Schoemann – Research Teaching Consulting

15/02/202614/02/2026

Time in Leadership

We identified already the importance of monitoring in democracies. The same theoretical considerations hold for an analysis of leadership irrespective of the organizational context, be it a government, governmental organization, non-governmental organization, association or private enterprise. In democracies, it is in most cases a constitutional rule that leadership positions are limited in time and it is “best practice” to have clear rules about renewable terms of office as well.
In private enterprises this seems to be of lesser importance, but the issue deserves more close scrutiny, not only by shareholders in case of a shared ownership or stocks. A particular person in the leadership position might be a good match for a company at times of growth or scaling of a start-up, but the same leadership is less likely to be an equally good match for the period of eventual stagnation or shrinkage.
Therefore, as an alternative hypothesis it might be wise to adopt leadership rules similar to filling leadership positions with politicians. Fixed-term and 1 renewal could be worth testing at the leadership level (like in presidential republics, USA or France), even if this does not preclude close monitoring of leadership processes. As a starting point for empirical research, Vogel, Raes, Bruch (2022) offer a toolkit to assess organizational energy and leadership trajectories. Learning from democracies as well as democratic procedures might be a worthwhile leadership model to follow. (Image: ceiling painting in chateau Vaux le Vicomte)

14/02/202613/02/2026

Time to prevent

If we take a medical life course perspective, we shall become aware that for each event there shall be a time to prevent it. From a scientific and socio-economic point of view, this is the crucial time to prevent failure of an organ, duration of an illness, death or an otherwise disruptive event. Taking our lung or liver as examples we intuitively know that there is a long time spell during which we have a chance to work on prevention. The monitoring of the early onset of disease is (Ge et al. 2026), potentially, a very cost-saving way as well in addition to avoid humans suffering later on in multiple ways. From a theoretical point of view it will be interesting to “think intervention as prevention” already, rather than the predominant way of intervention “post-hoc”, which means after the onset of disease. This implies a rather complete overhaul of medical research just as much as social research to guide policy makers interested in the “survival” of our social security systems as we know them currently in Europe. (Image is illustration in book on fairy tales: Beckmann in exhibition at Kunstbibliothek Berlin, 2026)

13/02/202612/02/2026

Time wasted

It is a rather narrow, mainly economically driven, view on time that time can be wasted. Maybe, it is just interpreted as the opposite of „carpe diemcarpe diem“ (make use of the day). In the immediate instance time might appear as not used in a productive manner, but with a longer time perspective in mind, wasted time might happen to have contributed substantially to a valuable outcome. The measurement of time can be done in a neutral fashion like using a digital or analog clockdigital or analog clock. Time wasted, however, is a judgement and attaches a value on a duration. In retrospect, or from a life review standpoint, wasted time may be subject to revision. How much of reading is wasted time? Some reading becomes relevant only at later times during the life course. Just keep wasting time this way. Sing songs like from Honahlei „Where has all the time gone“, there will be long term benefits. (Image: extract from Anna Dorothea Therbusch, Selbstbildnis, 1782, Gemäldegalerie Berlin)

12/02/202611/02/2026

Medical Life Course

The analyses of the life course have taken individuals as their starting point and linked their life courses to broader societal developments like periods of educational expansion, job growths or periods of high unemployment. Medical life course research has further dis-aggregated the life course of a person into, for example, the life course of human organs.
There is already an established line of research which collects and analyses lung function trajectories. The research starts even before your first “autonomous” breath and typically ends at death, although transplants become feasible. It is helpful to think of those measures lung function trajectories as a life course of lung health, because the air we breathe is subject to many social and environmental impacts. Some we are in control of (active smoking, less so with passive smoking), some others like inner city smog or pesticides inhaled in areas of agricultural production. Work environments play an important role in the life course of the lung as well. Global warming, particularly increases in summer heat, pose additional challenges on the overall aggregate level to lung health trajectories.
Inhale, exhale, … then force your breath out quickly, … keep breathing normally. That’s about the instruction for the “Forced Vital Capacity test”, which is a standard measure of your FVC just repeated over the life course. (Image: The healing of Tobit 1630, follower of Caravaggio and The finding of Sebastian 1649, Georges de la Tour, Gemäldegalerie Berlin)

11/02/202610/02/2026

Illness duration

The focus in medical analyses is primarily put on the diagnosis of illness. This is the best strategy, if the onset of an illness has a precise beginning and ending. In all processes, where either the beginning and/or the ending is less well-defined as precise point in time, the progression, as phase in or phase out of illness, is also of substantive interest. A duration analysis can inform about the potential presence of a co-morbidity in case, for example, an infection continues beyond the normally expected duration.
Financial pressures in the medical systems makes it necessary to release patients in a timely fashion. Therefore, has become more important to monitor patients even after release from hospital. Digital devices can support such a monitoring.
The study by Josi Levi and co-authors (2026) shows that smartphones or just the monitoring of the number of steps of patient offers a rather reliable indicator on the health status towards the end. The information that a patient has recovered to the normal level of activities as before the onset of the illness works quite well as indicator of recovery. A more precise measure of the duration of an illness is important for patients, care persons, the health system overall. The duration is one of the cost-intensive factors of any illness and it is surprising how little we know about the issue of time and duration in many health processes.

10/02/202609/02/2026

Regulation and bureaucracy

Economists will celebrate 55 years of the theory of regulation pioneered by George Stigler, which was published in 1971 in 2026. The basic question asked at the time and today is: why do we have regulation? The pubic choice and political economy answer of Stigler (1971) and many scholars after him, is that the industry of a specific sector will acquire the regulation or the public interest in this regulation and, subsequently, the industry will design and operate it to its benefits. At least, this is in a nutshell my summary of the literature inspired by Sam Peltzman (2021, p.20). If we add to this the perspectives of theories of bureaucracy (Sharma, 2020), we become skeptic of an efficient implementation of regulations by governments or governmental agencies.
In the field of pharmaceutical applications, it is the “European Diabetes Forum” which calls for a regulation on reliable “glucose monitoring devices” with industry and user backing. Of course, this asks for bureaucratic control of the regulation, imports and markets of such devices later on. The one (regulation) is rarely coming without the other (bureaucracy). It is about time to acknowledge this for societies as a whole as well.

09/02/202608/02/2026

Climate, time and space

For statistical analyses is good practice to not only study averages, but whole distributions over time and space. Climate change is an obvious candidate to apply such a methodology. The analysis of US data on temperature changes across quantiles of the distribution in 48 regions over 70 years finds distinct patterns of temperature changes. The authors María Dolores Gadea Rivas and Jesús Gonzalo published their findings in PLOS Climate, which showed different patterns of climate warming. Taking into account that it is not only average temperatures that may shift, but only the lower winter temperatures or the warmer summer peaks, they find overall 84% of the regions experienced a statistically significant warming effect. Whereas a higher summer peak is commonly perceived as a climate warming problem, a warmer winter usually is less associated with climate change. This leads to an overall misinterpretation or lower perception that climate warming is and has been happening over the last decades. With yellow daffodils on 2026-2-8, usually a winter day in Brussels (see image), the warm winter days are also evidence that global warming is well under way all year round and across the planet.

08/02/202606/02/2026

Time and power

Who commands our time? Who commands your time? Both macro- and micro-level analyses of power relationships related to time need to be investigated. Time policies are most obvious when it comes to regulations of working time, permissions of business hours or so-called bank holidays. On the micro or individual level, it is often the question of who spends more time on work, care and repair. Hourly wage rates have been claimed by economists to guide or decide societal time spent on one or the other activity. An extension of this rationale with an overriding objective of happiness might considerably change the impact of power relationships on time. Longer time perspectives on health shall also shift the view of how power impacts the time spent on various activities. Time sovereignty is a precious value in its own right.
The power play between employers and employees keeps shifting the balance, albeit the overall trend over the last 100 years has been towards a reduction of working time and increased time sovereignty of employees as a form of democratization of working life. This constitutes one form to share the benefits of productivity gains over decades as well. (Image clock on Berlin City Council building on labor day 2025).

07/02/202606/02/2026

Multilateral world

In the relatively brave new world of 21st century, it is not only a question of how the super powers like the USA, China and Russia shall push their strategic goals, but also what role so-called „Middle Powers“ will play. Europe and the European Union will have to make up their minds, whether they want to belong to one or the group, individually or jointly. New as well as shifting alliances seem to be a realistic scenario. Coalitions of middle powers will be effective counterparts to the threat of domination by a single or joint brutal force of superpowers. The power of interference of middle powers in the confrontation of superpowers is considerably higher if they were to collaborate more effectively than with each of the superpowers previously in a simple 2 opponents game of chess, much more familiar to us so far. (Image: Game of chess with 4, 5 or 6 players on the same board, here adapted from chessboard for 4 players, source: greenchess.net webpage)

05/02/202604/02/2026

Democracy in art

The depiction and imagery about democracy in the history of art is according to my own anecdotal evidence and visits across Europe much less frequent than depictions of royalty, mystery like religion or autocratic rulers. Therefore, visits of museums on art history, let us say prior to the impressionists, have to be approached with an obvious skepticism. The impressionist art movement rebelled against the official art academy and started their own salon and are still much acclaimed for this as well as the fight for their own vision of art. The worst authoritarian backlash came from the Nazi-terror, which annihilated large parts of democratic ideas in and about art. A second major issue is about who visits the museums in contemporary societies. Democratizing the crowd who visits art museums is a steep task. Ease of access also beyond costs of entry, they still pose barriers of access to reach a representative sample of a population to participate in art. (Image Kunstforum new barn in construction).

04/02/202603/02/2026

Democracy in Energy

Can there be democracy in energy? Power supply and power distribution are core topics in the theory of democracy as well. One of the foundations of democracy is the separation of power into a legislative, executive and a judicial power. A resilient democracy can assure a sufficient functioning of this fragile “balance of power”. In an energy market or a nation’s energy distribution a comparable balance of (electric or gas) power provision might be envisaged. The costs of parallel infrastructures of power distribution are high, but the resilience of overall power distribution will benefit. Also from a redundancy perspective, more than one distribution system may step in if there are failures or delivery problems with one of the distribution networks. The democracy in energy perspective goes beyond this simple analogy. Power supply as well as power distribution have been concentrated in large public or private enterprises, which might care little in terms of security or reliability of the overall system, not only during armed conflicts. Independent energy production and use, for example through wind and solar energy including batteries have pushed the feasibility of more democracy in energy to new boundaries. These technologies have enabled a new bifurcation and make room for more democracy in energy. It is a rather realistic version of a previously rather utopian vision.

03/02/202602/02/2026

Democracy in architecture

Over centuries we have pondered how to bring more democracy into architecture. This very idea is different from designing parliaments or other democratic institutions like courts or the representation of executive power in a democracy. Bottom-up or direct participation, beyond the pseudo open participation in a competition for the chosen best design, could take the form of voting by and/or listening to the people before any realization. Rather than relying on the choice of elected representatives, we may envisage the observation of people’s choices. Such a kind of bottom-up approach has been chosen by Anna Jung and Lea Krueger who let persons chose, where they wanted to take a rest at the Kulturforum in Berlin by moving chairs to a specific place or a nearby location. Rather than yet another grand design people could freely choose their favorite niche for 1 or 2 chairs. Sometimes just looking for shadow next to a wall or under a tree, sometimes desperate for a little green spot. Democracy in architecture can simply mean to think architecture from the people’s perspective or an observed user’s experience. Democracy in architecture could resemble a bit more the internet revolution and think in terms of user interface, UX-design. With the construction of the “Berlin Modern” well under way, such green niches shall be appreciated by many people passing by and those who would like to rest for a while.

02/02/202601/02/2026

Art and fashion

There is fashionable art and arty-ish fashion. The links between art and fashion are manifold and new explorations of the link are always an interesting variation of the original theme. The Berlin “Gemäldegalerie“ has added a contemporary perspective in connection with Berlin fashion week 2026 to the already rich collection on the topic. The exhibition confronts the craft of the world of fashion represented by the dresses on actual display with photographs of those dressed worn by models against the backdrop of the historic inspiration. Add sound and video to this format and you will be close to total immersion into the world of art and fashion yourself. Art and fashion may be a part of all us, not only the privileged few in society. It is most of all a question of crafts related to art, design and fashion, which dominates the creative process. A strong message from all involved in the project to the visitors.

01/02/202630/01/2026

Free Lunch

Who told you that there is no free lunch? On the premises of “The Berlin Philharmonic” a group of toddlers and babies had a free musical lunch. On the occasion of the lunch concert on 2026-1-28 in the spacious entry hall young musicians (piano, Ana Bakradze, and violoncello, Carlo Lay) gave a concert with Sonatas from Beethoven (op. 69) and Britten (op. 65) to an exceptionally broad range of ages in the audience. People fully enjoyed the concert, irrespective of uncomfortable seating also on stairs, if they managed to find a seat at all. The occasional breast feeding seemed to be the free lunch for some privileged babies. The adults were invited to contribute a donation to the UN refugee fund. Instead of the usual seasonal coughing, there were delighted outcries from the youngest, which enchanted the aging audiences additionally. The 2 musicians excelled in concentration on their performance in spite of the challenging setting.

31/01/202629/01/2026

German Cinémathèque

The “Deutsche Kinemathek” in Berlin has moved to its new location in the old E-Werk. There is room for temporary exhibitions and screening on all walls. Small boxes (3 seats) give a brief overview of the history of television. The library is accessible again to the public. In order to research what went wrong in the history of mass media and cinema in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s can get access to the archives as well. In the age of new digital media technology the study of historical approaches helps to be aware of the power of persuasion of this form of mass communication. A critical thinking perspective on the material presented and the long history of cinema can bring generations together through the exchange of experiences with different media.

30/01/202629/01/2026

Paper and Scissors

In order to produce art it is not always necessary to have expensive materials at your disposal. Henri Matisse has demonstrated that paper and scissors can go a long way. With this in mind, the work by Johanna Beckmann, shown in the upper hall of the “Kulturforum” in Berlin, is quite astonishing. Beckmann relied on just paper and scissors, in addition to her paper and pencil work, to illustrate her own texts as well as collections of fairy tales. Her paper cuts of some hobbit stories might be remembered by a whole generation of children and even some of today’s world. Paper cuts and theatre based on such figures have been a cross-cultural treasure. The illustration of stories, but also the creation of own characters might be derived from such cuts using just paper and scissors. The “Kunstbibliothek” and the “Lette-Verein”-academy in Berlin joined forces for this exhibition and they both continue to transmit this creative craft to students actively involved in this “intergenerational exhibition”. Please bring your (grand 😉 children.
All those who travelled to Paris recently will be well aware that at “Montmartre” you can still have your profile cut these days. At this exhibition there is a “do-it-yourself” section, not only reserved to children.

29/01/202628/01/2026

Holocaust commemoration

The commemoration of the Shoa or the Holocaust is part of an international remembrance of atrocities against humanity. It needs to be present in countries beyond Germany, even if Germany under Hitler’s rule caries the sole responsibility for the ruthless execution of a plan and the murder of 4 million of its own people of Jewish decent and additional 2 million Jewish people of neighboring countries. In the speech by Tova Friedman, a Shoa survivor, she pointed to the perceived threat which children posed to the Nazi-regime as witnesses of mass murders. There she is. In front of the whole nation she testifies for what seems like a distant past, but for many this past is still not over. Responsibility of Germany does not stop after a certain number of years, maybe in judicial terms, but a moral obligation to act against denial of these atrocities is primordial. 20 years after the inauguration of the memorial of the holocaust in the center of Berlin and the exhibition center “topography of terror” (image below, 2026-1-27) we should start an initiative to make the International Day of the commemoration of the holocaust a national day, of commemoration, where all daily routines are paused in Germany to give people time to act and reflect on what can be done that such atrocities will never happen again.

27/01/202626/01/2026

Time in Chess

The more you advance in playing chess, the more time and timing becomes an issue. Sooner or later you will want to have your very own chess clock to be in control of time when playing chess. It will be difficult to keep your mind hooked on the chessboard rather than the clock as each move is linked to a point in time as well as a duration.
It was common practice for advanced players to note, not only the moves they played, but also the time they needed to play the next move. This helped to analyse the quality of your game. In specific openings of a game of chess you even keep track of “time advantages” in bringing more of your pieces into powerful positions or a “developed” position on the chessboard.
You may choose to play a “Blitz” game, which allows only 5 minutes per player to think about the next move overall, which may turn into a fast hitting battle in an protracted endgame for each side. In anticipation of this you way your time very carefully right from the beginning of the game. In short, you will never consider time as a mere second by second running of time as time has a different weight depending of the progress of the game.
Come on, it is just a game of chess, isn’t it?

26/01/202625/01/2026

Timely timeless

It is very timely to discuss timelessness. Some inventions or artwork appear to have a timeless value. The creation of books has this feature as we have known also a lot about the conservation and restoration of books across centuries. Timelessness is about an open-ended vision of time. In mathematics it is a usual part of the differential equations‘ calculus to handle infinity as an operationalisation or a form of a projection of time into timelessness. Humans have made considerable efforts to create material and, most of all, immaterial goods which try to exist independently from time. Geek or Roman philosophy are with us for more than 2000 years and we still benefit from returning to this original concepts. Egyptian culture and the wall paintings in caves still speak to us, thousands of years afterwards. Each clock suggests that time is advancing, but some treasures achieve the level of a timeless beauty, art or conceptual masterpiece. The more we talk about time, the more we shall cherish timelessness. (Image: Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin 2026-1, The clock screening)

25/01/202624/01/2026

Time and music

The trick about music is the sheer unlimited variety it allows to experience time. We all think primarily of rhythm as the direct link between time and music. Then there are the additional annotations of composers on their scores like “lento” or “presto”. In addition each note has a frequency as swinging per second, which serves as the basis for synchronization of an orchestra. The length of each note or a each phrase of music evokes specific emotions in listeners. Human embryos even register music as the frequencies and duration travel across boundaries. The relationship of time and music is such a vast subject matter that the scope of this deserves to be studied across centuries, music periods as well as across cultures. Certainly, we find a few books on the subject beyond the simple physics of waves lengths and frequencies.

23/01/202622/01/2026

Time reference

Times serves as a point of reference. We often refer to precise points in time, like dates 1^st of May Labour Day, or a specific hour as a reference point. If we talk about 5 minutes before 12 o’clock, we convey a kind of urgency – before it is, presumably – too late. In the arts, particularly poetry, prose or drama, and even beyond the romantic period, the reference to seasons as “emotionally loaded” terms is widely used. Subsequently, there are many compositions in music, which make use of such references as programmatic titles. Through the reference to a specific duration, the scene appears to be set and the reader or listener prepared for a less surprising experience. You might even go full circle like in Vivaldi’s composition of “The 4 seasons”.
The writer, poet and Shakespeare translator Thomas Brasch (Link to publications) has written the poem “Der schöne 27. September” (1980) with an exact reference to a point in time, but reporting in 10 lines, what he didn’t do on that date (own translation).
“I didn’t read a newspaper.
…
I didn’t write a single line of text.
I didn’t set something in motion.”
(Extract from Thomas Brasch poem see above;
image below, Global stones project)

22/01/202621/01/2026

Time Concatenated

As a measure of the psychological and social pressure time may convey on people, it is useful to look into how time is concatenated. In a calendar we often make appointments in a form where time is concatenated in ever smaller time slots and condensed time sequences. The organisation of appointments into slots of 15 minutes, with or without a break in between, might be a dense schedule, but we have come to think in time as linked to dates, space and precise timing. We shall experience time as rushed or forcing us into concatenated sequences in our professional life more than in our private life. In IT we even integrate these separate columns into just a single column for computing efficiency. Our calendars allow to structure time in ever smaller sequences. We tend to organise our lives more and more according to these shorter concatenated time.

21/01/202621/01/2026

Multiple clocks

There is nothing more confusing that multiple clocks that are ticking away without being synchronized, which means, they ought to show the same time. A medical and social science perspective on multiple clocks, however, builds on the fact the different social processes run with different speed, i.e. multiple clocks are ticking in parallel but one may be more advanced than the other. The study of longevity has recently acknowledged that each human organ is aging at its own speed and if the time to failure is close for the liver, the time until problems of your heart might still be far off. Overall longevity is determined by the time to failure of a major organ, despite the fact that multiple clocks of organs are running in parallel.
The can be observed for social processes where, for example, the timing of unemployment or retirement might be dependent on a parallel process of a household dissolution causing a peak in stress. Overall life satisfaction, therefore, depends largely on multiple clocks that might be running in a synchronized or not-synchronized manner. Hence, we all live with multiple clocks ticking inside us and around us. The illusion is, to believe that time is just a single, unique measure.

20/01/202619/01/2026

Time as surprise

Sometimes, time comes as surprise. Time seems to run faster as we perceive it, or time might pass more slowly in actual terms than we perceive or think it does. What makes the difference? There is the objective measure of time with various types of clocks and watches versus the subjective or perceived lapse of time. The discrepancy between the two constitutes an interesting case for further study. Marketing strategies will try to make us believe that a specific kind of product will shorten or lengthen the difference between objective and subjective time. The entertainment industry works very hard on our perception of time relative to one or the other form of entertainment. The best result seems to be that objective time has been much longer than perceived time so that we “lost” our reference to time while being entertained. The so-called social media interaction is rather successful in this form of entertainment, infotainment or edutainment. The moments in life when time comes as a surprise might be great ones in our lives. Particular deviations between objective and subjective time make strong impressions on our memories, too.

19/01/202618/01/2026

Time and Emotions

In psychology, time and emotions are a matter of milli- or even nanoseconds. Showing emotions, intrinsic ones or controlled ones is passing rapidly through our brain and, for example, facial muscles. Hence, time plays a role in how we react emotionally to an image or any event. The author Rüdiger Safranski starts his history of the concept of time with the emotional experience that time appears lengthy or tedious. In his view the emotional understanding of the concept of time is key to a better grasp of the philosophical roots of the concept of time. Starting with Greek philosophers, the Stoic tradition, Augustinus, the history of ideas is full of reflections on time, what it does to us, and how we best deal with the effects time has on us. In famous literature from Marcel Proust or Samuel Becket, we were reminded of the creative power of lengthy periods of time and the importance or futility to ask fundamental questions about time and our destiny. Beyond the rational thinking about time, the emotional experience of time makes up much of the spice of life.

18/01/202617/01/2026

Time and money

In the English-speaking world, most people will be familiar with the expression “time is money”. In times of working for money as pay, rather than growing your own crops, we calculate hourly, monthly or yearly salaries. Time is a habitual point of reference in production systems and calculations of economic growth. Inflation and depreciation speak to value over time, just as investment and returns accrue over time. For comparisons of different investments the chosen horizon becomes a decisive factor. Of course, in the long run we are all dead, but in the meantime time matters a lot, doesn’t it? Take out a loan and you realize how much time will matter, suddenly. Now, let’s turn around the causality, Money is time or can be buy time with money? For many processes this seems to be the case. With money you can buy time off working, or pay somebody to do work instead of doing the work yourself. You can “win time” or gain more free time this way. However, towards the end of your life, money might no longer suffice to buy you time before death even with lots of disposable income or cash. From a philosophy of science perspective, we might even question the concept of time-linked causality altogether. The relationship between time and money gets even more interesting if. we take intergenerational considerations into account like inheritance and environmental heritage. … and “the times are a changing”.