The ‘politics of institutionalization’: The inner discourse of German churches after radical political change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany embodied continuity in a country marked by discontinuity. During the forty years of division, they were the only organizations in East Germany to retain strong ties and organizational structures with their West German counterparts. Yet, the continuity that characterized the churches as organizations does not corroborate the stability of their values and self-definitions. Drawing on conceptual tools such as guiding metaphors and organizing principles, this paper looks at the debates that accompanied the re-establishment of the churches’ unity after radical political change in order to delineate the conflicting conceptions of the churches’ public role. The focus is on the work carried out by religious agents in either maintaining or changing these conceptions, a process we refer to as the ‘politics of institutionalization’. Hirschman's framework on rhetoric enables us to reconstruct the debates to identify and compare the strategies and patterns of argumentation advanced by the actors in this process. Special attention is paid to the ‘East German metaphors’, or what is generally termed the ‘positive experiences of the GDR and the “Wende”’, and their defenders following the remarkable events that paved the way for the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and for German unification.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".