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The rapid growth of online social networking sites (“SNS”) such as LinkedIn and Facebook has created new forms of online labor market intermediation that are reconfiguring the hiring process in profound ways; yet, little is understood about the implications of these new technologies for job seekers navigating the labor market, or more broadly, for the careers and lives of workers. The existing literature has focused on digital inequality – workers’ unequal access to or skilled use of digital technologies – but has left unanswered critical questions about the emerging and broad effects of SNS as a labor market intermediary. Drawing on in-depth interviews with unemployed workers this paper describes job seekers’ experiences using SNS to look for work. The findings suggest that SNS intermediation of the labor market has two kinds of effects. First, as an intermediary for hiring, SNS produces labor market winners and losers involving filtering processes that often have little to do with evaluations of merit. Second, SNS filtering processes exert new pressures on all workers, whether winners or losers as perceived though this new filter, to manage their careers, and to some extent their private lives, in particular ways that fit the logic of the SNS-mediated labor market.

Writing in The Economist's Voice, Christophe Chamley and Brian Pinto set out a number of reasons against the bailouts which have been offered to Greece and Ireland by the International Monetary Fund and the European Central bank.¹ Their main concerns were focused on high risks surrounding privately held bond spreads, or the threat of debt restructuring, otherwise known as a default. The emergence of serious concerns about the state of Spanish, Italian and even American debt levels in the summer of 2011 has created an uncertain economic future globally.

In this study, the authors applied a routine dynamics perspective to examine how agile routines enhance efficiency while allowing flexibility in a world of flux. Hence, the authors conducted an ethnographic case study in the IT sector, following a scrum team. The findings indicate that agile routines create affordances for addressing temporal orientations toward the past, present, and future. Within the scrum framework, each routine has a designed temporal orientation, such that the planning meeting is oriented toward the future. Actors enacted this single, temporal orientation through temporal demarcating patterns. However, in some instances, other temporal orientations conflicted with the dominant one. In those cases, actors enacted temporal integrating patterns that embraced multiple temporal orientations. The authors contribute to research on routine dynamics by demonstrating how (1) temporal demarcating enables organizational benefits, (2) temporal integrating enables learning from and anticipating problems, and (3) temporal spaces emerge within routine enactments to solve problems at hand.

In the context of occupational health psychology, personality has usually been depicted from the perspective of single traits, dispositions, or their combinations. However, there is a clear need to better understand personality as a whole. For this reason, an integrative framework of personality is presented in order to give a more comprehensive and cohesive picture of how the different personality constructs relate to each other. In recent years, several holistic models of human personality have been presented. For example, such models have been formulated by Dan McAdams (1995), Brian Little (2007), Robert McCrae and Paul Costa Jr. (1999), and Brent Roberts and Dustin Wood (2006). In this chapter, we briefly introduce one of these models, that is, the three-tiered conceptual framework of personality by McAdams and his colleagues (McAdams, 1995; McAdams & Adler, 2006; McAdams & Olson, 2010; McAdams & Pals, 2006). This comprehensive and multifaceted model conceptualizes human personality via a developing pattern of (1) dispositional traits, (2) characteristic adaptations, and (3) constructive life narratives (see Fig. 1). Each of these three levels possesses its own characteristics for describing and understanding personality.