Why resilient workers perform better: The roles of job satisfaction and work engagement

Previous studies have confirmed correlations between resilience and job performance, but surprisingly little is known about the nature of this relationship. This study sheds light on the roles of two important positive dimensions of work-related well-being: job satisfaction and work engagement. Data were collected from 360 Czech workers in helping professions using an online survey. Levels of resilience and perceived job performance were indeed positively associated. Using structural equation modeling, the best-fitting model showed partial mediation by work engagement; conversely, job satisfaction was not found to be a mediator of this relationship. Additionally, the finding that job performance is related more strongly to work engagement than to job satisfaction contributes to the debate about the concurrent validity of job attitudes.     

Making precarious immigrant families and weaving the Danish welfare nation-state fabric 1970–2010

This article explores the making of immigrant families as precarious elements in the governing of the population’s welfare within the Danish welfare nation-state since the 1970s. The emphasis is on how immigrant families became a problem of welfare governing, and what knowledge practices and welfare techniques emerged as problem-solving responses. The article analyses a diverse set of national and local administrative documents advancing a polyhedron of intelligibility by which the authors discover how problem-solving complexes responsive to immigrant families change and sediment, and ultimately, weave the fabric of a Danish welfare nation-state faced with non-Western immigration after the economic boom in the late 1960s.     

Local Moral Economies: The Space,Place, and Locality of Social Media Mobilisation

This study is a case study of a locally rooted environmental campaign on the Swedish island of Gotland. We aim to enhance the understanding of how locality is manifested in social movements that emerge in today’s networked world. We analyse how the double goals of speaking to, as well as beyond, the local context came into expression in the movement’s social media activities. We draw on data from tweets and Facebook posts and include interactions between activists and critics as well as the resources linked to in the posts. Analysis indicates that the conflict must be seen as spanning across local, national and global levels. In line with earlier research, activists used social media to link their struggle with other struggles. Also, it was used to charge the local struggle with symbolic content by framing it as one of many struggles between local communities, authorities and multinational corporations. Beyond this, posts from the island signalled dedication to the history and long-term interests of the community. We argue that future studies should recognise the crucial role that reciprocity norms in the local community can play for outcomes of conflicts and that the notion of a ‘local moral economy’ can be used to reach a deeper understanding of this.     

Feminist Politics in Contemporary Turkey: Neoliberal Attacks,Feminist Claims to the Public

This article aims to offer a critical reading of the feminist claims to the public sphere in Turkey in the 2000s when there was transformation in the way public and private spheres are defined. We try to link the feminist claims to the public with the shifts in the patriarchal regime of the country in the decade. The main argument of the article is that feminist politics of the 2000s had the potential for an alternative imagination of the public and that they also faced the risk of assimilation into the de-/re-publicization process of the same period. The article starts with a brief outline of the post-1980 period, which hosted both the emergence of independent feminist organizing and the neoliberal restructuration of Turkey’s politics. It continues with the analysis of the Justice and Development Party’s terms in government, as the consolidation of neoliberal restructuration process. We conclude with the (possible) feminist interventions to the new mode of patriarchy that emerges out of this process.     

Path analysis and determining the distribution of indirect effects via simulation

The difference between a path analysis and the other multivariate analyses is that the path analysis has the ability to compute the indirect effects apart from the direct effects. The aim of this study is to investigate the distribution of indirect effects that is one of the components of path analysis via generated data. To realize this, a simulation study has been conducted with four different sample sizes, three different numbers of explanatory variables and with three different correlation matrices. A replication of 1000 has been applied for every single combination. According to the results obtained, it is found that irrespective of the sample size path coefficients tend to be stable. Moreover, path coefficients are not affected by correlation types either. Since the replication number is 1000, which is fairly large, the indirect effects from the path models have been treated as normal and their confidence intervals have been presented as well. It is also found that the path analysis should not be used with three explanatory variables. We think that this study would help scientists who are working in both natural and social sciences to determine sample size and different number of variables in the path analysis.     

Estimating Box-Cox power transformation parameter via goodness-of-fit tests

Box–Cox power transformation is a commonly used methodology to transform the distribution of the data into a normal distribution. The methodology relies on a single transformation parameter. In this study, we focus on the estimation of this parameter. For this purpose, we employ seven popular goodness-of-fit tests for normality, namely Shapiro–Wilk, Anderson–Darling, Cramer-von Mises, Pearson Chi-square, Shapiro-Francia, Lilliefors and Jarque–Bera tests, together with a searching algorithm. The searching algorithm is based on finding the argument of the minimum or maximum depending on the test, i.e., maximum for the Shapiro–Wilk and Shapiro–Francia, minimum for the rest. The artificial covariate method of Dag et al. (2014) is also included for comparison purposes. Simulation studies are implemented to compare the performances of the methods. Results show that Shapiro–Wilk and the artificial covariate method are more effective than the others and Pearson Chi-square is the worst performing method. The methods are also applied to two real-life datasets. The R package AID is proposed for implementation of the aforementioned methods.     

Be Careful Where You Smile: Culture Shapes Judgments of Intelligence and Honesty of Smiling Individuals

Smiling individuals are usually perceived more favorably than non-smiling ones—they are judged as happier, more attractive, competent, and friendly. These seemingly clear and obvious consequences of smiling are assumed to be culturally universal, however most of the psychological research is carried out in WEIRD societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and the influence of culture on social perception of nonverbal behavior is still understudied. Here we show that a smiling individual may be judged as less intelligent than the same non-smiling individual in cultures low on the GLOBE’s uncertainty avoidance dimension. Furthermore, we show that corruption at the societal level may undermine the prosocial perception of smiling—in societies with high corruption indicators, trust toward smiling individuals is reduced. This research fosters understanding of the cultural framework surrounding nonverbal communication processes and reveals that in some cultures smiling may lead to negative attributions.