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In der (klassischen) politischen Kulturforschung galt Kritik eher als Negativum von Unterstützung und als Gefahr für politische Stabilität. Politische Kulturforschung war folgerichtig im wesentlichen Unterstützungs- und Legitimitätsforschung. Seit Mitte der 90er Jahre ist eine stärkere Hinwendung zur Kritikforschung zu erkennen (z.B. Norris 1999). Ziel der Studie ist die Typologisierung politischer Kritik sowie die Analyse der Merkmale unterschiedlicher Kritiktypen.

Das Dissertationsprojekt wurde im Rahmen der Mitarbeit im Forschungsprojekt EUROPUB entwickelt, das von der EU durch das 5. Rahmenprogramm finanziert wurde. Von April 2004 bis März 2005 erfolgte die Finanzierung durch das Doktorandinnen-Programm des WZB. Die Dissertation wird von Prof. Dieter Rucht (WZB) und Prof. Ruud Koopmans (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) betreut.

Stock exchanges are receiving increasing attention both as markets where securities are traded and as organizations which take on the form of multinational corporations. At the same time, they are experiencing a number of changes due to the rising importance of trading technology, international competition and regulatory decisions. Today, after a consolidation at the national level, the biggest exchanges are looking across borders to improve and extend their business model. These stock exchange operators are internationalizing their activities and are reorganizing trading, clearing and settlement activities, potentially with great impact on national socio-economic configurations.

Social inequalities in educational attainment are an inherent feature of modern societies. However, the degree to which individual educational outcomes are affected by social origin varies across institutional contexts (Blossfeld and Shavit 1993; Erikson and Jonsson 1996; Breen et al. 2009). The comparably strong educational inequalities existing in Germany are often attributed to the rigid structure of its school system, where students are channeled early on into distinct school tracks that define the boundaries of their future educational pathways. In recent years, a number of reforms have introduced elements of flexibility in the German tracking system, with the purported aim of reducing inequality of educational opportunities.

Small and medium sized enterprises have increasingly turned into multinationals. Yet, paths of internationalization have depended on contracts, contacts and information at least originating in the home context. There are different types of SME multinationalization strategies. Based on the assumption that relative resource scarcity in SMEs makes a resource dependency approach desirable, more than for the commonly investigated larger MNEs, we investigated the internationalization profile and autonomous versus cooperative use of resources of SMEs in France, Germany, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands, in six regions, in engineering and software firms, under the influence of size and age of the firm, regional embeddedness, regional properity, and the product life cycle, for 58 enterprises.

Airbus Industries is a distinctive case of a large and complex transnational enterprise that did not arise from one clearly dominant centre and origin in one country. It has been subject to pressures for both international concentration and integration, on the one hand, and conservation of national and local facilities and responsibilities on the other, responding to conflicting pressures for international efficiency and for the distribution of expertise across many sites in many countries. Furthermore, enterprise organisation has changed substantially over time. The study analyses such countervailing pressures, how they were resolved and kept Airbus from falling apart and helped it grow.

The goal and innovative aspect of this project is the integration of different discussions which up to now have been treated separately:

This project is primarily concerned with the emerging European system of corporate governance. This ongoing "field experiment" is a unique opportunity to observe the complex process of constructing a new corporate governance system, including a new set of relationships between stakeholders. Key questions here include the following: