Leadership and Overload Stress Orientations of German and Russian Working Adults: Does Government Work Experience Make a Difference?

This paper examines task, relationship, and overload stress orientations of people in the high-context cultures of Russia and in the low-context cultures of Germany based on their government work experience. A Two-way ANOVA methodology is used for hypotheses testing in this research. As a result of the comparative, cross-national analysis of 462 responses, some significant differences were found between the two samples. Russians have higher scores on task and relationship orientations than German respondents. There is a marginally significant difference in the task scores between respondents who have government experience and those who do not. Respondents who have government experience are more task-oriented and experience more stress than those who do not have government experience. Finding reveals significant interaction between government experience and country in the task scores. Literature on German and Russian cultures is presented along with practical applications, suggestions, and implications for future studies.     

Evaluation of a Financial Literacy Test Using Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the quality (item difficulty and discriminability, construct validity, and reliability) of a financial literacy test that has been used to measure financial literacy in multiple countries. The test was analyzed based on Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory, specifically the Rasch model, with the goal of identifying areas of improvement. The findings from the two measurement frameworks were quite comparable and identified similar measurement problems. Steps to improve the financial literacy measure were recommended.     

“Thanks to the Internet,We Remain a Family”: ICT Domestication by Elderly Immigrants and their Families in Israel

In addition to coping with intergenerational and spousal problems related to aging and/or immigration, elderly immigrants in Israel are also often burdened with domesticating information and communication technologies (ICTs). Thus, the goal of this study is to explore how relationships within the elderly immigrant’s family are manifested in a home computer context and to determine the roles that domestication of the relevant technologies plays in their family life. This qualitative study is based on in-depth interviews with 26 elderly users who immigrated from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) to Israel about 20 years ago. The findings show that ICT domestication and family dynamics are complex, interrelated processes: Technologies have dramatically changed the elderly immigrants’ family situations, yet immigrants have accorded these technologies unique meaning, adapting them to respond to their family needs and negotiating ICT domestication as a means of discussing and rebuilding family communication.     

Boosting the input: 9-month-olds’ sensitivity to low-frequency phonotactic patterns in novel wordforms

To learn their first words, infants must attend to a variety of cues that signal word boundaries. One such cue infants might use is the language-specific phonotactics to track legal combinations and positions of segments within a word. Studies have demonstrated that, when tested across statistically high and low phonotactics, infants repeatedly reject the low-frequency wordforms. We explore whether the capacity to access low-frequency phonotactic combinations is available at 9 months when pre-exposed to wordforms containing statistically low combinations of segments. Using a modified head-turn procedure, one group of infants was presented with nonwords with low-frequency complex onsets (dr-), and another group was presented with zero-frequency onset nonwords (dl-). Following pre-exposure and familiarization, infants were then tested on their ability to segment nonwords that contained either the low- or the zero-frequency onsets. Only infants in the low-frequency condition were successful at the task, suggesting some experience with these onsets supports segmentation.     

‘We were fighting for our place’: Resisting gender knowledge regimes through feminist knowledge network formation

The transformative potential of feminist knowledge in the disciplines of entrepreneurship, business and management has arguably been hindered by persistent gender knowledge regimes that marginalize feminist scholarship and channel widely applicable gender expertise into niche streams, conferences and publication outlets. Whilst offering valuable spaces for feminist knowledge production, removing gender expertise from mainstream fora reduces its centrality to broader debates, maintaining its marginality and limiting its impact. Taking a collaborative autoethnographic approach, we explore the formation and development of a UK‐based organization for feminist entrepreneurship scholars, the Gender and Enterprise Network, as a means of collective resistance to this perpetuation of enforced marginality. Our network challenges extant gender knowledge regimes and offers transformative opportunities within and outside of our respective organizations, providing insights for others wishing to form similar networks and contributing to ongoing debates on the value and valuing of feminist knowledge.     

Current Publications Received

The Economics Across the Curriculum approach encourages the integration of economic concepts into various disciplines. This article features the essence of the approach built on best practices described in the literature. Several creative lesson ideas for teaching about money and inflation are showcased. These lessons were field-tested by high school teachers in algebra, American history, and Spanish language classes. The goal is to inspire teachers to try these ideas in their classrooms. Any subject area can be a fruitful ground for the infusion of some economic concepts and making lessons engaging and meaningful for students.