Trick or Treat? An Examination of Marketing Relationships in a Nondeceptive Counterfeit Market

Who is most responsible for the proliferation of counterfeit goods—the illicit purveyor of such products or the consumer who procures them? This paper seeks to address this question by presenting a behavior analysis of counterfeit marketing firms in China and the interdependent relationships between legitimate retailers, consumers, and the authorities who populate these competitive environments. This is achieved via an operant interpretation of these key agents and the network of contingent relationships in operation. The results suggest that purveyors of pirate products function as “bad competitors” in the marketplace according to normative business behaviors—behaviors that are amenable to analysis in behavioral terms.     

The importance of self-efficacy in the moderating effects of social support on stressor–strain relationships

Abstract

Occupational stress research offers inconsistent findings on the moderating effects of social support on the stressor–strain relationship. This study contributes to the research literature by examining how social support's moderating effect is dependent on one's self-efficacy. Ninety-six US military police soldiers completed two surveys 3 months apart. The results showed that three out of four regression equations had significant three-way interactions. Organizational constraints×supervisor support×self-efficacy had statistically significant interactions in the prediction of job satisfaction and psychological well-being. Organizational constraints×co-worker support×self-efficacy had a significant interaction in the predicted of psychological well-being. These interactions explained between 5% and 10% of the variance in the dependent variables. Social support buffered the stressor–strain relationship when self-efficacy was high and reverse buffered the relationship when self-efficacy was low. These results indicate that interventions aimed at reducing strains by increasing social support should consider an individual's self-efficacy. Future research should consider incorporating content of communication to determine if high and low self-efficacy individuals receive or react differently to different types of communication content.     

The relationships between work characteristics and mental health: examining normal,reversed and reciprocal relationships in a 4-wave study

This longitudinal study examined the causal relationships between job demands, job control and supervisor support on the one hand and mental health on the other. Whereas we assumed that work characteristics affect mental health, we also examined reversed causal relationships (mental health influences work characteristics). Further, the topic of the appropriate time lag for testing causal relationships was addressed. Our hypotheses were tested in a 4-wave study among a heterogeneous sample of 668 Dutch employees using structural equation modelling. The results provide evidence for reciprocal causal relationships between the work characteristics and mental health, although the effects of work characteristics on well-being were causally predominant. The best model fit was found for a 1-year time lag. Compared to earlier—predominantly cross-sectional—results, the present study presents a stronger case for the effects of work characteristics on the development of strain. The results also emphasize the need for a dynamic view of the relationship between work and health; the one-directional viewpoint in many work stress models does not seem to fully capture the relations between work characteristics and well-being.     

Employee perceptions of ethical listening in U.S. organizations

Through a national online survey with 300 U.S. employees, this study revealed that nonmanagers and women are not satisfied with their organization’s listening efforts. Using the lens of employee-organization relationship theory, problematic issues were identified related to transparency, communication climate, and employee silence. Some of the barriers to effective listening were limited ability to share insights from listening with supervisors and other employees, poor or absent training for collecting and analyzing intelligence that can be gained from listening, and employees who were unwilling to speak up due to perceptions that management was not sincerely interested in what they have to say. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Intra-Individual Differences and Relationship-Specificity of Mentalising in Early Adolescence

There is increasing interest in understanding how relationships promote children's understanding of their own and others' thoughts and feelings. A key question in this research is whether children's ability and motivation to represent and nderstand anothers' thoughts and feelings is a function of the quality of the relationship with that individual or, alternatively, a more general characteristic of the child that is similarly expressed across relationship contexts. The current study sought to extend previous research by assessing mentalising behaviour in early adolescence and examining intra-individual differences in adolescents' mentalising behaviour about self and other in different relationships. The research design exploited the natural experiment of the secondary school, in which children develop very diverse relationships with different teachers. In the spring of the academic year, a vignette-based, semi-structured interview was administered, and students' understanding and attributions of mental states of their most and least liked teachers were coded using a newly developed system. Results indicated that there were significant intra-individual differences in adolescents' mentalising; the psychological sophistication with which adolescents understood and described another's behaviour was predicted from the affective quality of the relationship. In addition, there was significantly less incongruity or distortion in adolescents' mentalising about their most liked teacher compared with their least liked teacher, highlighting the need to consider not only the presence but also the 'accuracy' of mentalising.     

Reinvestigating Remarriage: Another Decade of Progress

The body of stepfamily research published this decade exceeded the entire output of the previous 90 years of the century. The complexity and quality of the scholarly work in this decade improved as well—better samples were obtained, methods were more sensitive to stepfamily complexity, longitudinal designs were more frequently employed, and other important methodological gains were made. Unfortunately, many unknowns regarding remarriages and stepfamilies remain. We present an overview of trends regarding topics, research methods, and theories; we critique research methods that have not been productive; and we identify scholarly advances. Finally, new conceptual, methodological, and theoretical directions for future scholarship on remarriages and stepfamilies are proposed.     

杜威与池田大作的“学校职能”观及其启示

面临着学校教育质量和效率低下的窘境,美国现代教育家杜威和日本当代教育家池田大作进行了犀利的剖析和抨击,提出了关于学校职能以及学校与社会之关系的独到见解。他们的教育思想对于我们今天的学校教育改革具有重要的启发意义。对杜威的＂学校即社会＂思想和池田大作关于学校职能以及学校、社区、家庭三者关系的论述进行了比较分析得知,两者虽然有不同的视角和切入点,但初衷和目的是一致的,都主张学校建立纯净的教育环境,为学生提供参与社会实践的机会,由学校、社会、家庭三方共同参与学校的日常管理,使学校的不良现象标本兼治。     

A Comparison of Majority-race Children With and Without a Minority-race Friend

Majority‐race (black or white) ¹ elementary school children with and without a minority friend (black or white) in their classroom were compared on measures of social, behavioral, and affective characteristics. Analyses focused on 260 4th through 6th grade students who were racial majorities in their classrooms and had at least one reciprocated friendship in the classroom‐based peer group. Overall, the results were consistent with the scenario that majority children with minority friends are high status, prosocial, and socially satisfied members of the peer group, compared to majority children without a cross‐race friendship, although race and gender differences were observed. In contrast, class‐level characteristics (e.g. class size, the proportion of participating children in each classroom of the majority race, and the number of minority‐race children in the classroom) were not predictive of whether a majority child had a cross‐race friendship or not. Implications for the current status of black– white relations among our youth were discussed.