Democratisation of Business How More Democratic Business Structures Generate Innovation

Democratisation is a topic that is increasingly finding its way into the economic debate and is also becoming more and more of a trend within companies. The debates reveal various advantages and disadvantages of democratising companies. Within the various models of democratisation of companies, however, there seems to be a lack of coherent integration of the theoretical integration of this into the broad corporate structures – at least within business perspective. These often refer to orthodox theoretical foundations of hierarchical structures and corporate orientations, which in principle oppose and partly run counter to various forms of democratisation. In the present contribution, minimal conditions are to be worked out on the basis of democracy as cooperation and applied to the most elementary corporate structures. In such a coherent orientation and embedding, it can be shown that disadvantages of democratisation in the corporate context can be reduced and innovation and thus competitiveness can be promoted in a multidimensional way.

Redrawing the boundary of “speech community”: how and why the historicity and materiality of language and the space/place distinction matter to its reconceptualization

This essay contemplates how we adapt existing sociolinguistic theoretical concepts, methodologies, and analytical units to the world we live in today. Regardless of one’s location on the globe, our lives are profoundly affected by increasingly intense global interconnections and, at the same time, equally intense differentiation of space attending late global capitalism and the evolving nation-state system. While sociolinguistics has attended the heterogeneity within the speech community, in the world today as such, the idea of speech community as bounded is no longer tenable. In envisioning the future direction of IJSL and its leadership in the field, this essay suggests that speech community as an analytical concept would be significantly advanced through the theoretical integration of the space/place distinction and the historicity and materiality of language into its architectonics. By drawing on some of the recent works for guiding models, the essay argues that the reconceptualization of speech community would also demand radical openness to interdisciplinary approaches.

Media Entertainment as a Self-Regulatory Resource

In recent years, the perspective on media use and its contribution to positive outcomes for its users has been expanded toward the media’s potential to facilitate recovery from stress and strain and to support the replenishment of physical and psychological resources. The accumulation of empirical findings in this area calls for a systematization and theoretical integration. The present chapter therefore reviews latest developments in recovery theory and systematically summarizes previous research on the effects of recreational media use. It then presents a new model, the recovery and resilience in entertaining media use model (R²EM-model), linking entertainment use to the short-term experience of recovery and to the contribution to long-term development of resilience-enhancing factors. The chapter concludes with a discussion of open questions and future challenges in this field of research.