Human resource development competencies as predictors of agricultural extension agents' performance in Yemen

Human resource development (HRD) issue is recognized as a significant factor for survival of organizations and professionals, including those in the sector of agricultural extension. Few empirical studies have examined the influence of HRD competency variables on agricultural extension agents' performance. The authors argue that HRD competency variables such as leadership development, communication, programme planning, programme implementation and programme evaluation could predict agricultural extension agents' performance. Questionnaire data were collected from a sample of 290 extension agents in Yemen to discover if HRD competencies affect the performance of extension agents. Regression analysis shows that three variables – competencies in programme implementation, programme evaluation and programme planning – contributed significantly to the performance of extension agents. These predictors explain 42.2% of the variance in the job performance model.     

Human capital practices of Russian enterprises

Abstract

The goal of this study was to explore current human capital (HC) management practices (including training and development, recruitment and selection, compensation, empowerment, diversity, and work/family balance) of Russian enterprises. The data were collected at 270 large, medium and small enterprises in Moscow and four representative regional centers. The study results suggest that Russian firms tended to emphasize current HC needs, not long-term HC development strategies. The firm size had an effect on differences in training, selection and compensation practices, with large firms being more long-term oriented. Correlation between elements of the HC management model provided some preliminary evidence that Russian firms tried to coordinate selection, compensation and training procedures. In addition, firms that empowered their employees were also putting more emphasis on long-term oriented training, selection and compensation practices. Finally, there were signs that diversity was gradually becoming an important issue for Russian enterprises of all sizes. However, compared to diversity, companies' emphasis on helping their employees to deal with the work/family balance issues was much stronger.     

Women and training: an empirical investigation in the Arab Middle East

Few studies have explored the professional training experiences of Arab women within the contexts of learning organisational cultures and relevant human resource development (HRD) practices. Capitalising on in-depth, face-to-face interviews, this study explores the experiences of women managers in Lebanon with professional training and organisational learning. The findings demonstrate the paucity of professional training and learning opportunities for women and illustrate how organisational discrimination and gender-biased cultures and tension influence women’s learning. To overcome these barriers and alleviate organisational tension, the Lebanese women managers capitalise on their agency and individual capacities to improve their training experiences and increase their access to learning opportunities. By virtue of individual agency and through their agentic process, the careerists shape their training and overall learning by being adaptive and developing structures of action that enable them to advance their learning. The results have important implications for HR managers and HRD scholars. They also extend our understanding of the importance, or lack thereof, of the learning culture within an organisation.     

Estimation of rare and clustered population variance in adaptive cluster sampling

Abstract

Many researchers used auxiliary information together with survey variable to improve the efficiency of population parameters like mean, variance, total and proportion. Ratio and regression estimation are the most commonly used methods that utilized auxiliary information in different ways to get the maximum benefits in the form of high precision of the estimators. Thompson first introduced the concept of Adaptive cluster sampling, which is an appropriate technique for collecting the samples from rare and clustered populations. In this article, a generalized exponential type estimator is proposed and its properties have been studied for the estimation of rare and highly clustered population variance using single auxiliary information. A numerical study is carried out on a real and artificial population to judge the performance of the proposed estimator over the competing estimators. It is shown that the proposed generalized exponential type estimator is more efficient than the adaptive and non adaptive estimators under conventional sampling design.     

Singular Gaussian graphical models: Structure learning

ABSTRACT

The goal of this article is to introduce singular Gaussian graphical models and their conditional independence properties. In fact, we extend the concept of Gaussian Markov Random Field to the case of a multivariate normally distributed vector with a singular covariance matrix. We construct, then, the associated graph’s structure from the covariance matrix’s pseudo-inverse on the basis of a characterization of the pairwise conditional independence. The proposed approach can also be used when the covariance matrix is ill-conditioned, through projecting data on a smaller subspace. In this case, our method ensures numerical stability and consistency of the constructed graph and significantly reduces the inference problem’s complexity. These aspects are illustrated using numerical experiments.     

Negative Stereotypes of Ethnic Outgroups: A Longitudinal Examination Among Palestinian,Israeli Jewish,and Israeli Arab Youth

Ethno‐political conflict impacts thousands of youth globally and has been associated with a number of negative psychological outcomes. Extant literature has mostly addressed the adverse emotional and behavioral outcomes of exposure while failing to examine change over time in social cognitive factors in contexts of ethno‐political conflict. Using cohort sequential longitudinal data, this study examines ethnic variation in the development of negative stereotypes about ethnic outgroups among Palestinian (n = 600), Israeli Jewish (n = 451), and Israeli Arab (n = 450) youth over 3 years. Age and exposure to ethno‐political violence were included as covariates for these trajectories. Findings indicate important ethnic differences in trajectories of negative stereotypes about ethnic outgroups, as well as variation in how such trajectories are shaped by prolonged ethno‐political conflict.     

Protest leadership in the age of social media

This article challenges the idea that social media protest mobilization and communication are primarily propelled by the self-motivated sharing of ideas, plans, images, and resources. It shows that leadership plays a vital role in steering popular contention on key social platforms. This argument is developed through a detailed case study on the interaction between the administrators and users of the Kullena Khaled Said Facebook page, the most popular online platform during the Egyptian revolution of early 2011. The analysis specifically focuses on the period from 1 January until 15 February 2011. It draws from 1629 admin posts and 1,465,696 user comments, extracted via a customized version of Netvizz. For each day during this period, the three most engaged with posts, as well as the 10 most engaged with comments, have been translated and coded, making it possible to systematically examine how the administrators tried to shape the communication on the page, and how users responded to these efforts. This analysis is pursued from a sociotechnical perspective. It traces how the exchanges on the page are simultaneously shaped by the admins’ marketing strategies and the technological architecture of the Facebook page. On the basis of this exploration, we argue that the page administrators should be understood as ‘connective leaders’. Rather than directing protest activity through formal organizations and collective identity frames, as social movement leaders have traditionally done, connective leaders invite and steer user participation by employing sophisticated marketing strategies to connect users in online communication streams and networks.     

Symbolic Products: Prestige, Pride and Identity Goods

The paper distinguishes between two kinds of products, `symbolic' and `substantive'. While substantive products confer welfare utility in the sense of pecuniary benefits, symbolic products accord self-regarding utility. Symbolic products enter the utility function in a way which differs from substantive ones. The paper distinguishes among three kinds of symbolic products and proposes that each has a distorted form. If symbolic products result from forward-looking evaluation, they act as `prestige goods' which please admiration or, when distorted, as `vanity goods' which satiate pretentiousness. When symbolic products originate from forward-looking action, they act as `pride goods' which satisfy respect or, when distorted, as `deference goods' which indulge pomposity. When symbolic products arise from backward-looking evaluation, they act as `identity goods' which enhance dignity or, when distorted, as `reification goods' which gratify reverence.     

The socioculturalist agenda in economics: Critical remarks of Thorstein Veblen's legacy

The article identifies a cluster of heterodox economists, especially followers of Thorstein Veblen, who are critical of the neoclassical axiom of well-defined preferences. They generally have a problem with the reductionist reasoning that preferences of agents are constituted prior to social interaction. Some of them are proposing somewhat well-defined preferences deduced instead from the tastes of the reference groups with whom the agent identifies. The article does not question the relevance, with respect to economics, of the preferences of groups. Rather, it challenges a muscular view of such preferences which is being uncritically borrowed, inter alia, from functionalist sociology and substantivist economic anthropology. Sociologists and anthropologists in general have recently become, from diverse perspectives, critical of the conception of sociocultural tastes as hegemonic. The basic thrust of the article is that the socioculturalist agenda broadly subscribes to a biological/social dichotomy which neglects that tastes also arise from psychobiological developmental processes.