Imaginary friends: migrants' emotional accounts about friends outside Australia

Migration can have emotional costs for migrants, whose face‐to‐face friendships are ruptured. This article explores the ways that migrants managed their emotions towards old friends after migration. Excerpts from semi‐structured interviews with 20 skilled migrants are analysed to show the stoic, fantasy and disengagement accounts used to deal with ruptured relationships. Each account demonstrates a different type of emotion work, which assisted migrants to cope with the loss of friends. The article discusses how the ways that migrants thought about their friends were affected by structural aspects such as geographic and temporal distance, and normative expectations such as the obligation for the migrant to return home. The article provides insight into the personal costs of migration and highlights the loss and coping that can follow, whilst demonstrating the complexity of friendship over time and geographic distance.     

限量促销决策的情感机制——预期和预支情绪的视角

限量促销引发的是一种带有明显时间压力的决策情境。稀缺信息会引发预支情绪,限量品价值会引发预期情绪。预支情绪作为对未来进行展望而体验到的即时情感,有高兴和焦虑两种正负面情感。预期情绪作为人们想象经历确定结果后会有怎样的感受,有预期愉悦和害怕后悔两种正负面情感。在限量促销决策中,二者存在交互作用的可能性。此外,预支与预期情绪中的负面情感通常在临近促销时点时占优,而正面情感则在消息发布时占优。     

无政府主义与王鲁彦的早期创作

王鲁彦与无政府主义者有过较为紧密的接触,他在行动层面所表现出的与强权的势不两立以及在社会改造层面各类实验活动的参与,可以进一步推断,他曾一度信仰过无政府主义学说。鲁彦早期创作中张扬的个性主义,随处可见的迷茫、感伤情绪,都带有无政府主义色彩。     

The changing experience of researching family and intimate relationships

A small-scale study to explore the possibility of obtaining information about small companies' charitable giving through telephone interviews provided challenges on three research design issues: selecting a target sample, telephone interviewing, and sensitive research topics. This article explores the general lessons derived from the study. First, it considers suitable sampling frames for identifying and contacing small companies. Second, it discusses the consequences for response rates of the telephone warfare between telemarketers and small companies. Third, it reviews what contributes to the sensitivity of research topics and ways of overcoming this.     

Family Theory Versus the Theories Families Live By

I argue that there is significant disjunction between the way that families live their lives and the way that we theorize about families. Using the metaphor of positive and negative spaces from the art world, I argue that there are many negative spaces in our theorizing—everyday family activities that take up considerable time, energy, and attention but that are poorly represented in our theorizing about families. Specifically, there are three negative spaces that call out for more attention, including the realm of spirituality, emotions, and myths; activities related to consumption; and time and space.     

Productive organizational energy mediates the impact of organizational structure on absorptive capacity

The ability of an organization to cope with radical technological change is regarded to be heavily dependent on its ability to absorb and apply knowledge from its environment. This study investigates the role of organizational structure in driving absorptive capacity and uncovers the role of the emergent phenomenon of organizational energy as the enabler of this relationship. A field study was conducted among firms that are challenged by the disruptive nature of Cloud computing. Our results show that organizational design affects the degree of mobilization of an organization's affective, cognitive and behavioral resources, which in turn influence the effectiveness of learning processes related to the absorption and exchange of knowledge within the organization. Furthermore, they reveal the positive relationship between the enactment of absorptive capacity and the successful adoption of Cloud technology for incumbent firms. The findings contribute to our understanding of the micro-foundations of absorptive capacity and how positive organizational phenomena facilitate effective adoption and implementation of emerging technologies.     

Emotion,reflexivity and social change in the era of extreme fossil fuels

Reflexivity is an important sociological lens through which to examine the means by which people engage in actions that contribute to social reproduction or social elaboration. Reflexivity theorists have largely overlooked the central place of emotions in reflexive processing, however, thus missing opportunities to enhance our understanding of reflexivity by capitalizing on recent scholarship on emotions emanating from other fields of inquiry. This paper explores the role of emotion in reflexivity, with a qualitative analysis of social responses to hydraulic fracturing in Alberta, Canada, utilizing narrative analysis of long‐form interviews with rural landowners who have experienced direct impacts from hydraulic fracturing, and have attempted to voice their concerns in the public sphere. Based on interviews with a selection of two interview participants, the paper highlights the means by which emotions shape reflexivity in consequential ways, beginning with personal and highly individualized emotional responses to contingent situations, which then factor into the social interactions engaged in the pursuit of personal projects. The shared emotional context that emerges then plays a substantial role in shaping outcomes and their implications for social stasis or change. This study exemplifies the extent to which reflexive processing in response to breaches in the social order can be emotionally tumultuous affairs, constituting a significant personal toll that many may be unwilling to pay.     

‘Friends that last a lifetime’: the importance of emotions amongst volunteers working with refugees in Calais

The European ‘refugee crisis’ has generated a broad movement of volunteers offering their time and skills to support refugees across the continent, in the absence of nation states. This article focuses on volunteers who helped in the informal refugee camp in Calais called the ‘Jungle’. It looks at the importance of emotions as a motivating factor for taking on responsibilities that are usually carried out by humanitarian aid organizations. We argue that empathy is not only the initial motivator for action, but it also sustains the voluntary activity as volunteers make sense of their emotions through working in the camp. This type of volunteering has also created new spaces for sociability and community, as volunteers have formed strong emotional and relational bonds with each other and with the refugees. Finally, this article contributes to the growing body of literature that aims at repositioning emotions within the social sciences research to argue that they are an important analytical tool to understand social life and fieldwork.     

Connecting Practical Doings to Cultural Meanings: Exploring the Work of Moral Mediators in Human Service Organizations

This study illuminates the work of moral mediators, which I define as organizational actors who work to strategically monitor, maintain, and manage the moral identity of others. My layered, organizational, narrative analysis of the mentoring organization Big Brothers Big Sisters draws on two types of data: client stories featured on the national website and ten in‐depth interviews with case managers at a local agency. My analysis demonstrates how case managers employ an emotional labor technique of drama dilution, or work done to add ambiguity to public storytelling in ways that leave more space for variations of deservingness, success, and morality. This article emphasizes the paradoxical nature of public organizational narratives and highlights the need for continued exploration of day‐to‐day work in conjunction with organizational structure and cultural values and beliefs.