Volume 35, Issue 6

In the last few decades human rights have become increasingly institutionalized, legalized, and enlarged. Women's rights are a particularly successful example of the global institutionalization of human rights. After reconstructing the institutionalization of women’s rights at the global level this article compares their implementation in Germany, Switzerland, and Morocco. The three case studies show that the link between the global and the national levels, is weaker than a neo-institutional world-polity approach would expect.

In order to succeed within the German school system, immigrant children need to have mastered the German language. Exposure to the host country's language is an important factor in immigrants’ acquisition of the second language. Kindergarten affords such exposure to the German language to immigrant children of preschool age. Data from the school entrance examination of the City of Osnabrück for the years 2000 to 2005 show that deficits in German skills are less likely to occur among immigrant children the longer they have attended Kindergarten. Furthermore, methods of multilevel analysis are used to detect differences among Kindergartens with regard to the average level of German language deficits. While for Turkish-child differences from the one to the other Kindergarten are significant, no such group differences exist for ethnic-German (but non-German-speaking) children from the former Soviet Union. The variance in the German language deficits among Kindergartens found in the sample of Turkish-background children can be clearly reduced by taking into account the proportion of immigrant children in the Kindergartens, and it disappears completely once the proportion of Turkish children is accounted for. With regard to the Turkish children, the results indicate that a high proportion of children of the same ethnic origin in Kindergartens fosters linguistic separation in these institutions and in this way hampers their acquisition of the German language.

Up to now, little has been known about the character of social relations between employees of German and of foreign origin in industrial workplaces. Based empirically on interviews, group discussions, and a standardized survey this article examines these relations. It suggests that a co-operative form of interaction predominates. Origin-related discrimination and conflicts do indeed occur, but they are rare. In addition to the effects of the conformity induced by work-process related command and control, it is, in particular, day-to-day interactions in the work process foster mutual acceptance among employees. In general, one can speak of a predominantly successful social integration in the firms investigated. However, these co-operative relations are largely restricted to the workplace. Cultural and political differences are not taken up internally, but excluded from the social space of work. Therefore, differences remain latent in the background. In cases of exceptional conflict situations, which sometimes occur, excluded differences become manifest and contribute to a temporary collapse of collegiality.

Counseling today is a ubiquitous every-day practice, but it is also offered by professional counseling facilities. The latter are the subject of this article, which focuses on the function of counseling within the development and structure of Western societies. Three social theories - these of Luhmann, Bourdieu and Foucault - are used to show different aspects of counseling as a social innovation in the 20 th century. In this investigation counseling turns out to be a social system supporting social inclusion, as a field of competition which produces discourses of self-modification, and as a new instrument within the technologies of the self. In addition counseling-services are interesting fields for exploring recent social development as far as individuals and their every-day life are affected.