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Equal opportunity in the workplace is thought to be the direct legacy of the civil rights and feminist movements and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet, as Frank Dobbin demonstrates, corporate personnel experts--not Congress or the courts--were the ones who determined what equal opportunity meant in practice, designing changes in how employers hire, promote, and fire workers, and ultimately defining what discrimination is, and is not, in the American imagination. Dobbin shows how Congress and the courts merely endorsed programs devised by corporate personnel. He traces how the first measures were adopted by military contractors worried that the Kennedy administration would cancel their contracts if they didn't take \"affirmative action\" to end discrimination. These measures built on existing personnel programs, many designed to prevent bias against unionists. Dobbin follows the changes in the law as personnel experts invented one wave after another of equal opportunity programs. He examines how corporate personnel formalized hiring and promotion practices in the 1970s to eradicate bias by managers; how in the 1980s they answered Ronald Reagan's threat to end affirmative action by recasting their efforts as diversity-management programs; and how the growing presence of women in the newly named human resources profession has contributed to a focus on sexual harassment and work/life issues. Inventing Equal Opportunityreveals how the personnel profession devised--and ultimately transformed--our understanding of discrimination.

On average, temporary jobs are far less stable than permanent jobs. This higher instability could potentially lower workers’ incentives to relocate towards the workplace, thereby resulting in longer commutes. However, surprisingly few studies have investigated the link between temporary employment and commuting length. Building on the notion that individuals strive to optimize their utility when deciding where to work and live, we develop and test a theoretical framework that predicts commuting outcomes for different types of temporary workers – fixed-term, casual and temporary agency workers – and in different institutional contexts. We estimate fixed-effects regression models using 17 waves of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). As expected, the results show that the link between temporary employment and commuting length varies by employment type and institutional context. Agency work is associated with longer commutes than permanent work in both countries, whereas this applies to fixed-term contracts for Germany only. For casual work, the findings suggest no commuting length differential to permanent employment. In terms of policy, our findings suggest lengthy commuting can be a side effect of flexible labour markets, with potentially negative implications for worker well-being, transportation management and the environment.

Where does innovation in journalism come from, how is it implemented, and what factors drive or hinder its development? Scholars have explored these questions from different perspectives for over two decades. Our research holistically considers the broader factors that influence the development of journalistic innovation at the macro, meso, and micro levels, and whether it is internally or externally driven. In a three-year international research project, we have unpacked innovation with this multidimensional approach, looking at the most important innovations in journalism in Austria, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. Our study focuses on the mutual interplay between journalists, media organizations, and society. We investigated 100 case studies with 137 guided interviews with senior managers or project leaders. The results show that the focus of supporting and obstructive factors is internal and on the meso level and that many parallels exist between media systems. Internal factors are the intrinsic motivation of individuals, which need the support of open-minded management, allowing a culture of experimentation without economic pressure and assembling interdisciplinary teams. Across countries and independent of the respective media system, three external key drivers of innovation in journalism can be identified: technology, societal change, and change in the digital media universe. The study confirms once again as if through a magnifying glass that journalism is primarily a public service, especially for those innovations that strengthen the role of journalism in a democratic society.

Nazi Germany and the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the future government of Israel and the official representative of the Zionist Organization (ZO), entered a contractual transactional relationship from 1933 to 1939. In 1952 the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the State of Israel, on behalf of all Jews, signed an agreement that paved the way for Germany’s unconditional support for Israel. No suggestion is being made here that Nazi Germany and the FRG are the same; the FRG assumed responsibilities for the crimes of the Holocaust. However, both contractual transactional relationships between both countries from 1933 to the present have initiated policies and programs that contributed significantly to the deterioration of German Jewish living conditions in Germany, the transfer of thousands of German Jewish citizens and their assets out of Germany to colonize Palestine, the establishment of Israel in historic Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, the allocation of a significant portion of German reparation money for the benefit of Israel instead of the victims of the Holocaust, the strengthening of the Israeli economy and industrial base, and providing Israel with German military technology and equipment to wage wars in the region. In this article, I will examine and analyze the special, often secret, relationship between Germany and the Zionist mechanization to colonize Palestine, the establishment of Israel in 1948, and the arming of the state with modern weapon platforms that can carry and deliver nuclear weapons. This secret relationship is in clear violation of German law, made possible by creating a universal guilt feeling among Germans for the crime of the Holocaust, and associated with a deliberate lack of public debate and accountability.

The article analyses the impact of vertical disintegration on German labour relations. Previous research argued that the proliferation of outsourcing, divestment and non-standard employment results in a 'dualism' between a core of secure workplaces and a growing fringe of precarious jobs. Evidence from two key sectors, metalworking and telecommunications, however, suggest that this clear-cut division is replaced by a fragmented landscape of labour relations. In terms of institutional change, the analysis reveals a specific form of incremental transformative change, namely a shift in the meaning of formally stable legal-political institutions. Even in the allegedly stable core areas, the institutions of labour relations are gradually transformed from market-constituting institutions to market-dependent variables. Vertical disintegration plays an important role in this process of institutional commodification. It not only moves the core–periphery boundary; it is also deployed to subjugate collective bargaining, workplace co-determination and the utilization of labour law to firm-level economic calculations.

In this study we examine how employment insecurity affects social exclusion using data from the German panel study PASS. Assuming that secure employment is an important condition for the subjective feeling of social affiliation, we compare unemployed individuals and those in fixed-term, temporary agency or permanent employment. Applying hybrid random effects regression models we find that temporary workers feel less affiliated to society than permanent workers. This finding cannot be fully explained by economic and social resources or job status. We discuss alternative mechanisms, such as reduced life-course predictability and processes of social exclusion at the workplace.

With the increase of refugee movements since 2014 in Europe and the Near East, the debate of how to plan appropriate shelters and emergency accommodation has gained a new momentum. Established techno-managerial approaches have been criticised as inappropriate and the professional community of planners and architects was increasingly drawn into debates for alternative solutions. This article traces the “innovations” that promise better, more effective, and more humane emergency shelters using the examples of the “Tempohomes” in Berlin as well as the Jordanian refugee camps of Zaatari and Azraq. In both cases, planners were employed to address the ambivalent reality of protracted refugee camps and include “lessons” from failures of earlier solutions. While the article acknowledges the genuine attempt of planners to engage with the more complex needs and expectations of refugees, a careful look at the results of the planning for better camps reveals ambivalent outcomes. As camps acquire a new visual appearance, closer to housing, which mixes shelter design with social spaces and services as essential parts of the camp; these “innovations” bear the danger of paternalistic planning and aestheticisation, camouflaging control under what seems to be well-intended and sensitive planning. The article focuses on refugees’ agency expressed in critical camp studies to interrogate the planning results. While recent critical refugee studies have demanded recognition of refugees as urban actors which should be included in the co-production of the spatial reality of refugee accommodations, new planning approaches tend to result in a shrinking of spaces of self-determination and self-provisioning of refugees.

This article seeks to explain why Denmark and the Netherlands made dramatic progress reforming their welfare systems in the 1990s and why Germany had a relatively slow start. Some possible explanations found to be incomplete are institutional differences in welfare programs, the uniqueness of circumstances (for example, German unification), and the balance of political power in governing institutions. An important part of the puzzle is an increasing perception of the need to reform that was more widespread in Denmark and the Netherlands. The social construction of an imperative to reform in these countries generated a political consensus that was elusive in Germany but that may be developing under Gerhard Schroder's government.

Recent scholarship on advisory systems has focussed on the externalization of advisory capacities and sectoral dynamics of change, whereas changes of internal policy advisory systems have not yet been approached systematically. This article proposes an analytical concept for exploring change dynamics in internal policy advisory systems by means of three logics for assessing policy advice (political salience, credibility and representativeness). The approach is illustrated by analysing changes within the internal policy advisory system of the German federal government (1990–2015). The analysis relies on three original datasets on ministerial departments, research agencies and governmental advisory bodies. We find that the internal advisory system of the German federal government is characterized by a differentiated hybridization of advisory logics, which has changed the nature of policy advice.

This article explores how notions of formality and informality in housing are produced in relation to digital infrastructure and localized bordering regimes. Drawing on a research diary project conducted with “International” migrants in Berlin, Germany, I draw on scholarship in Digital Geography and Migration Studies to frame digital platforms as “arrival infrastructures,” which allow “Internationals” to negotiate the legal process of becoming formally resident in the city. Rather than entry into the long-term “formal,” rental sector, the opportunity to codify residency status becomes the decisive factor in determining housing choices. It also determines the type of housing platforms which are used to seek accommodation in the city and influences digital behavior. My contribution in this article is twofold. Firstly, I advance an understanding of housing in/formality as a concept which is formed according to one’s own positionality in relation to State mobility regimes. Secondly, I describe how the interface of platform-mediated rental sites becomes a site of knowledge production about norms and behavior within an unfamiliar housing system. This is accomplished through the proposal of a typology which classifies platform services according to the ways in which they used to negotiate residency governance regimes: large and long-term housing platforms; “medium-term” platform-mediated rentals; platforms rented and shared; and supplementary tools. I conclude by highlighting the need for further research into the role of rental platforms as a bordering technology, especially in the European context.