Search results

In contrast to the tendency to globalization in the world of sport, the scientific research into sport is largely restricted by national boundaries. The present study tries to break out of the parochial isolation characteristic of social sport studies. To do this, we identify self-concept and development tasks as central features of identity development in adolescence. After briefly discussing the theoretical and methodological problems of cross-cultural research, we empirically investigate the self-concept of selected groups of German and American adolescents. Furthermore, the relationship between involvement in sport and self-concept among adolescents in Germany and the USA will be examined. With regard to the pecularities of cross-cultural research the results are twofold. On the one hand, we found significantly higher self-concept scores for the American adolescents than for their German counterparts. On the other hand, there are more similarities than differences between the groups when age and gender effects on self-concept are under scrutiny. As far as the relationship between involvement in sport and self-concept is concerned, the empirical analysis reveals a positive trend valid across cultures, with those adolescents scoring highest on the self-concept measurement for whom sport plays an important role in their everyday life.

ObjectiveTo examine the association between divorce and partners' allocation of paid and unpaid work, and change over a few key decades in both West Germany and the United States.BackgroundPast research has indicated that partner similarity in time spent on both paid and unpaid work is associated with a higher risk of marital dissolution. We explore whether the association between paid work disparities and divorce or between unpaid work disparities and divorce changed across time or differed between two cultures.MethodUsing data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for the United States and the German Socio‐Economic Panel for West Germany from the mid‐1980s until the end of the 2000s, we conducted event history analyses.ResultsOver time, the risk of divorce declined among couples with a more similar division of labor. In parallel, the relative stability of marriages adhering to a dissimilar pattern of unpaid work decreased in Western Germany.ConclusionThese results contrast with the predictions of a static normative perspective, but they are consistent with the multiple equilibrium theory, which predicts that divorce risks will decline in tandem with the embrace of more gender similarity in couple arrangements. Thus, evidence suggests that as societies evolve toward greater gender similarity in the division of paid and unpaid work, marital stability will likely improve.ImplicationsPreventive intervention approaches promoting new forms of organization in the division of work between partners may be useful in the quest for improved marital relations and well‐being.

This paper explains the different trajectories of German and American competition policy and its permissiveness toward economic concentration in the last few decades. While the German political economy had moved to a stronger antitrust regime after 1945 and stuck to it even after the economic governance shifts of the 1980s, the traditional antitrust champion, the United States, has shed considerable parts of its basic governance toolkit against anticompetitive conduct since the 1960s. Drawing on theories of institutional change driven by bureaucratic and professional elites, the paper claims that different pathways of professional ideas in competition policy can account for the cross-country differences. In the 1960s and early 1970s, movements to strengthen competition policy enforcement emerged in both countries. While German as well as American professionals reacted to the seemingly increasing encroachment of societal concerns into antitrust with economized notions of the policies' goals, they did so in fundamentally different ways. Whereas US professionals proposed an effect-based approach in which consumer welfare and gains in efficiency may justify less competition, the more strongly law-based profession in Germany to a degree strengthened a form-based approach aiming at the preservation of competitive market structures. Such extrapolitical pathways of ideas, we argue, provide important guidelines for the implementation of competition policy by administrations and courts, whose decisions can have a far-reaching impact on industries and political economies as a whole.