Suchergebnisse

Anhand der wirtschaftlichen und ökologischen Lage in der nordsibirischen Stadt Norilsk werden exemplarisch die in der Phase des Übergangs zur Marktwirtschaft in Rußland auftretenden Probleme aufgezeigt. Während der Lebensstandard der Norilsker Bevölkerung dank der wirtschaftlichen Monopolstellung des Nickelkombinats NGMK relativ hoch ist, haben die ökologischen Schäden, insbesondere infolge der hohen Luftverschmutzung, inzwischen ein Ausmaß erreicht, das selbst im Rahmen der von Umweltproblemen geplagten GUS seinesgleichen sucht. (BIOst-Srt)

Der Beitrag informiert über Konflikte zwischen einzelnen Nachfolgestaaten der UdSSR wegen umweltpolitischer Fragen und über die Kooperationsversuche der GUS-Staaten im Umweltschutzbereich, wie sie im Abkommen vom 8. Februar 1992 und in der Gründung des zwischenstaatlichen ökologischen Rats und des zwischenstaatlichen ökologischen Fonds sowie in der regionalen Zusamenarbeit im Umweltbereich ihren Ausdruck finden. Abschließend werden kritisch die Perspektiven der Umweltschutzpolitik der GUS analysiert. (BIOst-Srt)

Purpose
Online calendar services (OCS) are primarily used for temporal orientation and reminding. Nonetheless, calendar work may also entail generic activities such as scheduling, tracking, archive and recall and retrieval which are not adequately supported by available systems. The purpose of the paper is to explore how online calendaring may be re-configured and re-aligned to alleviate these shortcomings, thus servicing accountability in team work and flexibility in organizational routines.


Design/methodology/approach
Following a design science research methodology, the authors review "justifiable failures" or deliberate non-use of OCS and establish the rationale for, design and evaluate a digital service that configures calendaring as an ecology of separate digital materials supporting file-, photo- and video-sharing services, online argumentation, project/task management and social bookmarking. The new service is a digital composite of materials that incrementally co-adapt and co-evolve to serve primary and secondary work-oriented activities. The authors assess the value of the digital composite in two empirical settings and discuss intrinsic features that create new possibilities for action.


Findings
The authors present the rationale, design, implementation and evaluation of a new digital composite calendaring service which is deployed in two empirical settings, namely group vacation planning and collective information management. Each case features different re-configurations of calendaring to serve human intentions. In vacation planning, the digital composite of the calendar operates as a mashup allowing peers to negotiate, schedule and track vacation options and archive, recall or retrieve digital memories of vacations. In the case of collective information management, the digital composite is further augmented so as to re-align performative and ostensive aspects of routines in a regional organic farming partnership.


Practical implications
Digital composites rely on the interdependent operation of different bounded systems and services to establish configured ecologies of (previously) separate digital artifacts. The practical implications of digital composites are that they can appropriate performative capacities which are already established and embedded across different settings. As a result, they enact complex digital assemblages which can re-align not only daily activities but also organizational routines. On the other hand, digital composites remain in flux, since their state, at any moment in time, is partly determined (even temporarily) by the state of their constituent parts.


Originality/value
Calendaring as presented in this paper defines a genre of digital artifacts that promote flexible and accountable collaborative work while exploiting material agency and resources distributed across digital settings. As such, it establishes a kind of meta-material that invokes collective social agency, thus re-aligning performative and ostensive aspects of organizational routines.

We test whether the two key EU and euro area economic governance pillars, the Stability and Growth Pact and the Lisbon Strategy, have had any impact on macroeconomic outcomes. We test this proposition on a panel of 27, some of which are non-EU (control group) using a programme evaluation approach. The impact of the EU economic governance pillars is evaluated based on both the performance before and after their application as well as against the control group. We find strong and robust evidence that neither the Stability and Growth Pact nor the Lisbon Strategy have had a significant beneficial impact on fiscal and economic performance outcomes. We conclude that a profound reform of these pillars is needed to make them work in the next decade. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]

This paper serves as a tutorial introduction to the themes and concepts of the special issue on 'Social Networking and Mining'. It is aimed to provide an overview of the type of connectivity that emerges in social media and a reflection on the papers reviewed and selected for publication in this special issue. In this vein, connectivity is approached both in its 'inscribed' form which anchors it as a quality feature embedded in technologies as well as in its 'enacted' form which entails a social accomplishment that materializes as users appropriate technologies and co-engage in a certain practice. Each form points to different issues and entails considerations rooted in various theoretical fields and scholarships. Of particular interest to the present study is how such 'inscribed' and 'enacted' connectivity is traced, revealed and experienced.

We test whether two key elements of the EU and euro area economic governance framework, the Stability and Growth Pact and the Lisbon Strategy, have had any impact on macroeconomic outcomes. We test this proposition using a difference-in-difference approach on a panel of over 30 countries, some of which are non-EU (control group). Hence, the impact of the EU economic governance pillars is evaluated based on both the performance before and after their application as well as against the control group. We find strong and robust evidence that neither the Stability and Growth Pact nor the Lisbon Strategy have had a significant beneficial impact on fiscal and economic performance outcomes. We conclude that a profound reform of these pillars is needed to make them work in the next decade.