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Space-related science and technologies affect our daily life. Many countries have already formulated national space regulations to regulate their space activities. China, as one space-faring country, has obtained several achievements in space science and technologies. In recent years, Chinese private space companies have sprung up quickly, which requires a stable and foreseeable legal framework to ensure development. However, compared to the other space powers, China is the only one that has not enacted any formal national space laws. Against the background of strengthening the rule of law in China, research on China's domestic space legislation is valuable and significant. The purpose of this thesis is two-fold. First, to find the legal basis and necessity of national space legislation and to extract the basic content of the existing national space legislation, simultaneously, to identify the new developments in the content of other States´ legislative practices. Second, based on the study of national space legislation, to propose the essential content of China's space legislation.
In sub-Saharan Africa, women own or partly own one third of all businesses, thereby having a large potential to contribute to the economic development and societal well-being in this region. However, women-owned businesses tend to lag behind men-owned businesses in that they make lower profits, grow more slowly, and create fewer jobs. To identify reasons for this gap and effective means to promote women entrepreneurs, large parts of the entrepreneurship literature have compared male and female entrepreneurs with regard to individual characteristics, paying only limited attention to the underlying environmental conditions. This is problematic as women entrepreneurs operate under different conditions than men, with particularly pronounced differences in sub-Saharan Africa. Against this backdrop, the goal of this dissertation is to contribute to a more profound understanding of women entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa and its promotion through training by examining critical context factors. Specifically, the author analyzes two context factors that influence women's entrepreneurial performance and the success of training interventions: 1) women entrepreneurs' husbands and 2) the entrepreneurship trainer. These analyses are embedded in considerations of the cultural, social, and economic conditions women entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa are facing. In Chapter 2, the author conducts a systematic literature review on spousal influence in entrepreneurship and identifies six recurrent types of influence. Complementing the literature originating from Western settings, she develops propositions on how the sub-Saharan context affects husbands' influence on women entrepreneurship in this region. In Chapter 3, she builds on a cultural theory and an economic theory of the household to develop and empirically test a theoretical model of husbands' constraining and supportive influences on women entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa. The empirical results point to three distinct types of husbands that differ significantly in their impact on women entrepreneurs' business success. In Chapter 4, the author explores the influence of the trainer on the effectiveness of entrepreneurship training in sub-Saharan Africa by drawing on an unsuccessful training implementation. Qualitative analyses indicate that the use of adequate teaching methods is critical towards training success.
Gegenstand der Wissenssoziologischen Diskursanalyse (WDA) ist der sozialpolitische Diskurs zur Weiterentwicklung der Eingliederungshilfe für Menschen mit Behinderungen in der Zeit von 2005 bis 2016. Im Rahmen der WDA wurden zwei Diskursformationen, die die Weiterentwicklung der Eingliederungshilfe notwendig machen erarbeitet: Der Kapazitätendiskurs, der einen monetären Sachzwang konstituiert, auf der einen und der emanzipatorisch-bürgerrechtliche Diskurs, der die Nichtpassung des gegenwärtigen Hilfesystems mit menschenrechtlichen Bestrebungen einer gleichberechtigten und selbstbestimmten Teilhabe am Leben in der Gesellschaft thematisiert, auf der anderen Seite. Zudem wurde die diskursive Konstituierung des zentralen Reformkonzepts "Personenzentrierung", das produzierte Wissen über dieses Konzept, die Strategien der beteiligten Akteure, die mit dem Konzept verfolgt werden, und die dahinterliegenden Deutungsmuster de- und rekonstruiert. Personenzentrierung konstituiert sich insbesondere durch ihre Abgrenzung zu der nicht mehr gewollten, paternalistischen und tendenziell kostenaufwendigen Institutionenzentrierung. Sie beschreibt einen Steuerungsmodus, der mit der Zentrierung des Individuums als zentrales Steuerungsmoment im Leistungsgeschehen und deren Vorstellungen, ihre Leben zu führen, die je passgenauen Leistungen je individuell komponiert (Hilfe folgt Bedarf). Die doppelte Anschlussfähigkeit von Personenzentrierung an die ausgehenden Problemdiskurse offenbart zwei zentrale Deutungsfiguren: Personenzentrierung wird einerseits zu einem sozialpolitischen Steuerungsinstrument, das bedarfsgerechtere und effizientere Leistungen organisiert und Leistungsberechtigte zur Mitwirkung aktiviert, um damit Kosten zu sparen, und andererseits zu einem Selbstbestimmungskonzept, das Leistungsberechtigte aus paternalistisch-fürsorglichen Strukturen befreit und sie als Experten ihrer eigenen Teilhabebedarfe in den Mittelpunkt rückt.
Whereas the extant literature discusses what Sustainability-Oriented Innovations (SOIs) are and why firms develop them, little is known about how they are developed. To enable firms to innovate for sustainability, it is essential to know more about the processes underlying SOI development, which are considered as very difficult, with many firms failing. Drawing on several academic papers and relying on qualitative research methods, the thesis uses the Fireworks model to examine how innovation processes unfold at established small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The main contribution of the thesis is to advance the Fireworks model to the context of SOIs unfolding at SMEs. The findings reveal that SOIs unfold in an emergent, somewhat chaotic way, that duration and outcome are uncertain, that the overall journey is composed of multiple intertwined innovation paths, of which several will likely lead to setbacks. To manage this complex process, the thesis suggests to set four management foci: (1) to create a dedicated organizational unit for exploration, (2) to create conditions allowing intelligent learning for efficient exploration, (3) to carry out in-depth investigation of the related technological innovation systems, and (4) to plan carefully the re-integration of the innovation into the core business for commercialization.
This paper-based dissertation deals with capital structures and tax policies of German family businesses. Family firms as the predominant company form in Germany are mainly characterized by the overlapping of the two spheres family and business, both having different goal systems and preferences. This also has an impact on decision making with regard to corporate finance including the application of tax avoidance policies. In Germany, bank finance is the dominant financing source for family firms but there is a preference for internal finance since it comes along with more external independency. Extant research usually bases its results on samples of publicly listed companies. These studies come up with different results regarding family firms' actual financing preferences and capture their heterogeneity only to a very little extent. In this light, the present dissertation and its three papers examine different research questions in the context of capital structure decisions and tax avoidance in family firms. All the three papers apply a quantitative empirical research design. The first paper is a comparison between capital structures of family firms and non-family firms. The paper examines differences in bank debt and trade credit ratios. Overall, the findings show that family firms have significantly higher overall and long-term debt levels compared to their non-family counterparts. The identity as a family firm, which leads to a leap of faith by banks, can be a possible explanation for these results. The second paper is an in-depth examination of drivers of bank debt levels within the group of family firms. Further, it addresses heterogeneity amongst family firms and combines survey results and corresponding financial information. This represents a first attempt to capture family firm heterogeneity and its link to financial issues. The study shows that the more power in the company is exerted via management or supervisory board by the family, the less bank debt is used. Paper three is an extension of the previous two studies as it sheds light on tax avoidance, a significant instrument to strengthen the internal financing capability of a firm. This also takes up a research gap as there is very little research on taxation in family firms. Contrary to the expectation, the study reveals that private family firms might pay less tax than their non-family peers.
Der Anteil der Menschen, die persönlich oder familiär einen Herkunftsbezug zu Ländern außerhalb Deutschlands aufweisen, steigt seit Jahren an. Diese Menschen werden in der Bevölkerungsstatistik als Personen mit Migrationshintergrund erfasst, wobei vor allem die eigene Staatsangehörigkeit eine Rolle spielt, sowie diejenige der Eltern. In den Mobilitäts- und Verkehrswissenschaften ist das Wissen über diese Bevölkerungsgruppe in Deutschland sehr gering und fragmentiert. Wenig ist bekannt über das Vorhandensein von Nutzungsvoraussetzungen wie Führerscheinbesitz oder der Fähigkeit Fahrrad fahren zu können, über die Verfügbarkeit verschiedener Verkehrsmittel oder über das alltägliche Mobilitätsverhalten. Auffallend ist diese Lücke vor allem im Vergleich mit den USA, wo sich Verkehrs-, Bildungs- und Gesundheitswissenschaften mit dem Mobilitätsverhalten von Migranten beschäftigen. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, diese Wissenslücke für Deutschland zu verkleinern. Dabei stellt sich die Frage, ob sich Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund unter den hiesigen Rahmenbedingungen in ihren Mobilitätsvoraussetzungen und in ihrem alltäglichen Mobilitätsverhalten von den Menschen ohne Migrationshintergrund unterscheiden. Darüber hinaus ist die Identifikation wichtiger Einflussfaktoren zur Erklärung des Verhaltens von besonderem Interesse. Grundlage ist eine - teilweise explorativ angelegte - empirische Studie zum Mobilitätsverhalten von Menschen mit und ohne Migrationshintergrund in Offenbach am Main, die 2010 im Rahmen eines Forschungsprojekts am ILS-Institut für Landes- und Stadtentwicklungsforschung gGmbH durchgeführt wurde. Die Ergebnisse zeigen sowohl Gemeinsamkeiten als auch Unterschiede zwischen den Gruppen. Diese betreffen soziodemografische und -ökonomische Faktoren, mobilitätsbezogene Voraussetzungen wie Führerscheinbesitz oder Verkehrsmittelverfügbarkeit, Fragen zur Mobilitätskultur im Elternhaus, aber vor allem die alltägliche Nutzung verschiedener Verkehrsmittel. Die Ergebnisse werden in dieser Arbeit in Artikelform kumulativ präsentiert und durch einen einrahmenden Text eingeleitet, eingeordnet und im Zusammenhang diskutiert.
Metals fulfill crucial functions in areas as diverse as renewable energy, digitization and life style appliances, mobility, communication, or medicine. In the context of sustainability, achieving a more sustainable metal use means (i) minimizing the adverse effects associated with metal production and use and (ii) sustaining the availability of metals in a way that benefits present and future generations. Urgent need to act to avoid bottlenecks as well as meeting the challenge of possible conflicts of use among those areas of application calls for appropriate strategy making to intervene in the complex field of metal production and use that involves various, often interlinked operating levels, actors, and spatial and temporal scales. This dissertation focuses on strategies as a means to intervene in a system. It pursues the question, which design features could guide future strategy making to foster sustainability along the whole metal life cycle, and especially, how a better understanding of temporalities, i.e. understanding time in a diverse sense, could improve strategy design and help to bridge the assumed "transformation-material gap". This research converges the results from four research studies. A conceptual part explores the role of temporalities for interventions in complex and interlinked systems, which adds to the conceptual basis, on which the empirical part builds up to explore present and future interventions in metal production and use. The research revealed three essential needs that future strategies must tackle: (i) managing the complex interlinkages of processes and activities on various operational levels and spatial and temporal scales, (ii) providing clear guidance concerning the operationalization of sustainability principles, and (iii) keeping activities within the planet’s carrying capacity and embracing constant change as an inherent system characteristic. In response to these needs, the author developed three guidelines with two design features each (one relating to content, and one to the process of formulating and implementing the strategy) to guide future strategy making. The results show that time matters in this respect. If considered in close relation to space and diversely understood in the sense of temporalities, it serves to (i) understand the impact (duration and magnitude) of an intervention, (ii) recognize patterns of change that go beyond establishing linear, one-dimensional connections, and (iii) design interventions in a way that considers the resilience of a system. These findings can contribute to closer considering our understanding of transformation processes towards sustainability in future interventions in metal production and use.
Das Emotionswissen umfasst verschiedene Bereiche des Erkennens und des Verständnisses von den Emotionen und Emotionsauslösern in anderen Menschen. Die Entwicklung des Emotionswissens findet zu einem großen Teil in der frühen und mittleren Kindheit statt und hängt mit verschiedenen weiteren emotionalen, sozialen und kognitiven Kompetenzen zusammen. In der aktuellen Forschung bestehen jedoch große Unterschiede in der Operationalisierung des Konstruktes. Diese Dissertation hat das Ziel, einige Zusammenhänge des Emotionswissens mit weiteren Variablen genauer zu untersuchen und ein neues Instrument zur Erfassung des Emotionswissens bei Kindern vorzustellen. Es wird der Zusammenhang des Emotionswissens von Kindern in der frühen und mittleren Kindheit mit schulischem Erfolg in Form von der Peerakzeptanz, der Einstellung zur Schule und der akademischen Leistungen betrachtet. Zudem werden die Entwicklung des Emotionswissens bei Kindern mit und ohne Migrationshintergrund, unter Einbezug ihres Sprachverständnisses und ihrer behavioraler Selbstregulation, verglichen. Außerdem werden die psychometrischen Eigenschaften des neu entwickelten Adaptiven Tests des Emotionswissens für drei- bis neunjährige Kinder untersucht. In dem ersten Beitrag der Dissertation, der drei Metaanalysen zum Zusammenhang zwischen dem Emotionswissen und schulischem Erfolg vorstellt, ergaben sich ein mittlerer Zusammenhang des Emotionswissens mit akademischem Schulerfolg und kleine Zusammenhänge mit Peerakzeptanz und der Einstellung zur Schule. Es zeigte sich unter anderem der sozioökonomische Status als ein moderierender Faktor auf diese Zusammenhänge. Im zweiten Beitrag der Dissertation, in dem ein Zuwachsmodell des Emotionswissens unter Einbezug von drei Messzeitpunkten innerhalb eines Jahres berechnet wurde, zeigten Kinder mit Migrationshintergrund zu allen Messzeitpunkten ein statistisch bedeutsam geringeres Emotionswissen als Kinder ohne Migrationshintergrund. Der Zusammenhang des Migrationshintergrundes mit dem Anfangswert des Emotionswissens wurde dabei vom Sprachverständnis und der behavioralen Selbstregulation mediiert. Der Adaptive Test des Emotionswissens für drei-bis neunjährige Kinder wurde mit dem Ziel entwickelt, eine differenzierte und gleichzeitig zeitökonomische Erhebung des Emotionswisssens bei dieser Altersgruppe zu ermöglichen. Der dritte Beitrag der Dissertation stellt die psychometrischen Eigenschaften des Tests vor, der bei einer Stichprobe von 581 Kindern angewendet wurde. Die vorliegende Dissertation unterstreicht die Relevanz des Emotionswissens bezüglich des sozialen und akademischen Erfolges von Kindern und verdeutlicht die Herausforderungen, vor denen Kinder mit Migrationshintergrund stehen. Der Adaptive Test des Emotionswissens für drei-bis neunjährige Kinder stellte sich als ein reliables und valides Instrument heraus, welches die Forschung zum Emotionswissen von Kindern vergleichbarer machen könnte.
A central aspect of sustainability governance is collaboration, which has been lauded for its benefits but also criticized for its challenges. The potential benefits of collaboration have apparently been recognized also in the context of EU agriculture. Yet, there has been a lack of holistic consideration of how collaboration can be systematically integrated and promoted in the governance of EU agriculture. Sustainable agriculture cannot only be encouraged through changes in the overall governance system but also through the support of existing and emerging small-scale collaborative initiatives for sustainable agriculture. Indeed, there has been substantial research on the conditions that influence success of similar collaborative initiatives. However, the knowledge resulting from this research remains rather scattered and does not allow for the identification of overall patterns. Additionally, little of this research specifically focuses on sustainable agriculture. What is more, the promotion of collaboration for sustainable agriculture is further complicated by the lack of clarity of the meaning of sustainable agriculture, which is an inherently ambiguous and contested concept. This cumulative dissertation aims to address these gaps by contributing to a better understanding of how collaboration can be facilitated and designed as a means to govern for and advance sustainable agriculture. For this purpose, the dissertation addresses three sub-aims: 1) Advancing the understanding of the concept of sustainable agriculture; 2) scrutinizing the current governance system regarding its potential to facilitate or hamper collaboration; 3) assessing conceptually and empirically how actor collaboration can be facilitated as a means to govern for sustainable agriculture, both from a top-down and a bottom-up perspective. In doing so, this dissertation focuses on EU agriculture and applies a mix of methods, ranging from qualitative to quantitative dominant. The findings of this dissertation highlight that collaboration has been underappreciated and even hampered as an approach to governing for sustainable agriculture. In contrast, this dissertation argues that collaboration offers one promising way to promoting and realizing agriculture and emphasizes the need to integrate different approaches to collaboration and to sustainable agriculture.
This thesis deals with the influence of sustainability communication on the purchase decision of sustainable tourism products involving German specialist tour operators. Sustainability communication is a challenge, because sustainable tourism is an abstract and vague concept which consumers find it difficult to grasp and about which they are sceptical. The service characteristics of tourism products complicate the decision making stage, which is a high-involvement situation of uncertainty to which sustainable product attributes add complexity. As an introduction, an interdisciplinary theory discussion reveals knowledge gaps in terms of the value-belief-norm theory and the elaboration likelihood model (ELM). The first article, which is the first systematic literature review on the topic, reveals that there is a limited theoretical understanding of sustainability communication, a lack of practical understanding of how to design sustainability messages, and an inadequate set of methodologies for its research. It identifies knowledge gaps concerning: the holistic approach to sustainability communication; its role in the attitude-behaviour gap; an interdisciplinary theoretical understanding focusing on belief-based social psychological theories and theories of persuasion; qualitative methods; and experimental design. The second article investigates the role of sustainability communication in the attitude-behaviour gap, employing the value-belief-norm theory to explain how information is processed by special interest customers. Interview findings show that ineffective sustainability communication is the reason for the gap and that customers unintentionally booked sustainably. The study identifies eight groups of beliefs which explain the processing of sustainability attributes. Sustainability information is effective when it is value-congruent, that is, when customers perceive they can make a difference, they begin to ascribe a responsibility to themselves. The third article investigates how to design an effective sustainability message in tour operator advertising. Drawing on the ELM, the study shows that appeal type does not significantly influence persuasion but the topic presented is important. Cultural sustainability is the sustainability topic that is most persuasive for cultural tourists, while consumer prior knowledge and issue-involvement with the topic promote successful information processing.