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For firms that depend on personalized management as a key element of their competitive advantage, maintaining personalized management in the face of sustained growth presents a particular challenge. The purpose of this paper is to examine how firms in the Germanic Mittelstand have endeavored to “scale up” personalization.

Different ways of scaling up personalization are explained with examples.

The concept of personalization need not just concern customers, in contrast to conventional treatments of personalization. Mittelstand firms illustrate the scaling up of personalization to target stakeholder groups other than just customers.

In recent years, personalization has come to refer to the customization of products to the preferences of individual customers. In contrast, a neglected but important topic is personalization of and within firms. Personalization refers to imbuing a firm with the personal qualities of individual personalities indissociable from management of the company.

Methods for scaling up personalization need to be truly scalable to be effective. Methods that only enable a one-time enlargement in the scope of the personalized business are liable to fail in the longer run.

By examining personalization as an important characteristic of small to medium-sized firms that they wish to maintain as they grow larger, this study highlights a little noticed dimension of Mittelstand growth strategies – and endeavors to bring personality back into research on “personalization.”

Digital literacy has become one of the key competences to ensure social cohesion, active citizenship and personal fulfilment. The objective of the project Digital Literacy 2.0 is therefore to develop and to implement an ICT‐based approach to lifelong learning addressing especially disadvantaged groups and vulnerable social groups of people with special needs. Since educational disadvantage is closely linked to social exclusion and poverty, there is a need to empower the really “hard to reach” learning distant groups and to enable them to make use of ICT. This paper seeks to address these issues.

The project partners are piloting a two‐step approach to attract learning distant groups by offering an attractive starting point to information and social bonding: staffs at non‐formal learning places like libraries will be trained for the use of ICT in their daily work with hard‐to‐reach target groups; they will gain competences in how to motivate socially disadvantaged clients to learn with the help of ICT/social media; adults from learning distant groups will be attracted to the places of non‐formal learning by the use of social media thus improving their motivation to learn and empowering them to participate in social life.

The project builds on the experiences gained so far in teaching digital literacy: special target groups can be attracted to learning offers by topics relevant to their daily life and offers that do require only a small first commitment to learning. Besides DLit2.0 will establish a new approach of non‐formal education with the help of ICT. Social media make it possible to provide learning offers tailored individually to the learners' needs and thus increase the learning effects. Taking also into account the new opportunities of online participation and user‐generated content, the concept of teaching digital literacy will be developed further in the project's lifetime and beyond.

The network develops an approach to improve the collaboration between the non‐formal education sector and the social sector. Staff from both areas will obtain knowledge and skills how to better understand the mode of practice of the other sector as well as to identify synergies and efficient procedures and to improve their collaboration. Information society has the potential to make a difference to the lives of people who often feel marginalized or isolated because of their social and cultural situation – DLit2.0 want to spread this issue to maximize this potential.

The purpose of this paper is to present information on the health care system in Germany with the focus on mental health care in people with intellectual disabilities (ID).

The paper is descriptive providing an overview of the general structure of the German health care system with historical and economic background. The paper also provides further information on the general social and health care in Germany for people with ID and medical education in the field of ID is used.

There is a highly developed health care infrastructure in Germany but health care for people with ID is not co-ordinated or universal. Mental health care for people with ID is predominantly in in-patient services. Only in recent years, out-patient services for people with ID have been developed. There is a little emphasis in medical education on the health care needs of people with ID.

The value of this paper is its description of health care in Germany and services for people with ID.

Flexible working time patterns have gained enormously in importance in recent years. Tins process has been accompanied by major changes in the area of industrial relations. The decision‐making power regarding working time issues is moving from the collective bargaining parties to the players at company level, namely management and works councils. How should we view these trends? How do they affect the options and freedom of action of companies and employees in the area of working hours? The article focuses on the options created by the introduction of working time accounts for the flexible oiganisation of work routines and the effects on the cost situation in modern companies as well as on the time‐based planning leeway it generates for employees. The available empirical findings support the hypothesis that the replacement of standard working time by time accounts can be described as a process of “controlled flexibility”. The introduction of time accounts is mainly observed within a regulatory framework that defines both bandwidths as well as rules for the variable organisation of working times. This practice enables companies to increase their internal flexibility and gives at least the majority of employees increased leeway to coordinate working and non‐working time.

This paper aims to provide a discussion on the interface and interactions between data, analytical techniques and impactful research in humanitarian health supply chains. New techniques for data capturing, processing and analytics, such as big data, blockchain technology and artificial intelligence, are increasingly put forward as potential “game changers” in the humanitarian field. Yet while they have potential to improve data analytics in the future, larger data sets and quantification per se are no “silver bullet” for complex and wicked problems in humanitarian health settings. Humanitarian health supply chains provide health care and medical aid to the most vulnerable in development and disaster relief settings alike. Unlike commercial supply chains, they often lack resources and long-term collaborations to enable learning from the past and to improve further.

Based on a combination of the authors’ research experience, interactions with practitioners throughout projects and academic literature, the authors consider the interface between data and analytical techniques and highlight some of the challenges inherent to humanitarian health settings. The authors apply a systems approach to represent the multiple factors and interactions between data, analytical techniques and collaboration in impactful research.

Based on this representation, the authors discuss relevant debates and suggest directions for future research to increase the impact of data analytics and collaborations in fostering sustainable solutions.

This study distinguishes itself and contributes by bringing the interface and interactions between data, analytical techniques and impactful research together in a systems approach, emphasizing the interconnectedness.

This paper aims to explain how the EU projects its own data protection regime to third states and the US in particular. Digital services have become a central element in the transatlantic economy. A substantial part of that trade is associated with the transfer of data, most of it personal, requiring many of the new products and services emerging to adhere to data protection standards. Yet different conceptions of data protection exist across the Atlantic, with the EU putting a particular focus on protecting the fundamental right to privacy.

Using the distinction between positive and negative forms of market integration as a starting point (Scharpf, 1997), this paper examines the question of how the EU is projecting its own data protection regime to third states. The so-called California effect (Vogel, 1997) and the utilization of trade agreements in the EU’s foreign policy and external relations are well researched. With decreasing effectiveness and limited territorial reach of its enlargement policy, the EU found trade agreements to be particularly effective to set standards on a global level (Lavenex and Schimmelfennig, 2009). The existence of the single market makes the Union not only an important locus of regulation but also a strong economic actor with the global ambition of digital assertiveness. In the past, establishing standards for the EU’s vast consumer market has proven effective in compelling non-European market participants to join.

As the globe’s largest consumer market, Europe aims to project its own data protection laws through the market place principle (lex loci solutionis), requiring any data processor to follow its laws whenever European customers’ data are processed. This paper argues that European data protection law creates a “California Effect”, whereby the EU exerts pressure on extra-territorial markets by unilateral standard setting.

With its GDPR, the EU may have defused the problem of European citizens’ data being stored and evaluated according to the US law. However, it has also set a precedent of extra-territorial applicability of its legislation – despite having previously criticized the USA for such practices. By now, international companies increasingly store data of European customers in Europe to prevent conflicts with EU law. With this decision, the EU will apply its own law on others’ sovereign territory. Conflicts created through the extra-territorial effects of national law may contradict the principle of due diligence obligations but are nevertheless not illegitimate. They may, however, have further unintended effects: Other major economies are likely to be less reluctant in the future about passing legal provisions with extra-territorial effect.

The Bertelsmann International Network of Public Libraries was created by the Bertelsmann Foundation of Germany to think flexibly about the public library of tomorrow and to develop model solutions to address the issues faced by public libraries across the world. From the first meeting, topics of relevance to public libraries were discussed and then the first group of participants had to choose a topic to research and create a model which could be implemented in other public libraries. Summaries of all research papers are available on the Internet at www.stiftung. bertelsmann.de Some models are currently being implemented in libraries of the participants and the new members of the Network are currently working on their research.

The research objective is to study the relevance of supply chain management in the humanitarian context, analyze supply chain expenditures and identify major cost-saving potentials and future research directions.

Our research design integrates exploratory and inductive research approaches that are based on existing literature, discussions with supply chain leaders and extensive financial data collected through field studies.

Supply chain management is increasingly considered as a critical success factor for humanitarian operations and amounts on average to around 75% of the total response cost. Based on our findings, humanitarian supply chains bear tremendous potential for further improvements to provide more assistance with limited resources available.

In particular, humanitarian supply chains in conflict situations and procurement processes offer potential for impactful and relevant research. Whilst our study focuses on international organizations, future research should give more attention to supply chain cost structures of local actors to reveal further untapped potential.

Our findings equipped supply chain leaders with fact-based evidence of the value of supply chain management and supported them in strategic meetings with their executive management and donors. Furthermore, we identified major cost-saving potentials.

For researchers (and practitioners), our findings serve as motivation to intensify their efforts in studying and enhancing supply chain management in the humanitarian context.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study and provide empirical evidence of the value of supply chain management in the humanitarian context.

The objective of this paper is to prove that any attempt to implement social justice in its present undefined form is unattainable, and to successfully achieve social justice, the term should be quantified by an appropriate index; accordingly, the first objective of this paper is to make an attempt to construct an appropriate social justice index. The second objective is to quantify this index for a number of developing countries so that a government with low value of social justice index can make policy for achieving an appropriate level of social justice.

The paper constructs a new composite index for social justice for 40 mostly developing countries by selecting six subindicators, each of which represents one aspect or dimension of social justice. The values of the subindicators are then normalized and the final composite index is formed from the weighted average of the subindicators.

The study quantified the levels of social justice in developing countries through a new social justice index and compared the ranking of some developing countries using the new index. The index also helped in identifying areas of social justice that need improvement and hence can improve the developing countries' scores in the social justice index.

The paper is valuable to policy makers in developing countries especially the Arab Spring countries in their pursuit for achieving social justice. Quantifying social justice clarifies exactly where such countries stand and the dimensions of social justice that need urgent action to improve their performance and thus their index scores.

The purpose of this paper is to utilize a newly constructed index for social justice, with its two versions SJI-1 and SJI-2, to measure new values for the indexes in 35 countries in two periods, 2005-2010 and 2011-2015, in an attempt to assess quantitatively how less developed countries developed through time in terms of social justice.

The paper obtained data for 35 developing countries in the six subindicators used to quantify the six dimensions of the social justice index. The values of the subindicators were then normalized and aggregated to form SJI-1 and SJI-2, each of which assigns different weights for its subindicators, for the 35 countries in the two periods 2005-2010 and 2011-2015.

Results of the new values of the index in its two versions were close in showing how 31 countries (according to SJI-1) and 29 countries (according to SJI-2) managed to improve their levels of social justice, while the indexes of only three countries (according to SJI-1) and six countries (according to SJI-2) worsened. Nevertheless, the index depicted that some countries performed better than others by improving their ranks at the expense of others. Comparison of the study’s quantitative results with qualitative research seems to provide some support for SJI-2 in echoing social justice compared to SJI-1.

The study is a vital tool for policymakers for appraising the levels of social justice in their respective countries, both in absolute terms by highlighting the scores of their countries with respect to social justice, and in relative terms by clarifying where their countries stand through cross-country comparisons, in addition to identifying dimensions of social justice which are in need of intervention for further enhancement.