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Role-taking, perspective taking, and empathy have developed through parallel literatures in sociology and psychology. All three concepts address the ways that people attune the self to others’ thoughts and feelings. Despite conceptual and operational overlap, researchers have yet to synthesize existing research across the three concepts. We undertake the task of theoretical synthesis, constructing a model in which role-taking emerges as a multidimensional process that includes perspective taking and empathy as component parts.

We review the literatures on role-taking, perspective taking, and empathy across disciplines. Focusing on definitions, measures, and interventions, we discern how the concepts overlap, how they are distinct, and how they work together in theoretically meaningful ways.

The review identifies two key axes on which each concept varies: the relative roles of affect and cognition, and the relative emphasis on self and structure. The review highlights the cognitive nature of perspective taking, the affective nature of empathy, and the structural nature of role-taking. In a move toward theoretical synthesis, we propose a definition that centers role-taking as a sociological construct, with perspective taking and empathy representing cognition and affect, respectively.

Role-taking is an important part of selfhood and community social life. It is a skill that varies in patterned ways, including along lines of status and power. Theoretical synthesis clarifies the process of role-taking and fosters the construction of effective interventions aimed at equalizing role-taking in interpersonal interaction.

Based on the situated focus theory of power, this chapter empirically investigates the relationship between an individual’s organizational power position and emotion recognition accuracy (ERA), and it examines individuals’ stress experiences at work as a boundary condition for this relationship.

Survey data were collected in a field sample of 117 individuals employed across various organizations in Germany. We used an established, performance-based test of ERA and applied hierarchical regression analysis to examine our model.

An individual’s power was negatively related with his or her ability to decipher others’ emotional expressions among individuals experiencing higher work stress, whereas this relationship was not significant for participants with lower stress.

Although the cross-sectional study design and data collection within one country are relevant limitations, the findings promote a better understanding of the complex relationship between power and ERA.

Given the relevance of accurate emotion perception, the results indicate that stressful work environments may be an important risk factor for organizational power holders’ personal and professional success.

The findings advance the literature on power and emotion recognition by highlighting the role of work stress as an important, heretofore neglected boundary condition that may explicate the ambiguous results in prior research.

Copula modeling enables the analysis of multivariate count data that has previously required imposition of potentially undesirable correlation restrictions or has limited attention to models with only a few outcomes. This article presents a method for analyzing correlated counts that is appealing because it retains well-known marginal distributions for each response while simultaneously allowing for flexible correlations among the outcomes. The proposed framework extends the applicability of the method to settings with high-dimensional outcomes and provides an efficient simulation method to generate the correlation matrix in a single step. Another open problem that is tackled is that of model comparison. In particular, the article presents techniques for estimating marginal likelihoods and Bayes factors in copula models. The methodology is implemented in a study of the joint behavior of four categories of US technology patents. The results reveal that patent counts exhibit high levels of correlation among categories and that joint modeling is crucial for eliciting the interactions among these variables.

Purpose – This chapter presents some innovative ways in which researchers can collect survey data on various types of violence against women.

Methodology/approach – The suggestions made here are drawn from over 30 years of national, international, and local survey research.

Findings – The methods described in this chapter minimize underreporting, produce theoretically relevant data, and have meaningful policy consequences.

Originality/value – The research techniques reviewed here have made many important contributions to the field and the data they uncovered have helped raise public awareness about one of the world’s most compelling social problems.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

This paper analyzes how the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or “drones” in foreign interventions abroad have changed the dynamics of government activities domestically. Facing limited or absent constraints abroad, foreign interventions served as a testing ground for the domestically constrained U.S. government to experiment with drone technologies and other methods of social control over foreign populations. Utilizing the “boomerang effect” framework developed by Coyne and Hall (2014), this paper examines the use of drones abroad and the mechanisms through which the technology has been imported back to the United States. The use of these technologies domestically has substantial implications for the freedom and liberties of U.S. citizens as it lowers the cost of government expanding the scope of its activities.