn der Süden wirtschaftlich merklich schneller wächst als bisher.

Europe and Germany are struggling to cope with an influx of refugees from the Middle East and Africa. Fences and walls, to keep asylum seekers out, are replacing sustainable solutions. The EU is both unwilling and incapable of formulating a sensible response to the crisis. Antony Loewenstein has investigated how governments around the world are increasingly privatizing and warehousing refugees, outsourcing responsibility to companies running detention centres, health care and surveillance drones for profit.

Efforts to digitize the collections of natural history museums are producing enormous amounts of data. Digital production lines, high-throughput pipelines, and biodiversity discovery factories aim to increase accessibility, facilitate worldwide research, rationalize collection management and aid the preservation of specimens. Accompanying these intramural efforts is a lively development of global portals, standards and tools, which seek to make biodiversity data both sensible and workable.

The workshop is a cooperation between the WZB, Center for Global Constitutionalism, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. 

This lecture presents theory and evidence from a series of studies about the impact of aggregators and intermediaries on news consumption and the structure of the news industry.  A theoretical model considers how increased switching changes advertising markets as well as content strategy for publishers.