Projects

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in integrity and unethical employee behaviour (UEB), in the public as well as the private sector. Many organisations try to prevent UEB trough different policy interventions. Although the impact of organisational factors (e.g. autonomy, rules and procedures, competition, etc.) seems important, research into the general impact of these factors on different types of UEB is limited. Rather ...

In spite of the paramount importance of police integrity in a democracy, police deviance continues to be a problem. One much-discussed factor for explaining police deviance, is police culture. However, quantitative empirical research on the relationship between police or organisational culture on the one hand and police deviance on the other is scarce. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of (different dimensions of) ...

I would like to investigate “representations of responsibility in Japanese culture”. In other words, how issues of responsibility have emerged and mattered in Japanese culture; what are the conditions for responsibility; what are crucial elements for responsibility to arise; where or who is the place of responsibility in societies, companies, or groups; how to take responsibility, to put it differently, what kind of actions would be expected ...

This dissertation contains four chapters on comparative development, political economy, public economics and migration with focus on cultural values. The first chapter investigates the ancient origins of differences of cultural traits across countries; in particular, using a large set of measures of culture it identifies the cultural traits associated with genetic distances. The second chapter explores the direct and barrier effects of ...

This project will investigate the ways in which human anatomy gained and/or lost prestige and visibility within the medical and the broader educational and cultural field in Belgium. It will do so by focusing on the ways in which medical anatomical knowledge circulated between these fields and acquired in this process new meanings, and by investigating the role of different forms of visual representation or display of the human body in ...

This dissertation critically studies Pope Francis’ ‘culture of encounter,’ which permeates every aspect of his Petrine ministry. Using the methodology of theology and praxis of Clodovis Boff (1987), this research critically investigates the background and influences that gave rise to the development of the model by Pope Francis, its theology and antithetical nature to the ‘culture of indifference’, ‘throw-away culture’ and ‘culture of ...

Material Culture investigates the interwoven and often dialectical relations between people and objects. The field extends across various academic disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, art history and archeology. Although their approach differs, they focus on the perspective of the user or consumer. This PhD research starts from the 'producer' side and studies how architects produce material culture in the process from material to ...

The history of counterfeit publishing traces the different forms of literary ‘piracy’ – the reprinting of texts without permission from the original publisher or author – in the past. It has been written mostly as a counterpart to the history of intellectual property, revealing the ‘copyright wars’ that led to international copyright legislation. This project draws attention to the overlooked, more productive functions of the copy, as a tool ...

In line with the recent developments in the literature, this dissertation examines the determinants of female labor force participation by employing a variety of econometric techniques. First paper of my dissertation uses a competing risks model and studies the reasons behind the high inactivity rates among recent school leaver women. Following the results of the first paper, the second paper focuses on cultural background as a potential ...