Parenting and children’s prosocial and problem behaviors in middle childhood: The role of Turkish mothers’ emotion socialization practices

Mechanisms by which the relations between different parenting behaviors and children’s prosocial and problem behaviors occur are the focus of the current study. Supportive and nonsupportive emotion socialization practices of mothers were considered as potential mediators. Further, the moderator role of gender was explored. Participants were 228 mothers of 6‐ to 11‐year‐old children living in Ankara, Turkey. Scales assessing parenting behaviors (specifically, positive parenting and inconsistent discipline), maternal reactions to children’s negative emotions, and prosocial and problem behaviors of children were completed by the mothers. The results revealed that supportive emotion socialization practices fully mediated the relation between positive parenting behaviors and both boys’ and girls’ prosocial behaviors. In contrast, nonsupportive emotion socialization practices partially mediated the relation between inconsistent parenting behaviors and problem behaviors, but only for girls. Findings indicated that girls were more vulnerable to their mothers’ inconsistent behaviors possibly because mother–daughter dyads are more likely to use emotion‐related language and to discuss emotions than mother–son dyads from a very early age.     

Revenue Management Through Dynamic Cross Selling in Call Centers

This paper models the cross‐selling problem of a call center as a dynamic service rate control problem. The question of when and to whom to cross sell is explored using this model. The analysis shows that, under the optimal policies, cross‐selling targets may be a function of the operational system state. Sufficient conditions are established for the existence of preferred calls, i.e., calls that will always generate a cross‐sell attempt. These provide guidelines in segment formation for marketing managers, and lead to a static heuristic policy. Numerical analysis establishes the value of different types of information, and different types of automation available for cross selling. Increased staffing for the same call volume is shown to have a positive and increasing return on revenue generation via cross selling, suggesting the need to staff for lower loads in call centers that aim to be revenue generators. The proposed heuristic leads to near optimal performance in a wide range of settings.     

Islamic Migrant Organizations: Little‐Studied Actors in Humanitarian Action

Since 9/11, attention to Islamic migrant organizations within Western countries has grown. However, the humanitarian activities of these organizations have received only limited attention. Hence, it is not yet clear why these organizations engage in humanitarian crises, which specific role Islam plays in their humanitarian engagement and which factors influence the scope of their activities in humanitarian crises. This paper aims to address these research questions by using approaches from sociology of organizations and presenting three empirical case studies from Germany. Particularly, it argues that although all three case studies are active in humanitarian crises the scope of their activities differs due to their differing organizational characteristics, member interests and external expectations.     

The Ethnic Composition of Science and Engineering Research Laboratories in the United States

The United States has been a top destination country for science and engineering (S&E) graduate education for foreign talent for many years. Despite the clear existence of foreign students in the USA, relatively little is known about the factors influencing the flow of foreign students. In this study, we examine foreign doctoral students in science and engineering, and test whether “ethnic affinity” plays a role in the ethnic composition of research laboratories (in what follows, “labs”) in US universities. In order to test this hypothesis, we conduct a web search, and select 164 science and engineering laboratory web pages for analysis. Among these 164 labs, 82 are directed by foreign‐born faculty (Korean, Chinese, Indian or Turkish). These 82 are matched with labs that are in the same department of the same university, but directed by a native (US origin) faculty member. We find strong evidence that labs directed by foreign‐born faculty are more likely to be populated by students from the same country of origin than are labs directed by native faculty. The percentage of students working in a lab from a nationality (foreign or native) is higher when they share nativity with the director. We seek to draw attention to the effect of affinity on the ethnic composition of research labs at the micro level that translates into the ethnic composition of the scientific community at the macro level. Further, these results emphasize the role of lab directors in future enrolments, creating scientific human capital, and contributing to the “brain circulation” phenomenon in the global context.     

Flexibility Structure and Capacity Design with Human Resource Considerations

Most service systems consist of multidepartmental structures with multiskill agents that can deal with several types of service requests. The design of flexibility in terms of agents' skill sets and assignments of requests is a critical issue for such systems. The objective of this study was to identify preferred flexibility structures when demand is random and capacity is finite. We compare structures recommended by the flexibility literature to structures we observe in practice within call centers. To enable a comparison of flexibility structures under optimal capacity, the capacity optimization problem for this setting is formulated as a two‐stage stochastic optimization problem. A simulation‐based optimization procedure for this problem using sample‐path gradient estimation is proposed and tested, and used in the subsequent comparison of the flexibility structures being studied. The analysis illustrates under what conditions on demand, cost, and human resource considerations, the structures found in practice are preferred.     

An ant colony optimization approach for the proportionate multiprocessor open shop

Multiprocessor open shop makes a generalization to classical open shop by allowing parallel machines for the same task. Scheduling of this shop environment to minimize the makespan is a strongly NP-Hard problem. Despite its wide application areas in industry, the research in the field is still limited. In this paper, the proportionate case is considered where a task requires a fixed processing time independent of the job identity. A novel highly efficient solution representation is developed for the problem. An ant colony optimization model based on this representation is proposed with makespan minimization objective. It carries out a random exploration of the solution space and allows to search for good solution characteristics in a less time-consuming way. The algorithm performs full exploitation of search knowledge, and it successfully incorporates problem knowledge. To increase solution quality, a local exploration approach analogous to a local search, is further employed on the solution constructed. The proposed algorithm is tested over 100 benchmark instances from the literature. It outperforms the current state-of-the-art algorithm both in terms of solution quality and computational time.

     

Unfolding intersecting forms of socio-spatial exclusion: Accommodation centres at the height of the “refugee reception crisis” in Germany

At the height of the “refugee reception crisis” in 2015, a large number of forced migrants had to be accommodated in Germany, which led to the transformation of old infrastructures and building of new centres. Based on extensive fieldwork in three centres in the same city, this article seeks to highlight the intersecting forms of socio-spatial exclusion in refugee accommodations in Germany. First, we unpack how differential internal and external spatial arrangements intersect to aggravate or alleviate social exclusion of forced migrants. Second, we draw attention to the ways in which the regulation of space and social relations inside the accommodation centres intersect with the dominant gendered notions of the refugee label. Despite the potency of power relations that differentially categorizes, controls and excludes, exclusion remains ambivalent as forced migrants consistently claim ownership over the space in and around the centres and build social relationships to maintain a sense of “normalcy”.