Head movement during listening turns in conversation

In five subjects, head movement during conversation was monitored by polarised light goniometry, and recorded alongside speech and a signal proportional to peak amplitude of sound waves (peak loudness). Kinematic properties of listeners' head movements, such as amplitude, frequency and cyclicity, differentiated various conversational functions. That is, they were function-specific: symmetrical, cyclic movements were employed to signal yes, no or equivalents; linear, wide movements anticipated claims for speaking; narrow linear movements occurred in phase with stressed syllables in the other's speech (ynchrony movements); and wide, linear movements occurred during pauses in the other's speech. That, it is argued, bears upon the relation between thesignalling of communicative intentions and the synchronisation of interactional rhythm. Thus, the former appears to determine the timing and tempo of responses such as yes and no, while the latter determines the regulation of synchrony movements. The manner in which these factors interact in other conversational functions and their theoretical implications are discussed.     

Stochastic dominance for ranking ventures: Comments and extensions

This paper suggests some extensions to Tilley and Eilon's paper on ranking ventures. Tilley and Eilon consider concave utility functions consisting of two linear segments and this allows all rectangular distributions to be ordered. Such utility functions have a wide scope and allow other distributions to be ordered.     

Ross' measure of risk aversion and portfolio selection

This article shows that if Ross' definition of riskier is replaced by a more traditional definition, such as a mean-preserving spread or second-degree stochastic dominance, then the application of Ross's stronger measure of risk aversion to the portfolio problem may no longer produce the desired result. It is also shown that the stronger measure may not perform satisfactorily when applied to exponential utility functions.The authors are grateful to John Pratt for his helpful comments.     

Habitus and social movements: how militarism affects organizational repertoires

2010–2012 were years of global protests. This wave of mobilization has been celebrated for its horizontal, leaderless, and participatory character. But this was not the case in all countries. In Israel, which saw the largest social contention in its history, the protest was marked by a dominant and centralized leadership and by cooperation with institutional actors and corporate media. Based on the study of the Israeli case, this research seeks to contribute to explanations of how movements’ organizational forms develop. Social movement scholars have shown that activists’ forms of organization are limited to a familiar repertoire of action. Building on previous scholarship, I argue that activists’ organizational repertoires are shaped by a habitus that familiarizes and routinizes certain practices. But while existing scholarship focuses on how organizational habitus develops within the field of activism, I expand the applicability of habitus and show how movement repertoires are also influenced by habit in fields unrelated and even antagonistic to activism. Based on participant observations and interviews, I show how in the Israeli case, militarism formed part of activists’ organizational habitus and contributed to the 2011 protests’ centralized and hierarchical character.     

Decision making with stochastic dominance: An expository review

This paper surveys the use of stochastic dominance to decision making under uncertainty. The first part presents the relevant definitions and some properties of distributions satisfying one of the stochastic dominance conditions. These properties include restrictions on moments, an invariance property, and properties of random variables related by an exact formula.The second part contains some applications of the stochastic dominance method and especially the problem of selecting optimal portfolios. Most of the results in this section deal with conditions that make diversification an optimal strategy.     

The effects of employee burnout on customers: An experimental approach

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the different effects of employee burnout dimensions (depersonalisation and emotional exhaustion) on customer service perceptions. We hypothesised that customers who interact with depersonalising employees will feel angry and hostile, which, in turn, should be related to low service perceptions. Emotional exhaustion was hypothesised to attenuate this effect because customers might perceive exhaustion as a reason for the depersonalising behaviour and may be affected less negatively. Each of the 156 study participants read 12 vignettes in which university employees displayed depersonalisation and emotional exhaustion symptoms. Multilevel analysis showed that employee depersonalisation negatively affected customer perceptions towards employee service and organisation service. Customer anger and hostility mediated this effect. Employee emotional exhaustion moderated the indirect effect such that depersonalisation had the strongest effect on customer service perceptions via anger and hostility when the employee did not display emotional exhaustion. Findings highlight the importance of studying the effects of depersonalisation and emotional exhaustion separately, and taking into account customer affective processes.     

LEARNING WITH DETERMINISTIC DECISION RULES

While many problems of uncertainty are commonly analyzed by means of stochastic models, under certain circumstances this may not be an appropriate approach. The latter situation arises when the decision maker knows that the uncertain variables are not generated by a stochastic process, or when he is unwilling, or unable, to compute subjective probabilities. One of the nonstochastic approaches to uncertainty is the expectational approach in which the decision maker forms deterministic expectations about the uncertain aspects of his environment. This paper is concerned with some criteria for selecting among available expectations, or anticipations functions, and the possibility of ordering them according to these criteria. This study focuses especially on the learning criterion. The discussion brings out conceptual problems in connection with the definition of learning, as well as some technical difficulties that one encounters when attempting to compare different anticipations functions from the point of view of the learning criterion. As an illustration of the issues discussed, the paper reports on the results of some simulated decision rules. These show that decision rules in which no learning takes place, and in which some information is ignored, may perform better than more sophisticated rules.     

The Benjamin Chreode

This article describes the development of Benjamin's ideas and discusses them critically on a theoretical level by comparing them with Lacan's ideas. I argue that Benjamin's and Lacan's theoretical formulations start from the same tradition of continental philosophy but develop in different directions. I follow the track of such concepts as intersubjectivity, domination, thirdness, and others and take the notion of thirdness from the clinical to the social domain. I then describe in some detail a series of workshops for Palestinians and Israelis—the Mutual Acknowledgment Project—that try to promote reconciliation by processing the deepest injuries that trouble the two communities. Analysis of the project gives rise to some insights regarding the third in its social action.