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As human rights evolved to become part of a dominant moral discourse in world politics, regional organisations (ROs) often portray themselves in the language of human rights. Facing growing contestation and politicisation, they have also gradually begun to legitimate their authority drawing on human rights. Yet not all ROs do so to the same extent, in the same manner, or consistently over time. This begs the question: why and how do ROs use human rights for self-legitimation? To answers this research question, I combine a macro analysis using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) on 23 ROs from 1980 to 2019 with a micro analysis via process-tracing in two cases - Arab League (LoAS) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Ultimately, ROs use human rights in their legitimation because they strive for congruence. When norms, values, and moral principles purported and embodied by the RO are congruent with those of its core constituency and all relevant audiences, The researcher observes human rights legitimation. She argues that the degree of congruence combines with different degrees of delegitimation stemming from the distinct constellation of agents and audiences of legitimation. Shee circumscribes this via four types of human rights legitimisers. Testing existing theories on legitimacy, legitimation, and human rights, the QCA suggests that "Self-containing Legitimisers" are ROs with a status quo of congruence between the RO and its core constituency. "Signalling Legitimisers" irregularly use human rights legitimation as a signal to respond to additional audiences. Thanks to the case studies, the author further refines existing theory. CARICOM constitutes a case of a "Reviving Legitimisers" where delegitimation towards their core constituency occurs to which it reacts by reviving what it embodies which entails including human rights in its legitimation. With LoAS, the author observes a "Brokering Legitimisers" in which case delegitimation is on the verge of a legitimacy crisis, but its Secretary General manages to broker human rights to two diverging audiences thanks to localisation. Thus, this book provides an explanation of how a distinct norm is used in self-legitimation, nuances our understanding of agents and audiences of legitimation, and introduces the concept of localisation to the study of legitimation.
New media and digital technologies open up numerous possibilities to document different versions of reality, which makes it essential to examine how they transform the logic behind the creation and production of documentaries in digital cultures. The goal of this study is to investigate the integration between the traditional documentary and new media: the interactive documentary, in the context of the different sociocultural and technological environments of China and the West. Accordingly, a comparative study on the evolution and integration of these two fields was carried out. The documentary genre brings with it a method of classification and various modes of representing reality, while new media provide new approaches to interactivity as well as the production and distribution of interactive documentaries. In this context, the study examines the differences and characteristics of interactive documentaries in China and the West. Interactive documentaries grow and change as a continuously evolving system, engaging the roles of the author and the user, such that their roles are mixed for better co-expression and the reshaping of their shared environment. In addition, an analytical approach based on the types of interactivity was adopted to explore this new form of documentary both to deduce how the stories about our shared world can be told and to understand the impact of interactive documentaries on the construction of our versions of the reality as well as our role in it.
The food and land use system is one of the most important global economic sectors. At the same time, today's resource-intensive agricultural practices and the profit orientation in the food value chain lead to a loss of biological diversity and ecosystem services, high emissions, and social inequality - so-called negative externalities. From a scientific perspective, there is a broad consensus on the need to transform the current food system. This paper investigates the suitability of True Cost Accounting (TCA) as an approach to inte-grating positive and negative externalities into business decisions in the food and land use system, focusing on the retail sector due to its high market power and resulting influence on externalities along the entire food value chain. For this purpose, a qualitative study was con-ducted with sustainability managers of leading European food retail companies in terms of their annual turnover, sustainable finance experts, and political actors related to environmental and social policy. A sample of N=11 participants was interviewed about the emergence and meas-urement of externalities along the food value chain, the current and future relevance of knowing about externalities for food retail companies, and the market and policy framework necessary for the application of TCA. The data collected was evaluated using the method of qualitative content analysis according to Mayring. Findings show that TCA is a suitable method for capturing positive and negative external ef-fects along the food value chain and thus also for meeting the growing social, political, and financial demands for its sustainable orientation. At the same time, there are still some chal-lenges in the application of TCA, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view. The main challenges at present are the lack of a standardised methodology, data availability, and key performance indicators. Due to the focus on prices, margins and competitors, food retail groups, in particular, emphasise the risk of revenue and profit losses as well as customer churn when applying TCA. Hence, the introduction of TCA in the food and land use system requires the development of measures that are socially acceptable, backed by legal frameworks and promote the scientific development of the methodology. This offers the opportunity to create a level playing field, apply the polluter-pays principle to the entire value chain and support science in developing appropriate indicators as well as a TCA database. Food retail companies can benefit from addressing TCA at an early stage by analysing their value chain to initiate change processes early, identify risk raw materials and products, reduce negative externalities through targeted measures, sensitise customers to the issue and thus differentiate themselves from competitors.
The ethical apparatus: The material-discursive shaping of ethics, autonomy, and the driverless car
(2023)
This research argues that the emergent driverless car, as a kind of autonomous vehicle, is a Foucault-ian "ethical apparatus", working as an epistemic device to materially embody and enable discursive power by generating notions of "autonomy" and "ethical decision-making". The ethical implications of AI, algorithmic, and autonomous technologies are topics of current regulatory and academic concern. This concern relates to the lack of meaningful oversight of black boxes inside AI systems, liabilities for manufacturers, and inadequate frameworks to hold AI-based socio-technical systems to account. One recent artefact, the driverless car, has taken on these concerns quite literally in the shaping of a niche discourse of the "ethics of autonomous driving". Ambitions to produce a fully autonomous vehicle based on AI technologies are constrained by speculative concerns that its decision-making in unexpected accident situations cannot be assumed to protect humans. "The ethics of autonomous driving" evaluates proposals to build "ethical machines" by examining the relationship between structures of human values and moral decision-making, and how they comport to computational architectures for decision-making. This is the first case this work takes up, chiefly organised around an analysis of a thought experiment, the Trolley Problem, and the online game, Moral Machine, that crowdsourced values to suggest approaches to an "ethics of autonomous driving". Rather than evaluate the feasibility or appropriateness of these two approaches, this work attends to the more critical issue that ethics is being proposed in terms of technologies turning on the logics of risk, speculation, and probabilistic correlations that are fundamental to how machine learning makes decisions. The concern in this work is less a normative framework or approach for a better or more appropriate ethics of autonomous driving. Rather, this work argues that what we understand as "the ethical" is being transformed when architected by, through, and for Artificial Intelligence / autonomous technologies to become their own regulators. Hence the production of autonomous driving necessitates computational infrastructures that are creating a world legible to and for the navigation of a driverless car. The author argues that this is fostering computational governance that has implications for human bodies and social relations, chiefly that conventional approaches to regulation and accountability attend to human values and decision-making rather than computational ones. A second case that this research examines is that of driverless car crashes, to examine how "autonomous" driving requires substantial embodied human knowledge and micro-work. Taken together, these two cases make an argument for how myriad practices of knowledge-production are translating the human world into something legible to the navigational needs of the car, producing changes in the human world through the actions of the car on that basis, and advancing notions of "autonomy". This work concludes with arguments for a critical reconceptualisation of ethics and ethical decision-making in AI / autonomous systems.
This dissertation contributes to research on generating actionable knowledge for coastal governance to enhance the resilience of coastal social-ecological systems (SES) to climate change. It does this by providing theoretical, methodological and empirical insights on three research questions (RQs). These are: (1) what is a more actionable concept for applying the concept of resilience in coastal governance?; (2) what methods and approaches are suitable to generate actionable knowledge for coastal governance?; (3) what obstacles to knowledge co-production exist for early-career researchers (ECRs) and how can they be overcome? The RQs are addressed in five publications. For answering RQ1, the dissertation applies a research synthesis to bring together common themes and challenges documented in resilience, climate change and environmental governance literature. For answering RQ2, different methods and approaches for generating actionable knowledge are proposed and tested using a case-study in the SES of Algoa Bay, South Africa. These include (i) the analysis of stakeholder agency; (ii) the application of a stakeholder analysis; and (iii) the combination of a capital approach framework, and fuzzy cognitive mapping. Finally, for answering RQ3, the thesis provides a perspective on the obstacles that especially ECRs face, and actions that are needed to create the conditions under which knowledge co-production processes can be successful. This is done by applying a multi-method approach combining an online survey and workshop targeted at ECRs in the marine sciences. Key findings suggest that system and transformative knowledge are particularly important when applying the concept of resilience in coastal governance to generate actionable knowledge. The different methods and approaches that are proposed and tested contribute to generating both system and transformative knowledge. Firstly, they provide an overview of the capacities of different stakeholders to act, shed light on current collaboration and knowledge exchange, and enable the identification of different governance processes for coastal governance and climate change adaptation (system knowledge). Secondly, results have implications for how to improve knowledge exchange and identify leverage points that can enhance overall governance performance, thus providing recommendations on actions and processes that can enhance climate resilience in the case-study area (transformative knowledge). It is also highlighted how knowledge co-production can contribute to generating system and transformative knowledge together with stakeholders, and what actions are needed to build the capacities to translate knowledge into action. Additionally, the findings of this dissertation put forward actions that are needed at different organisational levels of the academic system to facilitate knowledge co-production processes with stakeholders involved in coastal governance. The results of this dissertation have implications for stakeholders and decision-making in the case-study area, as well as for environmental governance, climate change adaptation and broader sustainability research. Implications for stakeholders include recommendations for implementing formal commitments to share climate information across levels and sectors, establishing the role of information providers in the municipality, and reinforcing human capital within the local municipality in Algoa Bay. Findings also suggest the need for a more integrated approach to climate change adaptation in coastal planning and management frameworks. It also suggests that the conservation of environmental assets presents an important bottleneck for resilience management and needs to be further prioritised within decision-making. Implications for research include the applicability of methods beyond the context of this dissertation; a more actionable concept for approaching resilience in (coastal) governance systems; and a more critical reflection on how transformative research is conducted, and what academic foundation is needed so that it can fulfil its societal goal.
This thesis deals with sustainability in African Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and the influence of language in achieving sustainable development. Several authors highlight the existing imbalance of sustainability research in higher education, with most publications focusing on the so-called Global North. Little is known about sustainability in the so-called Global South, and in African educational institutions in particular. The first article of this thesis investigated existing sustainability activities in African HEIs. Rather than focusing on the shortcomings, the paper took a positive stance, opposing the predominant language of deficits in research on Africa. In the Delphi study conducted, 32 experts from 29 HEIs in 16 African countries described the sustainability activities they are engaging in. Experts provided information about their experiences in their respective HEI, while language and culture emerged as areas in need of further research. The second article therefore focused on the relationship between language and education for sustainable development in African educational institutions, and systematically reviewed scholarly literature regarding this connection. Authors of the reviewed 33 papers approached this connection mainly on a theoretical and philosophical level, focusing on education and Africa as a whole rather than specified forms of education in specific countries. The third article examined the views of Tanzanian higher education students and graduates regarding language and sustainability. Participants explained how they integrate sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into their research and how they approach translations in the process. In the ensuing interviews, participants estimated that only a fraction of people outside of academia are aware of sustainability and the SDGs, rendering the achievement of target 4.7 unlikely. This thesis therefore contributes to a better understanding of the current challenges in implementing sustainability and the SDGs in African educational institutions. It highlights the need to integrate (local) African languages in order for sustainability activities as well as the SDGs to be successful.
This study examines the perspective of German venture capitalists on the success factors of digital startups and follows an explorative three-dimensional research approach that integrates the micro perspective on the entrepreneurial personality, the macro perspective on the entrepreneurial context, and the meso perspective on the business model. Thus, the study operates in a very young field of entrepreneurship research. One of the purposes of this research project is to work out the significance of particular characteristics at each research level for the economic success of a digital start-up from the perspective of German venture capitalists. Furthermore, the study sheds light on the view of this group of experts on the relevance of an entire group of characteristics. To answer the central research questions, qualitative research methods and a mixed-methods approach are pursued, with quantitative and qualitative primary data being collected by means of theory-driven semi-structured expert interviews. As a result, a total of four articles have been produced: three articles that focus on presenting the results of qualitative research from only one of the three aforementioned research perspectives each, and a fourth article that combines methods from qualitative and quantitative research and derives an integrated, evidence-based working model of the economic success of digital startups from the perspective of German venture capital (VC) investors.
The requirements for the design of information and assistance systems in labour-intensive processes are interdisciplinary and have not yet been sufficiently addressed in research. This dissertation analyses, evaluates and describes possibilities for increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of labour-intensive processes through design-optimised socio-technical systems. The work thus contributes to further developing information and assistance systems for industrial applications and use in healthcare. The central dimensions of people, activity, context and technology are the focus of the scientific investigations following the Design Science Research paradigm. Design principles derived from this, a corresponding taxonomy, and a conceptual reference model for the design of socio-technical systems are the results of this dissertation.
This dissertation deals with the increasingly recognized role of incumbent firms in advancing sustainability-oriented industry transitions. Incumbent firms are understood as firms-in-industries, which are embedded in established market structures and thereby contrast new entrant firms. The purpose of this research is twofold. First, to provide empirical evidence of barriers to and success factors of incumbent-driven industry transitions. Second, to unify hitherto dispersed descriptions of transition-related firm behaviour in a new understanding of incumbent firms in industry transitions. To this end, theoretical concepts are discussed and extended on the basis of different empirical studies in the German meat industry. The meat industry serves as suitable research setting due to its diverse sustainability challenges, ranging from climate change and pollution to animal welfare and public health, as well as its current developments towards sustainable protein alternatives. The meat context also offers opportunities to delve into individual-level processes influencing transition-related behaviour. The main contribution of this dissertation is a Multi Embeddedness Framework (MEF) that details processes and outcomes of integrated incumbent firm behaviour, including passive, reactive and proactive behaviors. The framework acknowledges the diversity in incumbent firm behaviors within industries and firms and provides new insights into transition-related behaviors at firm and individual level. With regard to the latter, the potential of learning about and from innovative start-up firms as well as shared sensemaking processes are discussed. The contents of this dissertation provide valuable contributions to the transition literature as well as important management implications with regard to the stimulation and promotion of proactive behaviors
In the study, predictive models for predicting therapy outcome are created using the dataset from E-COMPARED project, which belongs to the so-called type 3 models that use data from the intervention and preintervention phases to predict treatment outcomes, which can help to adapt intervention to maximize treatment. The predictive models aim to classify patients into two groups, improved and nonimproved. Since it is important to determine whether the models contribute to improvement of treatment, research questions that can contribute to the usage of type 3 models are established. The study focuses on the following three questions: (1) How accurately can the therapy outcome be predicted by various machine learning algorithms? Answering this question can let the people concerned obtain information about the reliability of contemporary predictive models. In addition, if the predictive power of the models is good, it is more likely to be used to assist therapists’ decisions. (2) Which kind of data is more important in predicting the therapy outcome? The answer to this question can show which dataset should be considered first to make better predictive models. Therefore, it can be helpful for researchers who want to make predictive models in the future and eventually help to facilitate personalized therapy. (3) What are the features with strong predictive power? The answer to this question can affect the people concerned, especially therapists. Therapists can use the most influential features revealed to adjust and improve future treatments.