Economic crisis and the employee: The effects of economic crisis on employee job satisfaction,commitment, and self-regulation

Greece has been suffering a severe crisis starting in about 2009. This paper examines the impact of the recent economic crisis in Greece on employee work-related attitudes via changes in regulatory focus. We collected data in a large and heterogeneous sample of employees (N = 1024) during the crisis and compared them with a matched sample of employees surveyed (N = 882) half a decade earlier, i.e., before the crisis. Participants reported their job satisfaction, organizational commitment and their self-regulatory focus. Results show, as expected, that participants after start of the crisis were lower in extrinsic job satisfaction, affective organizational commitment and were also (unexpectedly) lower in normative commitment, while these attitudinal changes were explained by decreased promotion orientation and increased prevention focus. Rather unexpectedly, pre-crisis and crisis samples did not differ in levels of continuance commitment. This paper makes a relevant contribution by showing that the threatening crisis event does not only have negative effects on work-related outcomes, but also that changes in regulatory foci occur and explain attitudinal change indicating an adaptive mechanism to the threatening situation of an economic crisis.     

Wenn weiße Schafe krampfhaft nach schwarzen suchen ... und sich dabei dreckig machen! Replik auf den Beitrag von Jochen Gläser

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

From consensus to credibility

The development of consensual science has greatly influenced the international environmental negotiation processes. This is not least the case for the Convention on Long‐range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP). Negotiators as well as regime analysts regard CLRTAP as a successful example of how scientists have succeeded in influencing international policy making through consensus‐building strategies. Drawing on Ulrich Beck's work on reflexive scientization and the concept of ‘stage management’ from the field of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), this paper critically analyzes the role of science in the regulation of transboundary air pollution. It discusses the consensus‐building strategies developed by scientists as well as contemporary strategies for making science matter in regulative work. It is argued that scientific credibility is crucial for attracting political and public attention, but that credibility does not necessarily have to be based on scientific consensus. The challenge for science is not so much to create consensus but to strengthen its credibility by elaborating new relations with its stakeholders.     

Strategies for survival: users' experience of child welfare in three welfare regimes

This paper draws on research into child welfare services in France, Germany and England which compares the subjective experience of mothers who have been in contact with family support and child protection agencies in the three countries. The mothers' stories suggest that successful help‐achieving strategies differ according to the nature of the child welfare regime, and that behaviour which is effective in getting a good response in one country may work less well elsewhere. The stories of two mothers in each of the countries have been chosen to demonstrate how the structures of different social welfare regimes affect the efforts of welfare users to get the help they need.     

Prediction of Chaotic Time Series in the Presence of Measurement Error: the Importance of Initial Conditions

In this paper we argue that even if a dynamic relationship can be well described by a deterministic system, retrieving this relationship from an empirical time series has to take into account some, although possibly very small measurement error in the observations. Therefore, measuring the initial conditions for prediction may become much more difficult since one now has a combination of deterministic and stochastic elements. We introduce a partial smoothing estimator for estimating the unobserved initial conditions. We will show that this estimator allows to reduce the effects of measurement error for predictions although the reduction may be small in the presence of strong chaotic dynamics. This will be illustrated using the logistic map.     

A sociometric status index without subgroup membership bias

Sociometric status is a widely used indicator to assess what is called popularity of a person within a group. The purpose of this paper is to show that status as defined by known indices may be biased whenever there are subgroups unequal in size within the total group and within-group choices are more probable than between-group choices. The problem of subgroup membership bias may be solved, however, by a simple linear transformation.