Sources,Characteristics and Effects of Mass Media Communication on Science: A Review of the Literature,Current Trends and Areas for Future Research

A significant amount of science coverage can be found nowadays in the mass media and is the main source of information about science for many. Accordingly, the relation between science and the media has been intensively analyzed within the social scientific community. It is difficult to keep track of this research, however, as a flurry of studies has been published on the issue. This article provides such an overview. First, it lays out the main theoretical models of science communication, that is, the ‘public understanding of science’ and the ‘mediatization’ model. Second, it describes existing empirical research. In this section, it demonstrates how science’s agenda‐building has improved, how science journalists working routines are described, how different scientific disciplines are presented in the mass media and what effects these media representations (might) have on the audience. Third, the article points out future fields of research.     

Relationships between stressful work environments and bullying: Results of a large representative study

Abstract

This paper contributes to the relatively sparse knowledge about relationships between stressful work environments and bullying. Relationships between job stressors and leadership behaviour were analysed as possible predictors of bullying at work on the basis of the work environment hypothesis, which states that stressful and poorly organized work environments may give rise to conditions resulting in bullying. Analyses of a representative sample (n=2539) of the Norwegian workforce showed role conflict, interpersonal conflicts, and tyrannical and laissez-faire leadership behaviour to be strongly related to bullying, and that the strength of associations to a high degree differed for various measures of bullying. Support was found for an interactive relationship between decision authority and role conflict at different levels of laissez-faire leadership. Not only targets and bully/targets but also bystanders assessed their work environment more negatively than did non-involved employees, while perpetrators of bullying did not differ significantly from non-involved employees as regards their perception of the work environment. Hence, bullying is likely to prevail in stressful working environments characterized by high levels of interpersonal friction and destructive leadership styles. In addition, bullying is particularly prevalent in situations where the immediate supervisor avoids intervening in and managing such stressful situations.     

Beware the angry leader: Trait anger and trait anxiety as predictors of petty tyranny

Drawing on the general aggression model and theories of victimization and temperamental goodness-of-fit, we investigated trait anger and trait anxiety as antecedents of petty tyranny: employing a multilevel design with data from 84 sea captains and 177 crew members. Leader trait anger predicted subordinate-reported petty tyranny. Subordinate trait anxiety was associated with subordinate-reported petty tyranny. The association between leader trait anger and subordinate-reported petty tyranny was strongest among low trait anger subordinates supporting the theory of temperamental goodness-of-fit—or rather misfit—in dyads. Hence, leader anger-generated petty tyranny seems to constitute itself both as an average leadership style and as behavior targeting specific subordinates, in this case low trait anger subordinates. In addition, anxious subordinates report more exposure to such abusive leadership behaviors irrespective of levels of trait anger in the captain. The practical implications are above all the needs for organizational and individual management of leader trait anger.     

Incentive effects and the income tax treatment of employer-provided workplace benefits

Employers often provide their employees with different kinds of benefits in the workplace to create comfortable working conditions. In order to avoid distortions of the wage-benefit ratio in employee compensation, economic theory suggests that fringe benefits should be subject to income taxation at a value placed on them by employees. This article shows that this approach does not apply to workplace benefits. Since the goal of these benefits is to reduce the employees’ disutility from work, treating them simply as wage substitutes disregards their incentive effects. Therefore, the rules for taxing workplace benefits are derived from an agency model. It is shown that in contrast to the standard economic approach, cost can be a more efficient tax base than willingness to pay, even though this results in higher tax payments. Moreover, with non-distortionary tax rates it is always better to tax the employer rather than the employee.     

Social interaction targets enhance 13-month-old infants' associative learning

Infants are attentive to third-party interactions, but the underlying mechanisms of this preference remain understudied. This study examined whether 13-month-old infants (N = 32) selectively learn cue–target associations guiding them to videos depicting a social interaction scene. In a visual learning task, two geometrical shapes were repeatedly paired with two kinds of target videos: two adults interacting with one another (social interaction) or the same adults acting individually (non-interactive control). Infants performed faster saccadic latencies and more predictive gaze shifts toward the cued target region during social interaction trials. These findings suggest that social interaction targets can serve as primary reinforcers in an associative learning task, supporting the view that infants find it intrinsically valuable to observe others’ interactions.     

Values and Their Change During the Business Education – A Gender Perspective

Modern management and organization theory have been criticized for being based on masculine values and concepts. The theory and associated values influence not only managerial behavior in practice, but also business education's value system. In this study, we analyze the change in values during business education from a gender perspective. By values we mean feminine and masculine values. Our empirical study is based on the literature of cultural values and gender socialization theories. We surveyed 324 students. The result of our study lends support to earlier research: men are more masculine and women more feminine in their values. The change towards masculinity during business education is not supported statistically in this study. However, there may be a weak tendency towards masculinity, especially among female students. In addition, we propose that it is possible that business students have a tendency to try to fulfil masculine needs in their occupational choice. Further research is needed to investigate the empirical findings of our study. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A new approach for disclosure control in the IAB establishment panel—multiple imputation for a better data access

For micro-datasets considered for release as scientific or public use files, statistical agencies have to face the dilemma of guaranteeing the confidentiality of survey respondents on the one hand and offering sufficiently detailed data on the other hand. For that reason, a variety of methods to guarantee disclosure control is discussed in the literature. In this paper, we present an application of Rubin’s (J. Off. Stat. 9, 462–468, 1993) idea to generate synthetic datasets from existing confidential survey data for public release.We use a set of variables from the 1997 wave of the German IAB Establishment Panel and evaluate the quality of the approach by comparing results from an analysis by Zwick (Ger. Econ. Rev. 6(2), 155–184, 2005) with the original data with the results we achieve for the same analysis run on the dataset after the imputation procedure. The comparison shows that valid inferences can be obtained using the synthetic datasets in this context, while confidentiality is guaranteed for the survey participants.     

电影工业的文化多样性：一项跨国研究

本文作者提出了一个评估文化多样性的框架。本文得出的主要结果：（1）国家的多样性等级次序高度依赖于其所采用的文化多样性维度;（2）电影产业得到公共支持越强大的国家（法国、欧盟和韩国）,其文化多样性越高;（3）供应多样性（supplied diversity）与消费多样性（consumed diversity）紧密相联,前者始终高于后者。这一现象揭示出对供应文化多样性的支持政策似乎与消费偏向相吻合。     

The multiple faces of tension: dualities in decision-making

Review of Managerial Science - In making decisions about strategic and operational actions, managers commonly need to consider dualities such as long-term versus short-term, innovation versus...