Grounding Twenty-first-Century Public Relations Praxis in Aristotelian Ethos

ABSTRACT

By grounding public relations praxis in Aristotelian ethos, practitioners can function as liaison officers with balanced perspectives, capable of co-creating meaning with both client organizations and their publics between whom experts are hired to facilitate mutually beneficial relationships. This approach locates persuasion at the nexus of speaker ethos in the public relations process. It allows practitioners to balance their commitment to the ethics of their profession with loyalty to clients, while empowering audiences (organizations and their publics) to function as the final arbiters of any courses of action proposed to them. Moreover, because the approach enables practitioners, based on their credible ethos, to participate in organizational decision-making, it has the potential to transfer their ethical worldview to client organizations. Ultimately, the central theoretical contribution of this essay is an alternative approach to public relations praxis founded on an analysis of Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, arête, and eunoia.     

The resentful undergrowth of nostalgia: Ontological insecurity,relative deprivation and powerlessness

This article untangles competing conceptualisations of nostalgia and identifies a specific form of collective-restorative nostalgia as politically significant. We argue that the link between resentment and this type of nostalgia emerges from their joint critique of the socio-political realities of the present. Nostalgia provides spatial and temporal orientations for a group's experiences of resentment through highly selective recollections of the heartland and an idealised golden age. We hypothesize that nostalgia leverages the heartland and the golden age to formulate claims for recognition and restored status on behalf of those who feel left behind by late modernity. Next, the article uses structural equation modelling and the 2019 Belgian National Election Study to reveal how resentment (consisting of ontological insecurity, group relative deprivation, and powerlessness) mediates between structural characteristics and nostalgia. Our findings suggest that each component of resentment individually contributes to explaining the nostalgia of less educated and economically deprived individuals.     

Curbing the demographic “drifting dune” in long-term care insurance financing: The case of Germany

Long-term care provision and financing are becoming increasingly important matters in all ageing economies. Therefore, a major challenge for policy makers is to strike a balance between adequate care and sustainable financing. In this study, we evaluate the proposal of a so-called sustainability factor in German long-term care insurance. Considering changes in the beneficiary-contributor ratio, it aims for a rule-based consideration of demographic dynamics to alleviate pressure on long-term care financing. Using the framework of generational accounting, we demonstrate that this proposal could have a relieving effect on finances, depending on the share of involvement of current and future generations. It may offer an option for pay-as-you-go long-term care insurance systems worldwide that need to curb the impact of ageing societies. Therefore, this article addresses policy makers tasked with designing a sustainable financing model for long-term care insurance. It demonstrates that the sustainability factor represents a step towards sustainable finances and, thus, it might be one component of a more comprehensive reform package.     

Transfer interest: measuring interest in training content and interest in training transfer

ABSTRACT

Motivational influences are important predictors of training effectiveness and transfer of training to the workplace. The present study introduces the Transfer Interest Questionnaire (TIQ) to measure trainee interest. Grounded in the person-object theory of interest, the construct encompasses two dimensions: interest in training content and interest in training transfer. The results of exploratory factor analyses of questionnaire data from 203 trainees provided strong support for the proposed scales. Based on the perspective of age-related motivational maintenance, socioemotional selectivity theory, the gender-similarities hypothesis, and research on training motivation and motivation to transfer, a series of moderator analyses tested the effects of six trainee and training-design characteristics: trainees’ age and gender, work experience, number of semesters completed, training course’s content area, and voluntary vs. mandatory training participation. Furthermore, based on social cognitive theory, the theory of planned behavior, and the expectancy-value model of achievement motivation, the study tested the TIQ scales’ associations with utility value, self-efficacy, normative beliefs, control beliefs, and transfer intentions. Implications for theorizing the role of interest in transfer of learning, screening training participants’ interest profiles in training evaluations, and future research directions on the role of interest in adult education, corporate training, and human resource development are discussed.     

Structure and legitimation of statutory accident insurance: A comparative legal view

Accident insurance schemes are among the most widespread systems of social security. However, the need for separate such schemes is occasionally questioned in international statements and scholarly contributions. In the context of these kinds of criticism, this article sets out the standard bases for accident insurance. The unity of prevention, rehabilitation and compensation as the common characteristic structure of individual schemes is presented from a comparative legal viewpoint. The central significance of the principle of self-management is also emphasized. With regard to their economic efficiency, which is supported by statistics, the criticism levelled at accident insurance schemes is shown to be unconvincing. Views calling separate schemes into question on the grounds of equity are also reected.     

Cooperation in the Face of Conflict: Effects of Top Managers’ Trust Beliefs in their Firms’ Major Suppliers

As with any relationships, those between buying firms and their major suppliers are likely to experience situations of conflict. When facing such situations, top managers tend to approach conflict either cooperatively or competitively. However, when and why top managers tend towards cooperation or competition is far from clear. This study proposes a novel link between the theory of cooperation and competition and the discounting principle of attribution theory to argue that it is top managers’ trust beliefs in their firms’ major suppliers that influences their intended approach to conflict. Using survey data from 140 C‐level managers and business owners, the authors develop and test a model that differentiates between two attributional dimensions of trust (competence and goodwill) and the specific relational conditions that influence how these attributions operate. The results indicate that top managers’ trust in their suppliers’ competence and goodwill is, in fact, decisive in determining how they intend to approach conflict. Further, the authors demonstrate that a top manager's trust belief in the supplier's goodwill is of particular relevance in driving the top manager to cooperate in the face of conflict. However, this link seems to be contingent on the specific conditions of the buyer–supplier relationship in question.     

Considering the shareholder perspective: value-based management systems and stock market performance

We empirically study the use of value-based management systems in listed German firms and examine implications for firms’ stock market performance. Using a novel, hand-collected data set covering 1,083 firm years from 2002 to 2008, we find that value-based management systems become increasingly common. Specifically, in 2008 42% of our sample firms have implemented such a system. In the empirical analysis, we find that firms implementing value-based management systems earn both statistically significant and economically substantial abnormal stock market returns measured within a 2-year adoption phase. These excess returns are not jeopardized by poor post-adoption returns. In the analysis, we carefully control for risk and account for endogeneity concerns. Overall, our findings support the view that shareholders consider the adoption of a value-based management system as a credible signal that management will focus on shareholder interests and that such systems actually increase shareholder value.     

Overviewing the transition of Markowitz bi-criterion portfolio selection to tri-criterion portfolio selection

Over 60 years ago, Markowitz introduced the mean-variance efficient frontier to finance. While mean-variance is still the predominant model in portfolio selection, it has endured many criticisms. One serious one is that it does not allow for additional criteria. The difficulty is that the efficient frontier becomes a surface. With it now possible to compute such a surface, we provide an overview on how Markowitz’s risk-return (bi-criterion) portfolio selection can be extended to tri-criterion portfolio selection. With a focus on the geometry of the extension, many graphs are used to illustrate.