Professional blinders? The novel as an eye-opener in organizational analysis

ABSTRACT

Scholarly textbooks often follow a logic where suitable empirical cases are selected to illustrate the theoretical and analytical points that we as scholars want to make. But what would happen if we would do the opposite: build a textbook on a novel written by a novelist for such purpose and let the theories explain the actions and emotions of fictional characters? In this article, we share and reflect upon our experiences of co-authoring a textbook in organization theory together with a professional novelist. We argue that the novel can function as an eye-opener in organizational analysis, forcing us to look beyond more static and rationalistic perspectives on organizations as well as the stereotypes of such. We build and relate our experiences to the growing literature about using fiction in scholarly work and discuss the potential of such genre-bending work when we bring in flesh and blood into the analyses.     

Feminism,militarism, and attitudes toward the role of women in the military

Attitudes toward the role of women in the military require the reconciliation of two often conflicting beliefs: those toward the roles and rights of women and those toward the military. This article explores the relationships between positive attitudes toward women’s roles throughout society, or feminism, and positive attitudes toward defense spending, or militarism, both with each other and with attitudes toward gender integration in the military. Results of this analysis show there to be a negative relationship between feminism and militarism, a positive relationship between feminism and gender integration, and a negative relationship between militarism and gender integration. The results of multiple regression analysis show that feminism is the strongest predictor of attitudes toward gender integration, while militarism is weak in its predictive ability. The author argues that the issue of women in the military is more one of women’s equality than of national defense and that policy discussions should be structured accordingly. She is currently conducting research which examines how women in the United States military employ strategies to manage gender and sexuality. This research provides evidence for the claim that gender is not simply a role or an attribute, but that gender is created and recreated through our interactions with others.     

Age difference asymmetry and a two-sex perspective

The paper shows that (a) the age difference between spouses can be and has been different for men and women; (b) male and female age differences can exhibit different trends; (c) the discrepancy is due to remarriage; (d) the age difference fluctuates substantially through time; (e) trends in the age difference are not readily interpretable as reflecting change in the relative status of the sexes; and (f) that trends in the age difference may be linked to marriage market conditions. The paper argues that marriage and fertility data for both men and women are increasingly necessary because of rises in marital breakdown and the associated divergence of the experience of men and women.Cet article montre que (a) les différences d'âge entre époux peuvent être et ont été dissemblables pour les hommes et les femmes; (b) les différences d'âge masculines et féminines peuvent présenter des tendances différentes; (c) la divergence est due aux remariages; (d) les différences d'âge varient de façon importante au cours du temps; (e) les tendances dans les différences d'âge ne sont pas simplement interprétables en termes de changements dans le statut relatif des sexes; et (f) les tendances dans les différences d'âge peuvent être reliées aux conditions du marché matrimonial. L'article montre que les données sur le mariage et la fécondité à la fois des hommes et des femmes, sont de plus en plus nécessaires du fait de l'accroissement des ruptures d'unions et de la divergence des expériences masculines et féminines, qui lui est associée.

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An earlier version of this paper, His and her age gap: asymmetry in the age difference between partners, was a contributed paper to Session F27 of the General Conference of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, New Delhi, 20–27 September 1989. A longer version appeared as LS Working Paper 70, issued by City University Social Statistics Research Unit, September 1990.     

The birth of the queen/the modern homosexual: historical explanations revisited

In this paper I review a number of explanations for the emergence of the modern homosexual category in Western (mainly Northwest European) cultures. I suggest there are four different emphases in respect of the social and cultural factors given priority in interpretations of the formation of the homosexual category. Of course, individual studies have often taken into consideration more than one single factor (most notably, Greenberg, 1988; Chauncey, 1994), and the grouping of previous studies that I here suggest only indicates where the focus of a given study is. The social and cultural factors emphasized in these four approaches are: 1) the effects of competitive capitalism on the bourgeois/middle class political economy of sexuality and sexual morals; 2) the rise of expert knowledges, controlling systems, and modern bureaucracies; 3) tensions within gender order and the struggle over new definitions of gender roles; 4) the rise of free wage labour, the proliferation of urban anonymity, and the unfolding of new modes of existence in the life-world of modern pluralist urban society. Finally, the article briefly considers the potential erosion of the homosexual vs. heterosexual divide in the light of the historical background. Almost thirty years have passed since ‘The Homosexual Role’, by Mary McIntosh (1968), the first notable contribution to the historical sociology of homosexuality operating within a social constructionist view of homosexuality. Since then, there have been numerous studies of the formation of the conceptual category and social aggregate of ‘modern homosexual’. Researchers have differed about whether the pedigree of ‘homosexual’ and homosexual identities and subcultures in Western societies can be traced back to the late nineteenth century or to the early eighteenth century, and whether or not some notion of ‘homosexual’ was established in the cultural imagery before the last fifty years or so. It might be fruitful to distinguish between the historically older categories of ‘molly’, ‘queen’, and ‘fairy’ on the one hand, and the more recent ‘homosexual’ on the other hand. It can be argued that the decisive feature of the first-mentioned ‘deviant men’ was their status as gender-crossers (which as a side-effect entailed an interest in homosexual conduct), whereas the modern term homosexual does not necessarily suggest gender-crossing or more generic ‘sexual inversion’(cf. Chauncey, 1994). However, allusions to gay men's purported effeminacy and lesbian women's purported masculinity continue to surface frequently also in contemporary culture. Hence, for the sake of brevity, I here use the term modern homosexual, by which I refer to a notion that there is in some people an inherent sexual desire exclusively for persons of the same sex, and that this so-called sexual orientation is to some degree intertwined with a tendency to gender-crossing conduct. ¹ 1 Historically there has been a mutually re-enforcing dynamics between the forma-tion of the conceptual category and the social aggregate of homosexual(s). Methodological considerations and also certain presumptions about the dynam-ics of culture and society help explain why, until recently, most studies have focused on the trajectory of concepts, identities, and social roles, rather than on the experiential, embodied aspects of the social aggregate of homosexual(s). The idea of sexual inversion predicates that homosexual desire is evidence of a faulty combination of body and soul: there is ‘a female soul in a male body’, or vice versa. On the distinctions between sexual orientation and sexual role see, King, 1984.
     

Policy instrument affordances: a framework for analysis

The present study uses the concept of technological efficacy derived from ecological psychology and design studies to offer an alternative way of analyzing how policy instruments affect change. Reasoning from this, the paper outlines a framework for analyzing policy instruments in terms of their affordances. We define affordances as the means through which an instrument exerts influence on its intended target audience. Using this approach, we contend that policy instruments may be analyzed as interfaces that organize social relations and create structures of opportunity and/or restrict possibilities for action. We argue that explicating the pathways through which instruments afford or constrain action is a central task for policy analysis. Our proposed framework of analysis builds on the idea that instruments yield effects by facilitating action and learning. We further contend that the actions that an instrument can facilitate or inhibit are determined by specific affordance modalities of the instrument in conjunction with contingencies of the actor and the policy environment. Examples from research policy are used to illustrate some of these effects.     

Housing and children: simultaneous decisions?—a cohort study of young adults’ housing and family formation decision

This study contributes to earlier research on homeownership and childbearing by taking into account the potential simultaneity between these two life events. A dataset comprising three different Swedish birth cohorts suggests that these are events that are indeed simultaneous. Different tests indicate that taking this simultaneity into account gives an overall statistically significant improvement of the model fit. However, this result is most obvious for those young adults who faced increasing problems on the housing market. The childbearing decision of these cohorts also seems to be more sensitive to changes in the user cost.     

Stock investors’ preference for short-term vs. long-term bonuses

Bonuses in the finance sector may be based on too short time intervals for environmental and social factors to be taken into account in investment decisions. We report two experiments to investigate whether investors prefer short-term to long-term bonuses. In Experiment 1 employing 27 undergraduates, preferences were measured for four short-term certain bonuses, evenly distributed across a time interval, and one certain long-term bonus at the end of the time interval. A majority chose the short-term bonuses, and in order for the long-term bonus to be equally preferred it had to be about 40% higher than the four added short-term bonuses. Experiment 2 employing another 36 undergraduates introduced outcome uncertainty that more accurately reflects the choices stock investors face. The participants again choose between a long-term bonus and four distributed short-term bonuses. It was shown that uncertainty made more participants prefer the long-term bonus to the added short-term bonuses than when the outcome was certain. A smaller increase of the long-term bonus of about 20% was now required to make it equally attractive as the four added short-term bonuses.     

Modeling probability density through ultraspherical polynomial transformations

We present a method for fitting parametric probability density models using an integrated square error criterion on a continuum of weighted Lebesgue spaces formed by ultraspherical polynomials. This approach is inherently suitable for creating mixture model representations of complex distributions and allows fully autonomous cluster analysis of high-dimensional datasets. The method is also suitable for extremely large sets, allowing post facto model selection and analysis even in the absence of the original data. Furthermore, the fitting procedure only requires the parametric model to be pointwise evaluable, making it trivial to fit user-defined models through a generic algorithm.     

The limits of the decentred state: the case of policing insurance claims fraud

Existing research clearly shows that the public–private divide is continuously being challenged, recast and transformed. However, this article argues that a sharp distinction between public and private continues to operate as an important norm for professionals involved in the investigation of insurance claims fraud in Sweden. It shows how power within private insurance companies and the police authority is organized around the public–private divide, which is in turn mobilized to justify repression and to give investigations legitimacy. The article indicates that the formal public–private distinction is far more thoroughly maintained than is suggested by the existing literature. Rather than challenging the centrality of state power, private insurers and the police construct, maintain and have a stake in the reproduction of a state‐centric monopoly of crime control.