Local perceptions of socio-ecological drivers and effects of coastal armoring: the case of Moorea,French Polynesia

Population and Environment - This paper presents a transdisciplinary study focusing on the socio-ecological mechanisms at play in the alteration of Moorea’s (French Polynesia) coastline....     

Plurality of Worlds, Plurality of Risks

Risk management decisions are not made only on the basis of expert risk assessment. In numerous instances, public controversy erupts, questioning the results of previous risk assessment procedures and shaping the development of risk management episodes. This article presents a case study of risk management in the context of a 1980s controversy over aerial spraying against a spruce budworm epidemic in Quebec and draws some general conclusions concerning the relationship between risk analysis and public controversies. Actors in public controversies define risks more broadly than risk assessment experts. Moreover, public controversies only partly concern issues of risk. They are first and foremost debates about social choices in which actors carry with them a multidimensional social experience of technology, trust, credibility and decision-making institutions. This experience contributes to the construction of a plurality of emergent representations of what is at stake in a controversy, referred to in this paper as "worlds of relevance." Analysis shows that in any given public controversy, there are not just two parties arguing against each other. Rather, several "worlds of relevance" can be found that link, in a variety of ways, a variety of entities not necessarily shared by all these worlds. Each "world of relevance" presents a different definition of what the issues and the stakes of the controversy are. Risks are only part of the picture, and they are embedded in "worlds of relevance" from which they take their significance. The successful management of a controversy entails the association of entities from different worlds.     

What Do We Know About Making Risk Comparisons?

The risks of unfamiliar technologies are often evaluated by comparing them with the risks of more familiar ones. Such risk comparisons have been criticized for neglecting critical dimensions of risky decisions. In a guide written for the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Covello et al. (¹) have summarized these critiques and developed a taxonomy that characterizes possible risk comparisons in terms of their acceptability (or objectionableness). We asked four diverse groups of subjects to judge the acceptability of 14 statements produced by Covello et al. as examples of their categories. We found no correlation between the judgments of acceptability produced by our subjects and those predicted by Covello et al. .     

A model for assertive training: Integration of feelings and behavior

The current emphasis in assertive training is based on behavioral and cognitive approaches. In this paper the authors present an approach which explores the interconnectedness of feelings and behavior in the learning of assertive skills. Creatively designed structured exercises are presented as tools used to bring people into contract with themselves, to highlight nonfunctional behavior, and to provide the means to try out and practice new assertive behaviors. The impact of the exercises as a learning vehicle in assertive training is described and discussed.     

Motivating deference: Employees' perception of authority legitimacy as a mediator of supervisor motivating styles and employee work-related outcomes

The two studies presented here examine the extent to which perceived authority legitimacy mediates the association between supervisors' motivating styles and subordinates' work-related outcomes. From the perspective of the self-determination theory (SDT), we examined two supervisory motivating styles: the autonomy-supportive style that nurtures employees' inner motivational resources and the controlling style in which supervisors pressure their employees to behave in specific manager-directed ways. Perceived authority legitimacy was defined according to the Relational Model of Authority (RMA). The results of Study 1 (n?=?191) showed that the autonomy-supportive motivating style, but not the controlling style, was associated with employees' work satisfaction, commitment, and burnout through legitimacy. These results were replicated in Study 2 (n?=?314), even after controlling for task-autonomous and controlled motivation, and extended to other reported employee behavioral outcomes such as organizational citizenship behavior, deviant behavior, and conflicts within the workplace. Taken together, the results suggest that the effectiveness of the autonomy-supportive motivating style is partly due to its association with volitional deference to authority. The paper concludes by discussing theoretical implications of integrating SDT with RMA and the practical implications of the findings.     

Réseaux épistémiques : formaliser la cognition distribuée

Knowledge-based communities bring together persons who collaborate and interact in order to produce knowledge. The tasks involved in this production are usually described in terms of “epistemic communities”: groups of individuals working on shared topics in pursuit of a common goal of knowledge production. Focus is thus placed on the formation, evolution and interactions of these communities – in general, on processes of collaboration. The objective is twofold: on one hand, describe how epistemic communities emerge and overlap at various hierarchical levels and, on the other, expose the determinants of collaboration between members of these communities. In an attempt to formalize the analysis of distributed cognition, an epistemic community is defined as the largest set of agents sharing and, working on, the same set of concepts. This formal definition helps us describe the distributed structure of knowledge production; understand the impact of this structure on the perception and arrangement of activities related to distributed cognition and appraise dynamically the stability over time of the distribution of tasks within the network, in spite of a continuous turnover among members. An empirical study of a community of embryologists illustrates this approach.