The Salience of Perceived Societal Conflict in Europe: A 27 Country Study on the Development of a Measure for Generalized Conflict Thinking

Social Indicators Research - Over the last two decades, European countries have struggled with several crises (e.g., the Great Recession, the refugee crisis) which had a tremendous impact on (some)...     

In the flesh: a poetic inquiry into how fat female employees manage weight-related stigma

ABSTRACT

This paper engages with the question of how fat female employees manage weight-related stigma at work. We use poetic inquiry to show the reader how it feels for our participants to be stigmatized based on their size. We interviewed 22 women who self-identify as full-figured, fat, overweight, or obese. The results consist of six poems, five of which were written by us, the researchers. These ‘tri-voiced poems’ (Leavy 2010b) illustrate the spectrum of affective responses and stigma management strategies that our participants talked about, ranging from feeling anxious, super-smart, impeccable, and funny to rebellious and confident. The sixth poem was written by one of our participants and voices her first-person experiences and perspective. Our aim is to do justice in our writing to the emotions that circulated in the interviews and to make a political statement with regards to the stigmatizing practices in organizations related to size and health.     

CHANGING BUSINESS MODELS IN INTERNATIONAL BANK FUNDING

This paper investigates the foreign funding mix of globally active banks. Using BIS international banking statistics for a panel of 12 advanced economies, we detect a structural break in international bank funding at the onset of the great financial crisis. In their postbreak business model, banks rely less on cross‐border liabilities and, instead, tap funds from outside their jurisdictions by making more active use of their subsidiaries and branches, as well as interoffice accounts within the same banking group. (JEL C32, F65, G21)     

In search of message design best practices: The Silver Anvil Award winners archive

We investigated specific award-winning public relations efforts to derive best practices that bridge industry practices with academic research and pedagogy. The data for this project were the winning entries for the annual Public Relations Society of America's (PRSA) Silver Anvil Award, which is considered the top award recognizing excellence in public relations. We found, however, that the archive of award winners does not provide sufficiently definitive information about what defines any public relations discourse genre or why any genre as used is “excellent.” This archival research provides us with a key rationale for employing rhetorical, narrative, and linguistic theories prospectively to guide public relations message design and planning, theories which hitherto have been used to judge campaigns post hoc or retrospectively.     

Charisma as signal: An evolutionary perspective on charismatic leadership

We present an evolutionary perspective on charismatic leadership, arguing that charisma has evolved as a credible signal of a person's ability to solve a coordination challenge requiring urgent collective action from group members. We suggest that a better understanding of charisma's evolutionary and biological origins and functions can provide a broader perspective in which to situate current debates surrounding the utility and validity of charismatic leadership as a construct in the social sciences. We outline several key challenges which have shaped our followership psychology, and argue that the benefits of successful coordination in ancestral environments has led to the evolution of context-dependent psychological mechanisms which are especially attuned to cues and signals of outstanding personal leadership qualities. We elaborate on several implications of this signaling hypothesis of charismatic leadership, including opportunities for deception (dishonest signaling) and for large-scale coordination.     

Technische Softwaredokumentation unter ?konomischen Gesichtspunkten – Ein formal-deduktiver Ansatz

Only a very low priority seems to be given to software documentation. For example, about 80% of the software systems in production worldwide are badly documented. In contrast empirical studies confirm that an adequate technical documentation reduces the error rate of subsequent changes during software maintenance. This leads to the question about the optimal scale of investment in technical documentation in any software project. In research, this decision problem has been largely neglected. Since underlying cause-effect relationships may be empirically hard to detect, this paper proposes a new deductive approach, which compares the present value of payments for the documentation and bug fixing. The basis of this model is the phenomenon of error propagation from one component to adjacent components through its dependencies. As a result the following hypothesis can be inferred: It is always beneficial to document too much rather than comparatively too little even for an arbitrarily low quality of documentation and for any required rate of interest. This hypothesis shows robustness even against some changes in assumptions.     

Dashed Hopes,Dashed Selves? A Sociometer Perspective on Self‐esteem Change Across the Transition to Secondary School

The transition from primary to secondary school challenges children's psychological well‐being. A cross‐transitional longitudinal study (N = 306; mean age = 12.2 years) examined why some children's self‐esteem decreases across the transition whereas other children's self‐esteem does not. Children's expected social acceptance in secondary school was measured before the transition; their actually perceived social acceptance was measured after the transition. Self‐esteem and Big Five personality traits were measured both pre‐ and posttransition. Self‐esteem changed as a function of the discrepancy between children's expected and actually perceived social acceptance. Furthermore, neuroticism magnified self‐esteem decreases when children's ‘hopes were dashed'—when they experienced disappointing levels of social acceptance. These findings provide longitudinal support for sociometer theory across the critical transition to secondary school.     

Falsificationism is not just ‘potential’ falsifiability,but requires ‘actual’ falsification: Social psychology,critical rationalism,and progress in science

Based on an analysis of ten popular introductions to social psychology, we will show that Karl Popper's philosophy of ‘critical rationalism’ so far has had little to no traceable influence on the epistemology and practice of social psychology. If Popper is quoted or mentioned in the textbooks at all, the guiding principle of ‘falsificationism’ is reduced to a mere ‘falsifiability’ and some central elements of critical rationalism are left out – those that are incompatible with positivism and inductivism. Echoing earlier attempts to introduce Popper to social psychology by Paul Meehl and Tom Pettigrew, we will argue that a discussing Popper's ideas in more depth could help social psychology to move forward in view of the ‘crisis of confidence’ (Pashler and Wagenmakers, 2012) that has emerged recently in view of the ‘Stapel affair’ and the reports of failures to replicate social psychological experiments in high‐powered replication attempts.