Bøger af Michael Boehl

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2.0, University of Tubingen (Neophilologische Fakultaet), course: American Studies (Seminar), language: English, abstract: America at the turn-of-the century was a rising nation. It was the time of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. It was in those years when Frederick Jackson Turner stated his ¿Frontier Thesis¿ and in which names like Rockefeller, the industrialist, Upton Sinclair, the writer or the W.E.B. Du Bois, the black leader, became well-known. A few decades after the end of Civil War the country was still in search of an identity, what it wanted and what it stood for. The unrelenting conflict on the meaning of the term America was visible in various fields such as immigration, consumerism and the development of Americäs economic system. The struggle for the shaping of Americäs economic system can be more narrowly defined as the fight between the two production factors capital and labor.The intention of this paper is to clarify what Scientific Management was, how it affected managers and workers, in others terms capital and labor. The following pages are going to show criticism of Scientific Management and qualify that. Furthermore, an assessment of Scientific Management and its results are given. The primary question of this paper is what impact did Scientific Management as one invention of America at the turn-of-the-century have on the country at that time, and whether there are remainders of Scientific Management either in America or in other parts of the world that are persistent today.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject Politics - Topic: International Organisations, grade: 1.7, University of Tubingen (Institut fuer Politikwissenschaft), course: International Relations (Seminar), language: English, abstract: This essay¿s general interest is in whether international trade institutions comply with a sense of justice. Concretely speaking, it is to be analysed whether the outcome of a specific international trade negotiation, namely the Uruguay Round, which lasted from 1983 to 1994, is to be judged as ¿just¿ or ¿unjust¿. Fulfilling this task, this essay at first displays a concept to define the very abstract term of justice. The regarded definition will be mainly according to Cecilia Albin.The second part of this essay provides a summary of main features of the Uruguay Round¿s final act, the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Although other sections of the agreement are highly interesting, too, these two fields prove to be extraordinarily useful for this paper¿s purpose. Nevertheless it is the my intention to point on other issues of interest for instance labour standards or the further development since 1994 in this essay where it seems helpful and possible. The chapter summarizing the Uruguay Round¿s outcome is mainly based on World Trade Organisation (WTO) sources, to insure that no subliminal judgement is included or at least none already supporting the view of the later discussed criticism.The third section analyses the Uruguay Round¿s outcome concerning agriculture and intellectual property. The criticism is derived from economic authors like Dasgupta and Sander/Inotai and development orientated NGOs like OXFAM as well. In most cases the analysis is critical of the agreement, at the same time avoiding the word ¿justice¿. This gap shall be filled by the author¿s assessment of the criticism, judging it, and linking it explicitly to the question of justice. At the end of the essay I want to draw a conclusion about justice in the Uruguay Round agreement, also taking into consideration recent developments within the agreement of the WTO, and referring to the question raised at the beginning of this introduction about ethics and morality in IR.