Bachelor Thesis
Effects of sufficiency-promoting campaigns on the intention to avoid leisure air travel
Hörnstein, Maja Carina
2025|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1702

Purpose – The purpose of this thesis is to examine the effects of a sufficiency-promoting campaign on participants’ intention to reduce or avoid leisure air travel following the Theory of Planned Behavior. Design/methodology/approach – A quantitative online experiment was conducted with participants acquired in convenience sampling (N = 240) from which half were randomly selected to be exposed to a fictional campaign promoting sufficiency in leisure air travel. After that, all participants were asked to answer questions assessing attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control and intention to reduce or avoid leisure flights. In addition, past flight behavior, the number of flights in the last twelve months, environmental behavior, social desirability, and sociodemographic data were included as control variables. Findings – Mann-Whitney U tests revealed that the attitude towards reducing leisure air travel was significantly different between the groups: The group of participants exposed to the stimulus evaluated a reduction of air travel more positive. No differences were found for subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, and intention. Findings from a two-step hierarchical regression analysis revealed attitude as the most significant predictor of intention. Within the Theory of Planned Behavior, subjective norm also had a significant, but small influence on intention. When relevant control variables were entered, sufficient past flight behavior for sustainability reasons emerged as a significant predictor, and subjective norm was no longer significant. Implications – This thesis suggests that sufficiency-promoting campaigns can be useful to create positive attitudes towards reducing leisure air travel. It calls for further longitudinal research on effects of more sophisticated campaigns on intentions and actual behavior.

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Dissertation
Feedback im Kontext digitalen Übens mathematischer Inhalte am Beispiel der Bruchrechnung - Über die Wahrnehmung und Nutzung des Feedbacks einer Lernplattform sowie deren Einfluss auf den Lernerfolg von Siebtklässler*innen
Altenburger, Larissa
2025|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1698

Die Bruchrechnung stellt sowohl für Lehrende als auch Lernende eine große Herausforderung dar. Dennoch ist der richtige Umgang mit Brüchen elementar für den späteren schulischen und außerschulischen Erfolg. Ein Ansatz zum erfolgreichen Umgang mit Brüchen ist die Förderung von konzeptuellem („Wissen, warum“) sowie prozeduralem Wissen („Wissen, wie“). Die Förderung dieser beiden Facetten kann durch Feedback positiv beeinflusst werden, denn: Feedback gilt als einer der lernförderlichsten Einflussfaktoren auf Lehr-Lern-Prozesse. Allerdings scheint die Wirksamkeit von verschiedenen Faktoren (wie z.B. der konkreten Feedbackgestaltung) abhängig zu sein. Ziel von Feedback ist es, eine Lücke zwischen dem aktuellen Leistungsstand und einem Zielzustand zu schließen. Zur Erreichung des Ziels wurden Lernende lange als passiv Empfangende angesehen. Der Feedbackbegriff öffnet sich diesbezüglich immer mehr und der Verarbeitungsprozess der Lernenden (z. B. deren Feedbackwahrnehmung und - nutzung) rückt verstärkt in den Fokus. Lehrkräfte ist es aufgrund vielfältiger Aufgaben und einer damit einhergehenden hohen Arbeitsbelastung jedoch nur schwer möglich, schriftliches und elaboriertes Feedback zu geben. Digitale Lernplattformen bieten das Potenzial Lehrkräfte durch automatisiertes Feedback zu unterstützen. Auch die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Wahrnehmung, Nutzung und Wirksamkeit von digital-gestütztem Feedback. Dabei fokussiert sich die Studie nicht nur auf den Einfluss von Feedback auf die Bruchrechenleistung, sondern auch eine weitere Facette schulischen Lernerfolgs: Die Förderung positiver und Reduzierung negativer Emotionen. An der Studie nahmen 2021/2022 insgesamt 137 Siebtklässler*innen von Gemeinschafts- und Oberschulen aus Schleswig-Holstein und Niedersachsen teil. Die Lernenden wurden nach einem ersten Messzeitpunkt randomisiert zwei Experimentalgruppen zugeordnet. Die Gruppen arbeiteten während der Intervention an Bruchrechenaufgaben zur potenziellen Förderung konzeptuellen sowie prozeduralen Wissen zur Bruchrechnung. Dabei erhielt Experimentalgruppe 1 das Feedback „knowledge of result“ während Experimentalgruppe 2 elaboriertes Feedback erhielt. Während der Intervention wurde die Feedbacknutzung und anschließend an die Intervention die Feedbackwahrnehmung und die Bruchrechenleistung erfasst. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sich beide Experimentalgruppen hinsichtlich ihrer Bruchrechenleistung verbesserten, allerdings ließ sich kein signifikanter Unterschied zwischen den Gruppen feststellen. Gleiches gilt für die Emotionen nach der Intervention. Außerdem zeigt sich, dass eine positive Feedbackwahrnehmung mit einer höheren Leistung im Zusammenhang steht. Diesen Zusammenhang gilt es jedoch noch genauer zu untersuchen. Hinsichtlich der Feedbacknutzung zeigen die Ergebnisse, dass nur wenige Lernende einfaches Feedback (knowledge of result) als Anlass nehmen, ihre Ergebnisse zu korrigieren. Die Nutzung elaborierten Feedbacks erscheint als sehr heterogen, wobei für Lernende mit geringem Vorwissen mit höherer Feedbacknutzung eine geringere Leistung einhergeht. Inwiefern die Feedbackgestaltung, die -wahrnehmung und -nutzung miteinander zusammenhängen, gilt es noch genauer zu untersuchen. Insbesondere qualitative Arbeiten besitzen das Potenzial Verarbeitungsprozesse von Lernende genauer zu untersuchen.

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Dissertation
Die Sorge ums Kind: Zur Problematisierung von Elternschaft im 21. Jahrhundert
Thiele, Lena
2025|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1684

Elternschaft erscheint im 21. Jahrhundert in vielfacher Hinsicht problematisch und risikobehaftet. Dies betrifft die Vorsorge in der Schwangerschaft, die Planung der Geburt und die Ernährung des Säuglings ebenso wie Rollenerwartungen an Mütter und Väter. Insbesondere Eltern der gebildeten Mittelschicht engagieren sich emotional, zeitlich und finanziell in erhöhtem Maße. Denn für ein gesundes und glückliches Leben muss, so die verbreitete Annahme, schon vor der Geburt der Grundstein gelegt werden. Die wachsende Sorge ums Kind wird durch überhöhte Vorstellungen begünstigt. Schwangerschaft und Babyzeit erscheinen als eine Lebensphase voller Glück. Doch das Streben nach dem Ideal erfordert große Anstrengungen – vor allem, da die kulturellen Vorstellungen einer „guten Mutter“ oder eines „guten Vaters“ oftmals widersprüchlich sind. Die Geburt soll sanft und sicher sein, Mutterliebe und Autonomie der Frau gelten gleichermaßen als selbstverständlich, ebenso die Mahnung zur Frühförderung und die Warnung vor Überforderung des Kindes. Zudem kollidieren vielfältige Informationen über mögliche Risiken mit einem Aufruf zu Gelassenheit. Anhand der Zeitschrift „Eltern“ zeigt die Analyse, wie sich das Ideal einer intensiven Elternschaft seit Ende der 1960er Jahre entwickeln konnte – trotz parallel verbesserter Bedingungen von Schwangerschaft, Geburt und Elternzeit. Mit Hilfe dreier Konzepte zur modernen Gesellschaft von Michel Foucault, Andreas Reckwitz und Eva Illouz wird die tiefe Verankerung eines kulturellen Skripts deutlich, das ein Gefühl des Ungenügens begünstigt und es Eltern im 21. Jahrhundert erschwert, auf ihre Intuition zu vertrauen.

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Journal Article
Empowering Communities Through Citizen Entrepreneurship: A Case Study of the #Wirvsvirus Project and Its Impact
Schikarski, Larissa
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1696

This article explores Citizen Entrepreneurship (CE) as a powerful tool for addressing global challenges through local action, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the #WirvsVirus project in Germany, the study analyzes the theoretical underpinnings, practical applications, and future implications of CE. Key elements such as collective efficacy, proximity, and user-producer identities are discussed, offering a comprehensive framework for understanding CE’s role in fostering social innovation and community resilience.

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Habilitation
The Electric Guitar in Rock Music
Herbst, Jan-Peter
2025|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1664

This research examines the role and practices of the electric guitar in rock music in terms of playing styles and techniques, technologies, and various relevant cultures. With a portfolio of three books, four articles, and three chapters, the research analyses the affordances and limitations of harmonic distortion for solo and rhythm guitar playing in rock music from its beginnings to contemporary practices, with a particular focus on virtuosity and ‘shredding’—the (often) ostentatious display of technical prowess. Concerning technology, the research explores the musical, sociological, and psychological dimensions of equipment choice and acquisition (including the so-called ‘gear acquisition syndrome’), advances in guitar and amplification technologies, and the creation of an effective and expressive guitar sound in record production. Finally, the research documents how playing practices and equipment use are negotiated in mainstream and niche cultures, focusing on more recent scenes prevalent on the internet. The portfolio, as a whole, fills significant gaps in current (electric) guitar scholarship by examining topics relevant to practising guitarists from a musicological perspective, as opposed to 1) common approaches in popular/cultural studies that tend to ignore issues of playing and technologies in favour of issues related to identity, society, and the environment, and 2) computer science and engineering approaches that quantify the material reality of the instrument with little regard to playing and guitar culture.

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Journal Article
Students’ Beliefs About Trigger Warnings
Sevincer, Timur; Tenbrueggen, Leonie; Sokolis, Marvin
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1695

Trigger warnings aim to help people emotionally prepare for potentially disturbing material or avoid the material altogether. There has been a lively debate in society and academia whether the widespread use of trigger warnings helps, harms, or has no substantial impact. Recent meta-analytic evidence suggests trigger warnings have no effect on people’s emotional reaction, avoidance, and comprehension. They do however heighten a negative anticipatory reaction. We examined students’ attitudes toward trigger warnings in a non-English-speaking country – Germany, and whether their beliefs about the effects of trigger warnings on themselves and others match the meta-analytic evidence. Students held relatively positive attitudes toward trigger warnings and advocated their use. Their beliefs about the effects of trigger warnings however did not concur well with the actual effects. Our findings suggest that making students aware of the empirical evidence on trigger warnings would benefit discussions around trigger warnings.

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Journal Article
Organizing Counterpublics: Scenes from Contemporary Russia
Kalinina, Anna; Beyes, Timon
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1694

Writings on counterpublics, publicness and the public realm present a theoretical and empirical dialectic of a public sphere in the singular and multiple counterpublics. We update and relocate this interplay by situating our paper in present-day Russia and the protests against the invasion of Ukraine. Through exemplary scenes of counterpublicness, and drawing upon Russian and Western scholarship, we develop a notion of counterpublics as a minimal condition of organization understood as the collective capacity to act. If the public sphere designates a controlled theatre for the organization of social experience, then the self-organized and dispersed struggle to enable moments of publicness keeps alive and rehearses political organizing under dire conditions.

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Journal Article
Organized Labor, Labor Market Imperfections, and Employer Wage Premia
Dobbelaere, Sabien; Hirsch, Boris; Mueller, Steffen; Neuschaeffer, Georg
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1693

This article examines how collective bargaining through unions and workplace codetermination through works councils relate to labor market imperfections and how labor market imperfections relate to employer wage premia. Based on representative German plant data for the years 1999–2016, the authors document that 70% of employers pay wages below the marginal revenue product of labor and 30% pay wages above that level. Findings further show that the prevalence of wage markdowns is significantly smaller when organized labor is present, and that the ratio of wages to the marginal revenue product of labor is significantly larger. Finally, the authors document a close link between labor market imperfections and mean employer wage premia, that is, wage differences between employers corrected for worker sorting.

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Journal Article
Unseating Mastery: The University and the Promise of the New
Hörl, Erich; Lalu, Premesh
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1692

The conversation between Erich Hörl and Premesh Lalu draws on their extended conversation on efforts to link discordant temporal and spatial encounters with the idea of the university and how, more importantly, to care for the future of its educational responsibilities. While much of the debate on the university is focused on how it is affected by large-scale geopolitical shifts and the rapid expansion of technological resources, Hörl and Lalu bring into view a language of the university that holds to its promise in the sources of a founding supplement that may yet exhibit the potential for guiding the university through turbulent times ahead. This is a call for a retracing of the emergence of the complex hegemony of the master signifier in university discourse, and the potential to supersede it by way of a re-articulation of the desire for a concept of freedom borne out of the emancipation of the 19th-century institution of slavery.

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Journal Article
Cultivating dispersed collectivity: How communities between organizations sustain employee activism
Stöber, Anna; Girschik, Verena
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1690

Pushing for social change at work is frustrating and precarious. Many employee activists therefore seek support in communities that form around their aspirations and reside ‘between’ organizations. This article advances our understanding of how community participation shapes employee activists’ experiences of their change agency as they return to and pursue their social purpose in their corporate lives. Grounded in an in-depth qualitative study of an inter-organizational community of employee activists, we introduce the notion of ‘dispersed collectivity’: employee activists generate a shared sense of collectivity that they maintain even as they disperse into their workplaces. Dispersed collectivity enables subtle agentic experiences by emboldening employee activists to endure their often-challenging corporate lives, unsettle corporate norms, and detach from their corporate positions. Even without mobilizing a collective push for change across firms, communities can thus play a critical role in sustaining employee activism. Our study contributes a more nuanced account of employee activists’ change agency and offers new theoretical insights into the role of inter-organizational communities in social change, the practices they can use to build collective momentum and empathic connections, and their impact on employee activists’ determination to drive social change from within.

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Journal Article
CSR Communication and the Polarization of Public Discourses: Introduction to the Special Issue
Schoeneborn, Dennis; Golob, Urša; Trittin-Ulbrich, Hannah; Wenzel, Matthias; O'Connor, Amy
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1689

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication faces significant challenges due to an increasing polarization of public discourses. This polarization oversimplifies societal differences into “us versus them” dynamics, complicating consensus building and eroding trust in democratic processes. Traditionally, CSR communication research has focused on how organizations negotiate meanings between various stakeholders. However, the rise in polarization necessitates a broader research scope to understand its impact on CSR practices and organizational relationships. This Special Issue of Management Communication Quarterly explores these evolving challenges, analyzing how polarization reshapes CSR communication and outlining strategies for businesses to navigate this fragmented landscape. The issue also reflects on the broader role of corporations amidst tendencies of polarization and suggests directions for future research.

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Journal Article
Human trafficking in nairaland digital community: A corpus-assisted critical discourse study
Osisanwo, Ayo
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1688

Human trafficking in Nigeria as a topical issue has enjoyed more sociological interrogation with very scant attention in linguistics and discourse. This paper applies a corpus-assisted critical discourse study to examine representative posts on human trafficking in Nigeria (2019 to 2022) retrieved from the Nairaland digital community. Using the Sketch Engine corpus tool and social actors representation model, this paper investigates how different constructions were deployed by participants to represent human trafficking, human traffickers and traffick victims in Nigeria. Findings suggest four constructions oriented to negativity: prostitution/commodification of sex, abuse of underage for sexual satisfaction, maltreatment of others for huge labour, dismembering of humans for occultism and health-assurance. Participants deployed role allocation, nominalisation, and others to negatively evaluate human traffickers, especially as economic usurpers, exploiters, and fraudsters, while the traffick-victims were represented as naïve, non-violent, armless, defenceless and (in)active recipients of the activities of the human traffickers. The dominant negative constructs manifested implicitly and explicitly through tagging, negative comparison, appeal to sentimentalities, and expression of detest, while the positive constructs of victims manifested through pity and appeal to humanity. Online participants attack the political class, and declare their ideological stances on human traffickers in Nigeria, making efforts to project suppressed stances.

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Journal Article
Promoting leadership for learning in Nigeria: The interplay of leadership mastery experience and leader self-efficacy
Ugwuanyi, Christian; Pietsch, Marcus
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1687

Leadership for learning has emerged as a holistic leadership behaviour that combines aspects of instructional leadership, transformational leadership and shared leadership. Little is known about how this type of leadership develops and what antecedents are important. Following the rationales of Social Cognitive (Career) Theory and applying Chan and Drasgow's leader development model, we examine how leadership mastery experience and leader self-efficacy affect leadership for learning in Nigerian schools. We divide leaders’ self-efficacy into the belief that they have the necessary skills and abilities to be successful as leaders (leader self-regulatory self-efficacy) and the belief that the actions they take as leaders will have the desired effect (leader action self-efficacy). Using structural equation modelling, our results show that both leadership mastery experience and leader self-efficacy are relevant antecedents of leadership for learning, with self-efficacy mediating the effects of experience on leadership. Our results suggest efficiency–performance spirals and illustrate how important it is for the enactment of leadership for learning to believe in one's ability to competently perform various critical leadership actions.

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Journal Article
Leading Knowledge Exploration and Exploitation in Schools: The Moderating Role of Teachers’ Open Innovation Mindset
Özdemir, Nedim; Çoban, Ömür; Buyukgoze, Hilal; Gümüş, Sedat; Pietsch, Marcus
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1686

Aim: The purpose of this paper is to identify teacher-level latent profiles of open innovation mindset and explore how these profiles moderate the effects of leader-member exchange on their exploitation and exploration activities. We also aim to investigate the indirect effects of principal transformational leadership on exploration activities via leader-member exchange. Research Design: Using a sample of 3,075 teachers working in 261 schools from 12 provinces across Türkiye, this study, first, employed a moderation analysis with latent profiles variables and, second, conduct a two-level structural equation model. Findings: Latent profile analysis produced three types of teacher mindset profiles: growth, average, and fixed. Findings indicate the quality of the dyadic exchange with the school principal did not influence engagement in exploitation activities of teachers with a growth mindset, whereas it contributed to the exploration activities of those teachers. Our results showed that when teachers perceived that their principal exhibited a higher level of transformational leadership behavior, they were more likely to have a higher leader-member exchange, which in turn increased the teachers’ exploration behavior. Implications: This study highlights both exploitative and explorative activities are facilitated by high-quality work-related social processes within the school, and we need to recognize affective and relational contexts in the schools, as they are primarily social institutions.

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Journal Article
My Cigarette Wife and Other Queer Tales of Kinship from Tunisia’s Contemporary Public Art Scene
Malachowski, Justin
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1685

This article explores the contradictions and political possibilities of creating a “safe space” using “family” as an organizational concept in a contemporary public art project in Tunisia. Amidst the backdrop of foreign development funding for the arts flowing into Tunisia and a global contemporary art scene where “patriarchal structures” are taken as antithetical to collaborative practices, family has been an intuitive and meaningful mode of organizing artistic projects in Tunisia, particularly as it relates to fostering safe spaces for queer youth. As opposed to “participation,” “commoning,” and other institutionally supported art concepts, family is not a concept widely exhibited. In relation to tendencies toward “sensible” approaches to the political efficacy of contemporary art, the artistic practice of making family points to a “nonsensible” politics of aesthetics, where the aesthetic is better understood not as the location of politics but as a quality of feeling that enables spaces of political possibility.

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Journal Article
A safe space and leadership matter for innovation: Exploring the role of psychological safety in the relationship between transformational leadership and innovation radicalness in Kyrgyz classrooms
Bellibaş, Mehmet Şükrü; Ryskulueva, Farida; Levin, Julia; Pietsch, Marcus
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1683

The present research examines the relationship between school transformational leadership and innovation radicalness in classrooms with the moderating and mediating role of psychological safety, to provide an understanding of whether and to what extent the influence of leadership on innovation radicalness in teaching might be strengthened or weakened across various levels of psychological safety. Utilizing a dataset that included 5052 teachers working in 147 schools across Kyrgyzstan, we conducted multilevel analyses to test the proposed hypotheses. We found a positive association of transformational leadership with psychological safety and innovation radicalness in classrooms at the teacher level. Moreover, transformational leadership was more strongly related to radical innovation in schools with greater psychological safety among teachers both at the teacher and school levels. We conclude that school principals should prioritize the emotional state of teachers characterized by psychological safety by acting as transformational leaders, thereby enhancing the impact of their practices on the realization of higher innovation radicalness in the pedagogical practices of teachers.

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Journal Article
Homelessness, Housing Crisis and Solutions Made by Citizens
Tan, Kayra Irmak
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1682

Journal Article
Drawing a Picture of Citizen Entrepreneurship
Jank, Susanne
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1681

Journal Article
Possibilities of imitation
Oomen, Danna; Genschow, Oliver
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1680

Humans tend to automatically imitate others. This tendency is generally explained by a common representation of observed and executed actions. However, people do not imitate each and any behavior they observe. Instead, they have different possibilities in terms of when, what, and whom they imitate. Here, we review the literature on the various factors that modulate imitative behavior to get an overview of these possibilities. While the reviewed literature supports the idea of possibilities in terms of how people imitate, this overview also emphasizes that the evidence for most factors has been rather mixed or preliminary. This calls for more replication studies, both conceptual and direct, before firm conclusions can be made for each modulating factor.

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Journal Article
Discourse of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in Newspaper Editorials on Insecurity in Nigeria
Osisanwo, Ayo
2024|DOI: 10.48548/pubdata-1679

The spate of security threats in Nigeria has recently become quite alarming, dominating newspaper headlines and editorials. This article examines the discourse strategies deployed in the representation of ‘self’ and ‘other’ by editorials in two Nigerian newspapers on the security challenges in Nigeria. Drawing insights from Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of critical discourse analysis, the sampled editorials on insecurity in Nigeria from two e-versions of newspapers from the northern (Leadership Nigeria) and southern (Punch) parts of Nigeria, published from 2017 to 2020 are subjected to discourse analysis. The paper identified the deployment of eight discourse strategies, motivated by nationalist and humanist ideologies. The newspapers polarise between self and other through positive in-group and negative out-group ideologies on the security challenges bedevilling Nigeria with attendant implications for Africa and the world at large.

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