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The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of trust, informational support and integrative behaviors in the effective outcomes of peer conflict in the workplace.

Deidentified secondary data were provided by a human resource management company that offers conflict resolution training. The authors studied a sample of 815 supervisors and middle-level managers (51% female; average age = 40) who reported their primary work experience was in the USA. Each respondent described a workplace conflict with a peer. A regression-based bootstrapping technique was used to test the hypothesized relationships between the constructs of trust, informational support, integrative behaviors and effective outcomes in peer conflict.

The relationship between trust and the use of integrative behaviors during peer conflict is conditional on the availability of informational support, such that those who solicit a third party’s views are more likely to exhibit integrative behaviors during the conflict under study, even at relatively lower levels of trust in the conflict relationship.

In this study, the authors add to social interdependence theory and the role of integrative behaviors by proposing the importance of interpersonal trust and informational support, which may reduce uncertainty during peer conflict. The authors also extend existing literature on cooperation, cooperative approaches to managing conflict and integrative behaviors in the workplace by examining peer-to-peer organizational conflict.

A central question of public administration is how political principals secure the cooperation of administrators within organisational frames and contexts; increasingly, rational influences are being considered alongside bounded rationality and non-rational influences. This paper aims to explore the intent of New Zealand’s Public Service Act 2020 in managing administrative behaviour.

The methodology is primarily ethnographic, combining emic and etic perspectives. A mixed-methods approach comprises participant observer field notes and meeting documentation, substantiated by official documents; documents were analysed thematically and triangulated with other data sources.

The Public Service Act introduces new bounds on administrative behaviour. The stated rationale for these changes reveals an attempt to set limits on the principal–agent relationship between politicians and administrators and causes predictable deviations from rational behaviour by cultivating public service motivation and a unified public service identity.

As the legislation in question was only passed in 2020, it is too early to definitively assess the ultimate impact of legislation on administrative behaviour. This case study demonstrates that behavioural approaches to public administration are being applied intentionally by governments. The choice architecture created in the case study blends rational, bounded, and non-rational influences. Together, this produces a bricolage of semi-relevant theories from other disciplines, especially psychology, to explain administrative behaviour. Further refinement is needed to develop a cohesive and comprehensive theory of administrative behaviour that can account for contemporary practice.

Administrators act as agents of political principals, within ethical and rules-based limitations and influenced by public service motivation and social identity. Shifting from implicit to explicit choice architecture does not negate possible tensions between bounds and can signal them more explicitly. Shared symbols are sometimes intended to influence identity and therefore adherence to behavioural norms.

This paper explores the manipulation of choice architecture as a viable strategy for altering behaviour for the better and, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first known instance of choice architecture being “legislated in” rather than merely “showing through”. This study illustrates the blending of rational, boundedly rational and non-rational factors into a choice architecture for public administrators that help mediate the biases and challenges of principal–agent relationships (which form a cascade in New Zealand’s public administration system).

Preservice English teachers are expected to use literary theories and criticism to read and respond to literary texts. Over the past century, two of the most common approaches to literary encounters in secondary schools have been New Criticism – particularly the practice of close reading – and Rosenblatt's transactional theory, both of which have been expanded through critical theorizing along the way. Elucidated by data produced in iterative experiments with Frost's “The Road Not Taken,” the authors reconceptualize the reader, the text, and close reading through the critical posthuman theory of reading with love as a generative way of thinking outside of the habitual practices of European humanisms.

In “thinking with” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2023) desiring-machines, affect, Man and critical posthuman theory, this post qualitative inquiry maps how the “The Road Not Taken” worked when students plugged into it iteratively in processes of reading with love, an affirmative and creative series of experiments with literature.

This study mapped how respect for authority, the battle of good v evil, individualism and meritocracy operated as desiring-machines that channeled most participants’ initial readings of “The Road Not Taken.” In subsequent experiments with the poem, the authors demonstrate that reading with love as a critical posthuman process of reading invites participants to exceed the logics of recognition and representation, add or invent additional ways of being and relating to the world and thereby produce the possibility to transform a world toward greater inclusivity and equity.

The authors reconceptualize the categories of “the reader” and “the text” from Rosenblatt’s transactional theory within practices of reading with love, which they situate within a critical posthuman theory. They eschew separating efferent and aesthetic reading stances while also recuperating practices of “close reading,” historically associated with the New Critics, by demonstrating the generativity of critically valenced “close reading” within a Deleuzian process of reading with love.

This research paper aims to understand how givers characterise and manage their gift giving networks by drawing on attachment theory (AT). This responds to the need to illuminate the givers–receivers’ networks beyond traditional role-based taxonomies and explore their changing dynamics.

A multi-method, qualitative approach was used involving 158 gift experiences captured in online diaries and 27 follow-up interviews.

Results show that givers organise receivers into gifting networks that are grounded in a contextual understanding of their relationships. The identification of direct, surrogate and mediated bonds reflects three different dimensions that inform gift-giving networks of support, care or belongingness rooted in AT. The relative position of gift receivers in this network influences the nature of support, the type of social influences and relationship stability in the network.

This study illustrates the complexity of relationships based on the data collected over two specific periods of time; thus, there might be further types of receivers within a giver’s network that the data did not capture. This limitation was minimised by asking about other possible receivers in interviews.

The findings set a foundation for gift retailers to assist gift givers in finding gifts that match their perceived relations to the receivers by adapting communication messages and offering advice aligned with specific relationship contexts.

This study illuminates gift-giving networks by proposing a taxonomy of gifting networks underpinned by AT that can be applied to study different relationship contexts from the perspective of the giver. This conceptualisation captures different levels of emotional support, social influences and relationship stability, which have an impact on the receivers’ roles within the giver’s network. Importantly, results reveal that the gift receiver is not always the target of gift-giving. The target can be someone whom the giver wants to please or an acquaintance they share with the receiver with whom they wish to reinforce bonds.

Managing differences is a difficult undertaking, especially considering the difficulties arising from the unconscious functions of our brains. Organisations should strive to counteract the potentially harmful effects of unconscious bias by implementing policies that support bias-aware management and decision-making. Although it is obvious that bias cannot be completely eliminated, there is enough data, as discussed in this work, to demonstrate that unconscious bias and stereotypes can be addressed and decreased with mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) to some extent. Mindfulness involves the process of bringing non-judgemental awareness to experience by striving for full attention in the present moment. In this context, including mindfulness practises into training programmes for equality, diversity, and inclusion may serve as an accelerator for recognising hidden biases, reducing stereotypes, eliminating discrimination, and encouraging cognitive changes. This chapter explains the ways in which MBIs can be used to promote cognitive changes and comprehend the automatic and unconscious nature of emotions and thoughts in order to remove barriers between all differences in the workplace.

Historically, graduate education’s goal was to prepare academics; now most science, technology, engineering and/or mathematics (STEM) graduate students (GSs) go on to nonacademic careers. STEM GSs must be equipped for success regardless of career aspirations, which can be done by strengthening GSs’ professional identities. This study aims to explore an interdisciplinary partnership designed to strengthen STEM GS professional identity.

The STEM Partnership Project (SPP), asked STEM GSs to serve as disciplinary experts and teach STEM content to elementary teacher candidates (TCs) so the TCs could design and teach an elementary science lesson. GSs also enrolled in a one-credit course to support SPP participation and activities. Over five semesters, the authors collected data from 28 STEM GSs across different disciplines and degree programs in the form of course assignments, surveys and interviews.

The SPP supported the development of a professional identity by having GSs serve as and feel like experts; increasing GSs’ sense of belonging in their field; increasing GSs’ self-confidence that they could (learn to) teach a wide variety of audiences; and raising GSs’ awareness of their ability to serve others via their field.

The SPP’s outcomes were consistent across STEM disciplines, did not require GSs to take on large amounts of coursework, nor did it cost much beyond materials for the various lessons. Furthermore, the key components that strengthened GSs’ professional identities could be adapted for different contexts and institutions.

This study examines chronic illness, disability and social inequality within an exposure-vulnerabilities theoretical framework.

Using the National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), a preeminent source of national behavioral health estimates of chronic medical illness, stress and disability, for selected sample years 2005–2014, we construct and analyze two foundational hypotheses underlying the exposure-vulnerabilities model: (1) greater exposure to stressors (i.e., chronic medical illness) among racial/ethnic minority populations yields higher levels of serious psychological distress, which in turn increases the likelihood of medical disability; (2) greater vulnerability among minority populations to stressors such as chronic medical illness exacerbates the impact of these conditions on mental health as well as the impact of mental health on medical disability.

Results of our analyses provided mixed support for the vulnerability (moderator) hypothesis, but not for the exposure (mediation) hypothesis. In the exposure models, while Blacks were more likely than Whites to have a long-term disability, the pathway to disability through chronic illness and serious psychological distress did not emerge. Rather, Whites were more likely than Blacks and Latinx to have a chronic illness and to have experienced severe psychological distress (both of which themselves were related to disability). In the vulnerability models, both Blacks and Latinx with chronic medical illness were more likely than Whites to experience serious psychological distress, although Whites with serious psychological distress were more likely than these groups to have a long-term disability.

Several possibilities for understanding the failure to uncover an exposure dynamic in the model turn on the potential intersectional effects of age and gender, as well as several other covariates that seem to confound the linkages in the model (e.g., issues of stigma, social support, education).

This study (1) extends the racial/ethnic disparities in exposure-vulnerability framework by including factors measuring chronic medical illness and disability which: (2) explicitly test exposure and vulnerability hypotheses in minority populations; (3) develop and test the causal linkages in the hypothesized processes, based on innovations in general structural equation models, and lastly; (4) use national population estimates of these conditions which are rarely, if ever, investigated in this kind of causal framework.

Co-teaching is a foundational mentoring model used in teacher residency programs in urban classrooms throughout the United States of America. Beyond the basic understanding of co-teaching in categorizing classroom models, the purpose of this qualitative case study is to investigate the dialectical tensions manifested in mentored co-teaching activities through the lens of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT).

Designed as a qualitative case study of 17 pairs of teaching-residents and mentor-teachers, the authors used thematic analysis to scrutinize archival interview data in an urban teacher residency program located in the largest megalopolis of the USA Northeast. The authors used CHAT-based concept coding to analyze the interview narratives from participants across different secondary school placements as they reflected on their co-teaching philosophy and the relationships they built.

The authors found that for teaching-residents and mentor-teachers to co-develop as co-teachers, they jointly must learn to resolve the dialectical tensions of unbalanced classroom ownership vs added co-working responsibilities, breaking from routine so that a partnership can grow. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the prefix co- should be understood as (1) shifts in thinking that transcend the status quo and (2) the orchestration of human capital to change norms.

This new understanding of the prefix co- allows teacher education programs to better mediate the dialectical tensions experienced by co-teachers in a mentored co-teaching activity, from individual teacher learning (e.g. a pair/dyad comprising one teaching-resident and one mentor-teacher) to collective co-learning across activity systems (e.g. partnership-based teacher education).

The purpose of this conceptual article is to examine the role of villainification and heroification in social studies through critically analyzing the author’s place-based encounters with three civil war narratives.

The article describes the author’s critical reflections on three narratives involving confederate figures and examines theoretical and pedagogical implications.

The article introduces a spectrum of ethical judgments which plots villainification and heroification on opposing ends. The author advocates for more nuanced ethical judgments that contextualize decisions as understandable or defensible based on evidence. The term understandable reflects a concept of being able to explain (i.e. demonstrate understanding) why a curricular figure made certain choices without agreeing with or supporting those choices. The term defensible denotes the existence of evidence that provides a rationale for a choice such that the person making the ethical judgment would feel comfortable making (i.e. defending) the same choice.

The article introduces a theory of nuanced ethical judgments in social studies that maps onto existing literature on heroification, villainification and place-based education. Pedagogical implications for social studies education are also identified.

This paper aims to examine the barriers and facilitators of conducting and implementing research in frontline child and youth mental health settings in the UK.

Researchers, clinicians and commissioners who attended a workshop at the Big Emerging Minds Summit in October 2022 provided their expert views on the structural barriers and possible solutions to integrating research in clinical practice based on their experiences of child and young people mental health research.

The identified barriers encompass resource constraints, administrative burdens and misalignment of research priorities, necessitating concerted efforts to foster a research-supportive culture. This paper proposes the potential actionable solutions aimed at overcoming challenges, which are likely applicable across various other health-care systems and frontline NHS services. Solutions include ways to bridge the gap between research and practice, changing perceptions of research, inclusive engagement and collaboration, streamlining ethics processes, empowering observational research and tailored communication strategies. Case examples are outlined to substantiate the themes presented and highlight successful research initiatives within NHS Trusts.

This paper provides an insight into the views of stakeholders in child and youth mental health. The themes will hopefully support and influence clinicians and academics to come together to improve the integration of research into clinical practice with the hope of improving service provision and outcomes for our children and young people.