Books by Michael Kuhn

In seiner empirischen Studie untersucht Michael Kühn die Vorgehensweisen von Führungskräften bei der Bewältigung von krisenhaft zugespitzten Entscheidungssituationen. Hierzu erfolgt zunächst die Bestimmung, Einordnung und Ausdifferenzierung der zentralen Begriffe "Krise", "Management" und "Führungshandeln". Anschließend werden die Strategien von Führungskräften bei der Bewältigung von Krisen über narrative Interviews erhoben und mithilfe der Grounded Theory ausgewertet. Die Resultate der Untersuchung führen zur Entwicklung eines Stufenmodells. Das Modell bildet die Grundlage für die Ergänzung und Erweiterung bestehender Beratungsangebote, Coachings und Trainingsprogramme in Richtung einer strukturhermeneutisch orientierten Managerweiterbildung.

The European social sciences tend to absorb criticism that has been passed on the European approach and re-label it as a part of what the critique opposes; criticism of European social sciences by "subaltern" social sciences, their "talking back", has become a frequent line of reflection in European social sciences. The re-labelling of the critique of the European approach to social sciences towards a critique from "Southern" social sciences of "Western" social sciences has somehow turned "Southern" as well as "Western" social sciences into competing contributors to the same "globalizing" social sciences. Both are no longer arguing about the European approach to social sciences but about which social thought from which part of the globe prevails.If the critique becomes a part of what it opposes, one might conclude that the European social sciences are very adaptable and capable of learning. One might, however, also raise the question whether there is anything wrong with the criticism of the European social sciences; or, for that matter, whether there is anything wrong with the European social sciences themselves. The contributions in this book discuss these questions from different angles: They revisit the mainstream critique of the European social sciences, and they suggest new arguments criticizing social science theories that may be found as often in the "Western" as in the "Southern" discourse.

At the beginning of the new millennium, the social sciences discover an epochal "turn" making it necessary to revolutionize their theory-building: As a response to what they call the globalization of the social, they find the need to globalize their theorizing as well.It is odd to discover after two centuries of colonialism and imperialism, after two world wars and several economic world crises that there is a world beyond the national socials; it is even more strange that the social sciences globalize their theorizing by comparing theories about nationally confined socials and by creating all sorts of, preferably, "local theories", just as if any national social was a secluded social biotope. Discussing how to globalize the social sciences, they argue that globalizing social science theorizing means finding a way of theorizing that must, above all, be liberated from "scientism" in order to allow a "provincialization" of thinking. Not surprisingly, the globalizing social sciences also rediscover mythological and moral thinking as a means for a "true scientific universalism".Michael Kuhn''s new book presents many thought-provoking arguments on the oddities of the globalizing social sciences and on how these oddities are not accidents, but a consequence of the nature of how the social sciences theorize about the social.