Contributions in Merlin

Technology Assessment (TA) is a field of study which systematically analyses and evaluates the potential positive and negative impacts of introducing and applying technologies, identifies areas of social conflict created by applications and gives recommendations for improving the technologies and their terms of application (ITAS, n.d.). Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP) aims to ensure that critical information infrastructures “are less vulnerable to disruptions, any impairment is short in duration and limited in scale, and services are readily restored when disruptions occur.” (Juster and Tritak, 2002, p. 12). This paper presents a TA perspective on issues of CIIP. It shows how risks emerging from critical information infrastructures can be assessed at a very early stage of technological development. The typical TA approach takes a precautionary position here, whereas the CIIP approach tends to be preventive and reactive. The main thesis of this paper is that the two fields can learn from each other: TA studies in the field of ICT can benefit from the CIIP-specific focus on vulnerabilities, and CIIP can benefit from the prospective, scenario-based TA approach which focuses on the interaction between technology and society, providing a comprehensive view of technological risk.

In data integration applications, a join matches elements thatare common to two data sources. Often, however, elements are represented slightly different in each source, so an approximate join must be used. For XML data, most approximate join strategies are based on some ordered tree matching technique. But in data-centric XML the order is irrelevant: two elements should match even if their subelement order varies. In this paper we give a solution for the approximate join of unordered trees. Our solution is based on windowed pq-grams. We develop an efficient technique to systematically generate windowed pq-grams in a three-step process: sorting the unordered tree, extending the sorted tree with dummy nodes, and computing the windowed pq-grams on the extended tree. The windowed pq-gram distance between two sorted trees approximates the tree edit distance between the respective unordered trees. The approximate join algorithm based on windowed pq-grams is implemented as an equality join on strings which avoids the costly computation of the distance between every pair of input trees. Our experiments with synthetic and real world data confirm the analytic results and suggest that our technique is both useful and scalable.

Multinational Corporations can contribute to reach the targeted poverty reduction goals – the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. Linking the core business of a multinational with development goals can be found in the concept of Serving the Base of the Pyramid mainly pushed by C.K. Prahalad and Stuart L. Hart. In the “classic” development work, bottom up approaches, which give more power to the poor, are taking advance in the theoretical debate. This know how however, hasn’t found a systematic consideration in the BoP concept yet. Focusing on Multinational Corporations, the paper takes a closer look at bottom up development approaches and agues for the importance of integrating this know how in the BoP debate by highlighting the relation between the concepts.

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This research investigates mechanisms and boundary conditions for the performance effects of transformational leadership (TFL) climate at the organizational level of analysis. In a study with 158 organizations, a total of 18,094 respondents provided data on their organizations' TFL climate, positive affective tone, and internal trust, and on employees' collective job performance within the respective organizations. We received empirical support for the hypothesized conceptual scheme, yielding a pattern of moderated mediation: Organizations' TFL climate indirectly enhances employees' collective task performance by fostering positive affective tone under conditions of high internal trust, but not under conditions of low internal trust. Furthermore, organizations' TFL climate indirectly enhances employees' collective contextual performance by fostering positive affective tone independent of the level of internal trust. These findings contribute to a better understanding of TFL climate at the organizational level. They also corroborate the inherently affective nature of TFL prior research has emphasized and demonstrate that the performance consequences of such leadership may hinge on specific contextual factors.

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Despite the attention that strategic change as a topic of research has received, there remain considerable difficulties in conceptualizing the actual sources of strategic change. Using the concept of strategic episodes, this paper develops an endogenous theory of change, where the sources of change are located in the organization itself. We argue that processes of organizational reproduction lead to inconsistencies which manifest themselves as conflicting demands on those working in the organization. Such inconsistencies have the potential to place considerable strain upon the actors experiencing them but we argue that organizations possess suppression mechanisms which prevent the organization from openly dealing with the tensions that these inconsistencies would introduce. Hence, these suppression mechanisms are not a deficiency of the organization but are in fact, crucial for its very functioning. The paper examines strategy workshops as episodes which suspend these organizational suppression mechanisms so that previously experienced inconsistencies can be voiced. We therefore build an explanation of strategic change where inconsistencies are not so much solved by bringing in new principles, rules or schemas from outside, but by the novel rearrangement or recombination of existing or previous aspects of the organization. We examine three case studies of strategy workshops and observe that the process of strategic change typically involves several consecutive workshops before significant changes are carried beyond the workshop environment and into ongoing organizational process.