Does It Pay to Be Moral? How Indicators of Morality and Competence Enhance Organizational and Work Team Attractiveness

Based on a social identity analysis, the authors argue that people are attracted to teams and organizations with positive features. Such features can refer to the competence and achievements of the organization, or to its moral values and ethical conduct. However, in work contexts, ethics and achievements do not necessarily go together. The paper reports three studies that examine the relative and combined impact of perceived competence vs morality of a team or organization on its attractiveness to individuals. Study 1 (n = 44) reveals that students prefer to seek employment in a moral rather than a competent organization, when forced to choose between these organizational features on a bipolar scale. Study 2 (n = 100) replicates these findings in a design where the competence and morality of a fictitious organization were manipulated orthogonally. Study 3 (n = 89) examines responses to experimental task teams that systematically differed from each other in their competence and morality. Results of all three studies converge to demonstrate that the perceived morality of the team or organization has a greater impact on its attractiveness to individuals than its perceived competence. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.     

Seasonality of coitus and seasonality of birth

Seasonal variation of birth rates has been observed in every population in which it has been studied. Many hypotheses have been advanced to account for the variation, including seasonal variation in frequency of coitus. This relationship is known to be true for other primates, but seasonal variation in coital rate has not been previously documented in man.This paper presents over one hundred woman-years of data on coital rates from about .fifty white, mostly well-educated, premenopausal, married, husband-present volunteers. Seasonal fluctuations were seen in coital rates, of about the same magnitude as seasonal variations in the white birth rates reported for New York City, 1962-64; for the United States, 1963; and for the highest socioeconomic quintile census tracts, Baltimore, 1952-56. However, shifting the birth rates back forty weeks to approximate conception dates revealed no association with the observed coital rates.If the pattern presented has great generality, seasonal variations in births cannot be explained by seasonality of coitus.     

Critical Analysis of the Relationship between Local Ownership and Community Resiliency*

Abstract Collectively, current resource‐development literature has given little attention to organizational features of ownership as important variables in community resilience. By drawing from six local buyout cases in Canada's forest sector, we reveal the complexity and numerous constraints on local ownership and expose a more nuanced context than most sociologists tend to consider. Our findings suggest that the meaning of local ownership and community resilience varies depending upon the composition (e.g., private vs. public; mill vs. forest license vs. coupled mill & forest license), type (social, cooperative, trust and/or direct‐share ownership), extent of ownership (percentage of local versus extra‐local shares), and the level of control (e.g., proportion of locally held seats on the Board of Directors) associated with ownership. Future research on local ownership should more carefully differentiate between the nature of local ownership and its associated outcomes.     

Toddler Emotion Regulation With Mothers and Fathers: Temporal Associations Between Negative Affect and Behavioral Strategies

The present study investigated temporal associations between putative emotion regulation strategies and negative affect in 20‐month‐old toddlers. Toddlers’ parent‐focused, self‐distraction, and toy‐focused strategies, as well as negative affect, were rated on a second‐by‐second basis during laboratory parent–toddler interactions. Longitudinal mixed‐effects models were conducted to determine the degree to which behavioral strategy use predicts subsequent negative affect and negative affect predicts subsequent strategy use. Results with mother–toddler and father–toddler dyads indicated that parent‐focused strategies with an unresponsive parent were followed by increases in negative affect, whereas toy‐focused strategies were followed by decreases in negative affect. Results also indicated that toddler negative affect serves to regulate behavioral strategy use within both parent contexts.     

Knowledge of American sign language and the ability of hearing individuals to decode facial expressions of emotion

The relation between knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) and the ability to decode facial expressions of emotion was explored in this study. Subjects were 60 college students, half of whom were intermediate level students of ASL and half of whom had no exposure to a signed language. Subjects viewed and judged silent video segments of stimulus persons experiencing spontaneous emotional reactions representing either happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, or fear/surprise. Results indicated that hearing subjects knowledgeable in ASL were generally better than hearing non-signers at identifying facial expressions of emotion, although there were variations in decoding accuracy regarding the specific emotion being judged. In addition, females were more successful decoders than males. Results have implications for better understanding the nature of nonverbal communication in deaf and hearing individuals.We are grateful to Karl Scheibe for comments on an earlier version of this paper and to Erik Coats for statistical analysis. This study was conducted as part of a Senior Honors thesis at Wesleyan University.     

Social Consequences of Employee/Management Buyouts: Two Canadian Examples From the Forest Sector*

Abstract Local control of natural resource processing facilities in small rural communities is often viewed as beneficial to community development. This paper employs social impact assessment tools to examine the social and economic effects of change in the ownership of forest products mills in two communities. Our analysis documents (1) the degree to which local ownership of the new, locally owned corporations led to local reinvestment of profits, and (2) whether the goals of the architects of these buyouts were realized: the maintenance of jobs, income, population, and a way of life. Overall, both communities were able to maintain jobs, population, and real estate values, and profits were reinvested in mill upgrades. After the buyouts, however, both communities experienced a rise and then a decline in community cohesion, and changes in local social and power relations, in which local ownership was short‐lived; benefits to relationships within the community were mixed.     

More than a Metaphor: Organizational Identity Makes Organizational Life Possible

Recent papers by Cornelissen (2002a, 2002b) and Gioia, Schultz and Corley (2002a, 2002b ) have debated the utility of organizational identity as a metaphor for understanding organizational life. In the present paper we argue that this debate is limiting because it frames issues of organizational identity purely in metaphorical terms and fails to explore the social psychological basis and consequences of the discontinuity between personal and organizational identity. Extending this debate, we argue that the power of organizational identity as a theoretical and applied construct derives from the fact that it has the capacity to be both an externally shared and negotiated product and an internalized aspect of the collective self. Consistent with recent research informed by the social identity approach to organizational psychology, we discuss how an appreciation of the identity‐based dynamic between the social facts of organizations and the socially‐structured psychology of organizational members is essential for both theoretical and practical understanding of organizational life.     

Towards Reconceptualizing Political Action*

The discipline of sociology faces important challenges that may result in a transformation of the field. For example, the practice of specialization potentially takes on a new meaning in the context of growing interdisciplinary studies, the growth of feminist scholarship, and renewed efforts at micro-macro linkages. In essence, more comprehensive accounts of social phenomena are made possible as a result of these trends. This paper examines the way in which such approaches may lead to advances in the study of political action.     

Charles S. Johnson’s the Negro in Chicago

Charles S. Johnson’s classic study of the Chicago race riot of 1919,The Negro in Chicago, can provide contemporary social scientists with valuable historical insight into urban race relations and a model of methodological comprehensiveness. This review of Johnson’s study suggests the influence of the Chicago School of Sociology and especially of Robert Park on its methodological and conceptual framework. In contrast to the tendency of many recent studies of black urban communities to maintain a narrow theoretical and empirical focus,The Negro in Chicago draws on a wide array of types of data and uses an organic metaphor to suggest the complex interrelatedness of urban residents in the many contexts of their daily lives.