Engaging leader – Engaged employees? A cross-lagged study on employee engagement

The goal of this study is to provide a cross-lagged examination of the relationships between engaging leadership, job resources and employee work engagement. We propose a mediation model and we postulate that engaging leadership can increase perceptions of three specific job resources (i.e. autonomy, support from colleagues and opportunities for learning and development) which theoretically correspond to the three facets of engaging leadership (i.e., inspiring, connecting and strengthening, respectively). Subsequently, in keeping with the extant body of Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) research, we link job resources to employee work engagement. Our hypotheses were tested on data collected at two time-points – T1 (N = 759) and T2 (N = 273) –from employees working for a hotel chain in the Netherlands. In line with our expectations, engaging leadership showed a significant cross-lagged relationship with autonomy and support from colleagues, but did not predict learning opportunities and work engagement across time. While we formulated specific hypotheses, we also tested reversed causation relationships. We found no direct effect from engaging leadership on employee work engagement, however, the reversed effect was significant; employee perceptions of engaging leadership were shaped by their own engagement experiences. Importantly, engaged employees at T1 reported more job resources at T2. By providing a cross-lagged examination of our model, we showed that engaging leaders as well as employees’ positive affective state of being engaged, are essential to shaping a resourceful work context. A comprehensive view on the triggers and outcomes of work engagement and engaging leadership is needed, as the traditional unidirectional cause-effect rationale fails to explain how these concepts relate to one another and to employee experiences of job resources.     

Approximation of the Bivariate Renewal Function

Recently, Kambo and his co-researchers (2012) proposed a method of approximation for evaluating the one-dimensional renewal function based on the first three moments. Their method is simple and elegant, which gives exact values for well-known distributions. In this article, we propose an analogous method for the evaluation of bivariate renewal function based on the first two moments of the variables and their joint moment. The proposed method yields exact results for certain widely used bivariate distributions like bivariate exponential distribution, bivariate Weibull distributions, and bivariate Pareto distributions. An illustrative example in the form of a two-dimensional warranty problem is considered and comparisons of our method are made with the results of other models.     

Deaf and disabled? (Un)Employment of deaf people in Belgium: a comparison of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century cohorts

In this article, the employment characteristics of pre-industrial and industrial cohorts of deaf men and women are compared with each other, as well as with a cohort of non-disabled siblings. The aim is to determine the extent to which the employment patterns of deaf persons lined up with those of non-disabled people and to see how nineteenth-century industrialization processes influenced their employment opportunities. This article challenges the widely held assumption that the nineteenth century constituted a definitive break by arguing that the professional lives of deaf people were not necessarily better before industrialization. Moreover, I demonstrate that the development of deaf schools in the course of the nineteenth century opened a new range of career opportunities for deaf individuals.     

舟山灯塔历史概述

灯塔一般位于海岸、港口或河道，用以指引船只的航行方向。灯塔大都类似塔的形状，透过塔顶的透镜系统，将光芒射向海面或河面照明。舟山地处我国大陆海岸线中部，长江口南侧，杭州湾外缘东海洋面上，自古有“江浙之门户，四明之藩篱”之称，历史上就为中国重要的海上贸易通道。为保障海上航行安全，舟山很早就设立导航设施，到清晚期，随着航线的日益繁忙以及导航技术的发展，舟山设立了众多的近代灯塔，这些灯塔大多保留完整，其数量之多，密度之高，在全国首屈一指。     

A new generalized Weibull distribution in income economic inequality curves

Researchers have been developing various extensions and modified forms of the Weibull distribution to enhance its capability for modeling and fitting different data sets. In this note, we investigate the potential usefulness of the new modification to the standard Weibull distribution called odd Weibull distribution in income economic inequality studies. Some mathematical and statistical properties of this model are proposed. We obtain explicit expressions for the first incomplete moment, quantile function, Lorenz and Zenga curves and related inequality indices. In addition to the well-known stochastic order based on Lorenz curve, the stochastic order based on Zenga curve is considered. Since the new generalized Weibull distribution seems to be suitable to model wealth, financial, actuarial and especially income distributions, these findings are fundamental in the understanding of how parameter values are related to inequality. Also, the estimation of parameters by maximum likelihood and moment methods is discussed. Finally, this distribution has been fitted to United States and Austrian income data sets and has been found to fit remarkably well in compare with the other widely used income models.     

论历史演义的虚构性

明清时期对历史演义的性质存在着争议,有些评论家认为历史演义是正史的通俗版,因而极力反对在历史演义中进行虚构。但大量的创作实践证明,为了增强作品的可读性,历史演义不可能句句依傍正史,必然在细节描写、心理刻画、语言描写、环境烘托等方面进行虚构,从而使历史演义成为虚实结合的历史小说。     

‘Public toilets for a diverse neighborhood’: Spatial purification practices in community development discourse

This paper explores the dialectic of place and community identity in Mount Pleasant, a multi–ethnic and multi–class U.S. neighborhood where definitions of place are hotly contested among its residents. In a grant proposal for public toilets, Mount Pleasant writers use linguistic strategies such as presupposition, deixis, and contrast, coupled with discursive themes of filth and geography, to construct a core of the Mount Pleasant community. The writers place themselves and people who share their values in that core, and immigrants at the margins. These strategies serve as a discursive type of spatial purification practice (cf. Sibley 1988) through which the grantwriters set up a moral and spatial order where they and other core community members are deemed to use space ‘appropriately’, and thus inhabit positive moral positions, while immigrant community members’ imputed ‘inappropriate’ use of space is used to construct negative moral positions for them.     

英美TEFL的历史及其特征

本文简述了英美两国把英语作为外语教学(TEFL)的历史,并就英美两国的一些语言学家对于TEFL的贡献作了较详尽的描述。本文还谈及英美两国TEFL的历史特征,其中最重要的是语言学理论的研究在TEFL中的应用。