On Movement Frames and Negotiated Identities: The Case of Poland's First Solidarity Congress

How do participants in a social movement come to agree on goals and strategies? Recent scholarship has moved in two theoretical directions. Some writers focus on movement leaders and their efforts to excite and attract potential supporters by formulating a vision that conveys optimism and moral outrage, yet is congruent with long-standing popular beliefs. Other writers focus far less on leaders and their frames and insist, instead, that movements are organizationally decentralized and typically lack consensus on goals and strategies. From this second perspective, programs are best seen as the byproducts of ongoing clashes and messy negotiations between a myriad of local activists with different beliefs, diverse values, and frequently divergent interests. Using the First Solidarity Congress as a historical case study, this article argues for the utility of combining both approaches – one that focuses on leaders’ ongoing efforts to build consensus around a seemingly effective frame, and the other that stresses the extent of intra-movement discord and the decentralized nature of movement organizations.     

Considerations on the ‘Replication Problem’ in Sociology

We re-examine the so-called “replication problem” in sociology—a scarcity of published studies dedicated to reproducing findings from prior research. We do this in part by considering the larger epistemological traditions of the natural sciences and humanities. We make three primary arguments: that (1) replication studies are more prevalent than is commonly perceived, (2) calls for and discussions of replication do not attend enough to issues of theory, and (3) we should reconsider as a discipline how we evaluate replications. In developing this third argument, we draw on the concept of episteme, discussing two epistemes that concurrently exist in sociology: the scientific project and the aesthetic object. The former overlaps with approaches to knowledge growth in the natural sciences, the latter with the humanities. We propose that sociology is situated between these extremes, presenting unique challenges for replication research. In particular, nuanced considerations of replications in sociology foreclose any simplistic accounts of a replication problem in the discipline.     

Price Inference in Small Markets

This paper investigates the effects of market size on the ability of price to aggregate traders' private information. To account for heterogeneity in correlation of trader values, a Gaussian model of double auction is introduced that departs from the standard information structure based on a common (fundamental) shock. The paper shows that markets are informationally efficient only if correlations of values coincide across all bidder pairs. As a result, with heterogeneously interdependent values, price informativeness may not increase monotonically with market size. As a necessary and sufficient condition for the monotonicity, price informativeness increases with the number of traders if the implied reduction in (the absolute value of) an average correlation statistic of an information structure is sufficiently small.     

Mental fatigue at work and pain perception

Abstract

The object of this study was to determine whether mental fatigue connected with high and low stimulation at work can affect the subjects' perception of pain. Two groups of female visual display unit operators were studied: the first group performed tasks involving high levels of stimulation, while the second group performed tasks involving low levels of stimulation. The results show that mental fatigue due to a high level of stimulation causes an increase in pain ratings, while the mental fatigue due to low stimulation level causes a decrease in pain ratings.