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The purpose of this paper is to explores the factors that might lead an individual to pursue part‐time (PT) employment.

The paper hypothesized that employees have very different motivations for PT working, and that these motivations will affect their work experiences. The paper builds on recent research focusing on attitudinal differences between “voluntary PT” and “involuntary PT” employees by developing and evaluating a measure of reasons for accepting PT work. Current full‐time (FT) and PT employees from several samples (n=1,069) completed a survey including our reasons scale, plus measures of facet job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions.

Cluster analyses of reasons indicated four groups of PT employees – voluntary, involuntary, caretakers, and students. These sub‐groups differed from each other, and from FT workers, on most outcome measures. Students and involuntary PT workers generally reported lower job attitudes and greater intentions to turnover than did caretakers, voluntary PT workers, and FT workers.

Future research should attempt to sample a larger number of PT workers, and begin investigating understudied outcomes (e.g. task and contextual performance, actual withdrawal behavior).

It is shown that PT workers are heterogeneous in both their reasons and their attitudes. The paper stresses the value of examining specific factors which result in an individual choosing to work PT in an effort to better understand his or her experiences on that job. A short measure is presented which may be used to further examine the implications of various reasons behind PT job choice.

How do radical technological fields become naturalized and taken for granted? This is a fundamental question given both the positive and negative hype surrounding the emergence of many new technologies. In this chapter, we study the emergence of the US nanotechnology field, focusing on uncovering the mechanisms by which leaders of the National Nanotechnology Initiative managed hype and its concomitant legitimacy challenges which threatened the commercial viability of nanotechnology. Drawing on the cultural entrepreneurship literature at the interface of strategy and organization theory, we argue that the construction of a naturalizing frame – a frame that focuses attention and practice on mundane, “rationalized” activity – is key to legitimating a novel and uncertain technological field. Leveraging the insights from our case study, we further develop a staged process model of how a naturalizing frame may be constructed, thereby paving the way for a decrease in hype and the institutionalization of new technologies.

Work environments, which are widely acknowledged to exert strong influences on employee attitudes and behavior, have been studied since the initiation of formal work entities. Over this time, scholars have identified myriad impactful internal and external factors. Absent though are investigations examining economic downturns despite their acknowledged pervasiveness and destructive effects on worker performance and well-being. To address this theoretical gap, a multistage model acknowledging the impact of recessions on workplace responses, response effects, and environmental considerations is proposed. Inherent in this discussion is the role of economic decline on reactive change processes, the nature of work, and the structure and design of organizations. These significant changes affect employee attitudes and behaviors in ways that increase the political nature of these work environments. Organizational factors and employee responses to heightened recession-driven politics are discussed. Additionally, theoretically relevant intervening variables capable of influencing work outcomes are described. The chapter is concluded by discussing the implications of this theoretical framework as well as directions for future research.

Theories of trust imply that team trust develops and grows over time, yet relatively few researchers have taken on the challenge of studying team trust in longitudinal research designs. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a concise summary of the existing literature on team trust over time, and to offer a conceptual model of team-level trust development over time to aid future research on this topic.

We draw from the Input–Mediator–Output–Input (IMOI) framework, as well as previous multilevel models of organizational trust development, and published findings from longitudinal team trust studies.

Taking a temporal perspective, we consider how team-level mediators and outcomes can both predict and be predicted by team trust trajectories and feedback loops over time, as well as how those relationships with team trust might change based on the existence of other moderating variables including trust violation and repair.

Future longitudinal team research may use the model as a starting point for investigating the antecedents, as well as the team processes and dynamic emergent states, that can effectively predict trajectories of team trust across various stages of teamwork.

Based on our review of extant literature, we provide several recommendations for training and organizational intervention including the importance of management’s consideration of team-level trust in providing feedback, enhancing cohesion, and mitigating conflict.

We provide insight into the development of team trust trajectories and offer a framework to help guide future longitudinal team trust research.

This chapter analyzes the ways in which jurors use everyday storytelling techniques in their deliberations. It begins by reviewing the literature on how jurors receive and process evidence, emphasizing narrative and storytelling. It then presents some new, qualitative linguistic data drawn from actual jury deliberations, which shed light on jurors' standards of evidence and proof, as well as on the persuasive tactics they use in dealing with each other. Although these data are limited, they provide an interesting basis for assessing existing ideas about jurors evidence-processing and thinking more broadly about the strengths and weaknesses of the jury system.

Existentialist progenitors emphasized the contextual or situational nature of human action and meaning. This paper reviews some of these ideas and then compares how different approaches in sociology have embodied this view: symbolic interaction, dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, the California School of Existential Sociology, grounded theory methodology, and macro existential sociology. These perspectives will be compared to assess their relative emphases on the contextual or situational nature of human action and meaning.