The development of national in-group bias: English children's attributions of characteristics to English, American and German people

This study investigated the development of national in-group bias in 5-11-year-old children. Three hundred and seven English children were asked to attribute characteristics to their own national group either on its own or in conjunction with attributing characteristics to one of two national out-groups, either Americans or Germans. The importance which the children ascribed to their own national identity in relationship to their other social identities was also assessed. It was found that, with increasing age, there was an increase in the number of negative characteristics attributed to the national in-group, and an increase in the number of positive characteristics attributed to the two out-groups, the net result being an overall reduction in in-group bias across this age range. However, in-group favouritism was still exhibited at all ages. Greater importance was attributed to national identity with increasing age. However, the characteristics attributed to the English in-group did not vary as a function of the comparative out-group which was present while the attributions were being made. The presence of a comparative out-group also did not affect the importance that was ascribed to the national identity. These findings suggest that children are relatively insensitive to the prevailing comparative context when making judgments about national groups.

“Authentic Reproductions”: Staging the “Wild West” in Modern Irish Drama

This article examines two metatheatrical plays written by playwrights from the north of Ireland that bookend the twentieth century. The first is Ulster Literary Theatre (ULT) playwright Gerald MacNamara’s parodic, “proto-Pirandellian”4 The Mist That Does Be on the Bog (1909), which satirizes the peasant aesthetic of the “Abbey play” of the Irish Revival.5 The second is Marie Jones’s international hit, Stones in His Pockets (1999), a “play-full,” postmodern deconstruction of the commodification of Irish culture in the era of the Celtic Tiger. Although separated by exactly ninety years, the two plays can be connected through their critiques of the cultural politics of nationalism and globalization during the periods of the Irish Revival and the Celtic Tiger, respectively. Moreover, both plays are distinguished by their dramaturgical form, as the political critique of each is corporeally embodied in metatheatrical performance.

The Advent of Modern Irish Drama and the Abjection of Peasant Popular Culture: Folklore, Fairs and Faction Fighting

This paper is part of a larger project in which the author is interested in recovering popular performative traditions and practices that have been occluded by the modernist project of the Irish Revival. This erasure has been compounded by subsequent historiographical paradigms that have reinforced the revivalist narrative of theatre history and excluded indigenous forms, traditions and practices (mumming, rhymers, strawboys) along with the wider performative culture of patterns, wakes, fairs, faction fights etc. This essay subjects to scrutiny what the author sees as a disjuncture between the riotous reality of peasant popular culture and its representation in Revivalist dramas to argue that Irish Theatre Studies needs to develop alternative historiographies of performance and to methodologically engage with theoretical models extant in Performance Studies.

GERMAN WORKS COUNCILS AND THE ANATOMY OF WAGES

Using matched employer-employee data from the German LIAB for 2001, the authors found that German works councils are in general associated with higher earnings, even after accounting for establishment- and worker heterogeneity. Works Council wage premia exceed those of collective bargaining and are higher, in fact, where both institutions are present in the workplace. The authors also found evidence indicating that works councils benefit women relative to men and appear to favor foreign, east-German, and service-sector workers as well. Separate evidence from quantile regressions suggests that the conjunction of works council presence and collective bargaining is important to the narrowing process. In smaller plants even the presence of a works council markup depends on the coexistence of the works council entity With the machinery of collective bargaining.

The demand for labor: An analysis using matched employer-employee data from the German LIAB. Will the high unskilled worker own-wage elasticity please stand up?

This paper uses matched employee-employer LIAB data to provide panel estimates of the structure of labor demand in western Germany, 1993-2002, distinguishing between highly skilled, skilled, and unskilled labor and between the manufacturing and service sectors. Reflecting current preoccupations, our demand analysis seeks also to accommodate the impact of technology and trade in addition to wages. The bottom-line interests are to provide elasticities of the demand for unskilled (and other) labor that should assist in short-run policy design and to identify the extent of skill biases or otherwise in trade and technology.

Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession

Negotiating the boundaries of the secular and of the religious is a core aspect of modern experience. In mid-nineteenth-century Germany, secularism emerged to oppose church establishment, conservative orthodoxy, and national division between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Yet, as historian Todd H. Weir argues in this provocative book, early secularism was not the opposite of religion. It developed in the rationalist dissent of Free Religion and, even as secularism took more atheistic forms in Freethought and Monism, it was subject to the forces of the confessional system it sought to dismantle. Similar to its religious competitors, it elaborated a clear worldview, sustained social milieus, and was integrated into the political system. Secularism was, in many ways, Germany's fourth confession. While challenging assumptions about the causes and course of the Kulturkampf and modern antisemitism, this study casts new light on the history of popular science, radical politics, and social reform.

Opportunity cost based analysis of corporate eco-efficiency: A methodology and its application to the CO2-efficiency of German companies

In this paper, we propose the return-to-cost-ratio (RCR) as an alternative approach to the analysis of operational eco-efficiency of companies based on the notion of opportunity costs. RCR helps to overcome two fundamental deficits of existing approaches to eco-efficiency. (1) It translates eco-efficiency into managerial terms by applying the well-established notion of opportunity costs to eco-efficiency analysis. (2) RCR allows to identify and quantify the drivers behind changes in corporate eco-efficiency. RCR is applied to the analysis of the CO2-efficiency of German companies in order to illustrate its usefulness for a detailed analysis of changes in corporate eco-efficiency as well as for the development of effective environmental strategies. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Decadence in the Forest: Smyth's Der Wald in its Critical Context

Ethel Smyth’s opera, Der Wald, met with mixed reactions at its premiere in Berlin in 1902. Many factors contributed to this, not least, as Smyth herself observed, anti-British sentiment in Germany following the second Boer War. One might have expected that the reception of the opera at its British premiere on 18 July at Covent Garden might have been more positive, but even here critical opinion was divided. Even positive reviews were not free from gender discrimination, and other reviews condemned the opera for being too German or Wagnerian. What was meant by ‘Wagnerian’? This article answers the question in three ways. Firstly, I argue that ‘Wagnerian’ meant not a leitmotif-filled, through-composed work (as distinct from a number opera), but simply a lyrical drama; for British audiences the model for this was Tannhäuser or Lohengrin, not the Ring or Tristan. Secondly, taking this definition on board, I analyse the musical language of the opera, in particular the key structure. The central duet sung by the doomed lovers, Heinrich and Röschen, is in F major, almost the furthest possible distance from the home key of the opera (E major), which characterizes the forest and ‘nature’ in general; by contrast, the next scene, where the Kundry-like Iolanthe attempts to seduce Heinrich (a crucial reversal of the more conventional power relations of the love duet), sees a return to the home key. Thirdly, I set the hermeneutical implications of this reversal in the context of the decadent movement, with which late nineteenth-century Wagnerism was associated, and which, following the conviction of Oscar Wilde in 1895, was discredited. Der Wald thus failed because of its ‘guilt by association’ with an aesthetic that had fallen into disrepute.