Publications

In the era of Agriculture 4.0, agricultural cooperatives are struggling to understand the challenges and threats the digital platforms of large agribusiness corporations represent for the competitiveness of cooperative systems. An opportunity in this context is for agricultural cooperatives to enter the platform economy and collaboratively develop their digital platform. This study aims to analyze the process of creating a digital platform through the collaboration of agribusiness cooperatives. The action research method, which involved four interconnected cycles, was followed. The first cycle aimed to generate strategic alignment among thirty cooperatives to promote digital innovation. The second cycle referred to conceptualizing and establishing the project's governance structure and developing three minimum viable products. The third cycle involved the construction of the digital platform. The fourth and final cycle focused on instantiating the platform through diffusion and utilization by the cooperatives. A digital platform was developed, considering the potential for building relationships and adopting cooperative concepts. The platform gives participants access to a digital business ecosystem and direct access to the community of users, the infrastructure and the data. This means the cooperatives can manage them without subordination to large multinational companies that may threaten their long-term survival. The study contributes to theory by proposing a systematic method to create digital platforms following a cooperative approach. It also contributes to the managerial practice by revealing the steps and challenges managers may face when implementing digital platforms in the context of cooperatives. The platform attracted over 13,000 active users in three years and represented more than 1,700,000 ha of land for food production in Brazil.

In this article, I argue that pioneer African writing (in the frame of the empire writing back) hinges its anti-colonial aesthetics and politics on what I see as the African natural world—a space of nonhuman–human entanglement ruled by the natural order of things. In confronting colonial discourse, the writers, in most cases, resort to deploying the natures (I prefer the plural form) and the nonhuman elements of their traditional societies, which constitute what many scholars see as the cultural context of their writing in postcolonial reading practice. By way of shifting the paradigm, I propose an ecocentric reading practice that unbundles the notion of cultural context to reveal its heavy reliance on the African natural world. The recourse to natures, I argue, is a decolonial strategy, in that the writers deploy the natural world to counter the Western civilisation imposed on their epistemological order. In the end, the natural world remains the forte of the African writer in presenting a civilisation that claims to be more all-embracing (of humans and their nonhuman others) than the Western one with emphasis on human exceptionalism. I then read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino as illustrations of how African writers of the colonial moment anchor their counter-discourse on the African natural world. It is hoped that this reading practice will inspire a revisionist reading of African literature that places indigenous ecology at the centre of decolonial philosophy and practice.

In 2018, a Tanzanian government official announced a crackdown on homosexuality. International actors rapidly expressed their disapproval and temporarily suspended some foreign aid, which elicited a negative response from the Tanzanian government and soured donor–recipient relations. The incident was short-lived, however, and expressed mainly at the symbolic level and does not appear to have achieved any change in policies or practices either among the donors or in Tanzania. How should one interpret this sudden eruption of frictions and its lack of impact and what are its implications? I argue that international actors felt pressure to take quick, visible action, regardless of how ineffective those steps could be expected to be. Politicians from Tanzania's ruling party seized this occasion to ramp up anti-LGBT+ and anti-donor rhetoric, attempting to strengthen their standing domestically. Both sides used the opportunity to express their identity as either defenders or opponents of LGBT+ rights. This case shows how donor–recipient frictions can be primarily performative and reflect both sides' desire to please their own constituencies without implementing any lasting changes to aid flows or domestic policy in the recipient country.

This article examines current developments towards workations as a new form of hybrid tourism driven by the Covid-19 pandemic. The neologism workation is composed of the words work and vacation – two terms that at first glance seem incompatible or even contradictory in tourism research. Since our study aims to delve deeper into the phenomenon of workation, we conducted a qualitative study in which we explored both the supply side (hotel managers) and the demand side (workationers). Based on the analysis of eleven qualitative interviews, we show that workationers neither fit into the category of working tourists nor traveling workers. Instead, the artificially created distinction between business and leisure tourism seems to be outdated, especially in a digitalized world.

Over recent decades, one can identify two key narratives associated with changes in university organization and governance. The first narrative focuses on the administrative consequences of an off-loading state relinquishing direct control over some of universities’ internal operations while at the same time driving bureaucratization at the institutional level. The second narrative focuses on the emergence of an increasingly competitive and uncertain environment driving universities to transform into strategically managed organizations. In this paper, we argue that while the organizational logics associated with these two narratives imply differently accentuated forms of legitimation, they converge and combine with respect to key dimensions of universities’ internal organizing, ultimately giving rise to a hybrid form of organizational governance we label ‘strategic bureaucracy’. Such strategic bureaucracy, we illustrate, is characterized by a strong focus on strategic leadership and the associated management techniques while also intensifying organizational features traditionally associated with bureaucratic governance such as formalization and hierarchical authority.

Since conflict is a ubiquitous phenomenon in inter- but also intra-organizational work, conflict management behavior (CMB) is a preconditioning factor for successful cooperations. Prior research shows, that CMB can be individualistic or collectivistic in orientation and highlights the episodic nature of CMB. However, in focusing on analyzing specific conflicts and conflict dynamics in cooperations, research paid less attention to how conflict and CMB are influenced by structural patterns and thus might overstate the role of individual agency compared to the role of the general structure of the cooperation. We address this issue by investigating the inter-organizational cooperation of IT-freelancers and their client organizations. Based on 18semi-structured problem-centered and expert interviews with IT-freelancers, representatives of client organizations and agencies, we show that the CMB orientation depends on the very institutionalized sequential stages of the cooperation. While individualistic CMBs dominate the pre-contract sequence, in which recruitment processes and negotiations take place, parties switch to collectivistic CMB in the contract sequence, in which the actual cooperation iscarried out. The post-contract sequence serves for reflections on the cooperation and thereby affects the readiness for future collaborations andinforms future pre-contract sequences, again. Thus, with focus on the IT industry the paper addresses research gaps related to the specific temporality and temporal structuring of contingent work. It introduces a sequence-oriented framework and analysis of conflict and conflict management in inter-organizational projects and thereby complements the established episodical perspective on conflicts by taking into account a rather structural viewpoint.

In some instances, two basic development cooperation principles appear to be in direct contradiction: on the one hand, the Sustainable Development Goals prescribe universal social inclusion under the leitmotif of “leave no one behind”, mandating an emphasis on the most marginalized. On the other hand, the cornerstone of development cooperation is “ownership”, which recognizes that countries must be free to choose their own priorities and strategies. To what extent can these two principles be reconciled in “hostile environments”, places where certain groups, such as LGBTQI+ people, are marginalized and even persecuted and criminalized? I argue that, while the SDGs are clear about the need for radical inclusion, the ownership principle lacks precision about who “owns” the concept. Adopting an emancipatory conceptualization of ownership, under which the ultimate beneficiaries should be the ones to determine priorities and strategies, eliminates the apparent contradiction and legitimizes support to marginalized groups even if their own governments disagree.

Sozial- und gesundheitspolitische Transformationsprozesse haben in den letzten Jahrzehnten zu Veränderungen im deutschen Gesundheitssystem geführt, die auch den Wandel von Karrierewegen, insbesondere von Frauen, einschließen. Im Beitrag analysieren wir, wie insbesondere weibliche Karrieren in der Medizin kollektiv von verschiedenen institutionellen Logiken (Barley 1989) beeinflusst werden. Führungsrollen, bestimmte Berufe und die zu ihrer Ausübung erforderlichen Fähigkeiten werden dabei an Männlichkeit bzw. an das männliche Geschlecht geknüpft. Ein Paradebeispiel hierfür ist die Medizin (Krell 2008). Andere institutionelle Logiken betreffen den Mangel an medizinischen Fachkräften, die Ökonomisierung bzw. Kommodifizierung sowie die Feminisierung der Medizin. Flankierend hierzu ändern sich auch die Ansprüche an Arbeit. So führen z. B. gestiegene Ansprüche an die Work-Life-Balance zu einer Zunahme der Teilzeitbeschäftigung von Ärzt*innen im Krankenhausbereich, was einerseits die Realisierung veränderter Arbeitsanforderungen ermöglicht, andererseits aber Auswirkungen auf die beruflichen Karrieren hat. Unser Datenmaterial umfasst zwei qualitative Studien mit Ärzt*innen in deutschen Krankenhäusern. Die beiden Studien wurden zu unterschiedlichen Zeitpunkten durchgeführt, um nicht nur die Veränderungen in den Karriereverläufen von Frauen zu analysieren, sondern auch die Auswirkungen der oben erwähnten Transformation der beruflichen Laufbahnen.

The article focuses on the book "Geistesarbeit," exploring the intersection of intellectual work and practical activity in the humanities, particularly in German studies. It delves into the concept of moderation as an essential aspect of intellectual work, showcasing the authors' analysis of various practices and their moderating influence, presenting a viewpoint that emphasizes continuity rather than crises within the field and discussions about the state of the humanities.