Search results

Although hope is commonly used in terms of wishful thinking, as a positive psychological concept consisting of the dimensions of both willpower (agency) and waypower (pathways), it has been found to be positively related to academic, athletic and health outcomes. The impact of hopeful leaders, however, has not been empirically analyzed. This exploratory study (N = 59) found that high‐ as compared to low‐hope leaders had more profitable work units and had better satisfaction and retention rates among their subordinates. The implications of these preliminary findings of the positive impact that hopeful leaders may have in the workplace are discussed.

In this chapter, I reflect on the place of hope in activist criminology. Offering reflections from my own activist scholarship, this chapter draws out the ways in which hope structures and sustains our work across temporal frames and distinct modes of academic practice. This chapter develops a hopeful analysis of lineage, memory and resistance, reflecting on my participatory research with the Tamil community in London, and reflects on the revival of utopian thought in criminological scholarship. Hopeful imaginaries of an abolitionist future inform my scholar-activism with Reclaim Holloway – an abolitionist collective formed to influence the redevelopment of the Holloway prison site. I describe this future-oriented work before considering hope as a practice in the present, focusing on ‘pedagogies of hope’ as activist criminology in the classroom.

In this chapter we apply a range of insights drawn from social science studies of hope amidst contexts of illness, and studies of hope emerging from the sociology of emotions, in critically considering social processes of hoping amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. While much of the health sciences literature on hope emphasises positive outcomes in terms of coping and motivation, we also draw upon various perspectives which denote a dark side of hoping, whereby inequalities and injustices are tolerated, or where feeling rules insidiously coordinate collective hopes in ways which serve various political-economic interests. Reflecting this ambivalence across different literatures, our examples and analyses suggest that hoping as a social process is itself inherently conflicted, dissonant and rife with tensions. As we explore the contradictions of hoping amidst a pandemic, the tensions between expectations and desire, tragedy and optimism, aspiring to act and fatalistic acceptance make apparent that emotions of hope can be neither neatly delineated nor disentangled from a ‘messy’ web of related feelings and framings. We extend our emphasis of these blurry, dissonant and messy aspects of hoping through work on ‘tragic optimism’, following Frankl, wherein wider lifeworlds or imaginaries pertaining to deeply embodied and implicit notions of self and a good life are central to maintaining hope amidst heightened vulnerability and uncertainty. We close by laying out a post-formal approach to hope, which methodologically and conceptually focusses on contradictions and dissonance in narratives of hope, whereby living hopefully always involves living awkwardly with these tensions.

Amid the multitude of economic effects emanating from impositions of COVID-19, workers in the tourism sector are potentially experiencing significant psychosocial impacts. These effects are compounded by the uncertainty of pathways for positive change and the precariousness of adjustments to life and livelihoods. Their attitudes to the newly imposed circumstances are possibly conditioned by a sense of hope which may have implications for their adaptations in the face of sudden or slow change. In this chapter, we argue that one’s sense of hope represents an important component of psychosocial well-being and may even be visualized as a necessary component of adaptation. Hope is conceptualized as a cognitive process that entails thinking and planning in order to achieve proposed goals (Snyder, Irving, & Anderson, 1991; Snyder, Lopez, Shorey, Rand, & Feldman, 2003) and can be operationalized into three core components: goals, pathways, and agency. Based on in-depth interviews and a questionnaire survey administered to former accommodation workers in the Negril tourism industry, this chapter examines expressions of hope(lessness) existing among workers displaced by COVID-19. It potentially provides nuanced understandings of hope as a necessary raw material for adaptation initiatives and explores ways in which a sense of hope could be harnessed in the face of disasters and despair.

Many students living in poverty experience daily hopeless realities that prevent them from meeting their full potential. Adversely, hope makes it possible for one to engage in the struggle, to believe in the possibilities of tomorrow, and actively participate in their quest for transformation. This chapter explains the role critical hope plays in dismantling systemic oppression and dehumanizing order of what society has historically and unjustly prescribed them to be. As agents of hope (Strikwerda, 2019), educators can beget hopeful possibilities for our students by instilling a belief that change is possible and creating loving dialogical spaces that awaken a taste toward humanization.

In this chapter, we draw from the emerging positive organizational behavior movement to describe the role that hope can play in the effectiveness of Egyptian organizational leaders. After providing a brief review of the theory and research on hope, we suggest ways that hopeful Egyptian organizational leaders can be developed and “hopefully” thrive in these times.

This study aims to examine the role of hope and hate in political leaders’ messages in influencing liberals versus conservatives’ social-distancing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the increasing political partisanship across the world today, using the appropriate message framing has important implications for social and public policy.

The authors use two Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods – a pretrained package (HateSonar) and a classifier built to implement our supervised neural network-based model architecture using RoBERTa – to analyze 61,466 tweets by each US state’s governor and two senators with the goal of examining the association between message factors invoking hate and hope and increased or decreased social distancing from March to May 2020. The authors examine individuals’ social-distancing behaviors (the amount of nonessential driving undertaken) using data from 3,047 US counties between March 13 and May 31, 2020, as reported by Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports and the New York Times repository of COVID-19 data.

The results show that for conservative state leaders, the use of hate increases nonessential driving of state residents. However, when these leaders use hope in their speech, nonessential driving of state residents decreases. For liberal state leaders, the use of hate displays a directionally different result as compared to their conservative counterparts.

Amid the emergence of new analytic techniques and novel data sources, the findings demonstrate that the use of global positioning systems data and social media analysis can provide valuable and precise insights into individual behavior. They also contribute to the literature on political ideology and emotion by demonstrating the use of specific emotion appeals in targeting specific consumer segments based on their political ideology.

The findings have significant implications for policymakers and public health officials regarding the importance of considering partisanship when developing and implementing public health policies. As partisanship continues to increase, applying the appropriate emotion appeal in messages will become increasingly crucial. The findings can help marketers and policymakers develop more effective social marketing campaigns by tailoring specific appeals given the political identity of the consumer.

Using Neural NLP methods, this study identifies the specific factors linking social media messaging from political leaders and increased compliance with health directives in a partisan population.

Purpose – In this chapter, I explore and argue for a theoretical shift in research about Aboriginal physical activity practices in Canada, from a deficit perspective to a strengths perspective that incorporates practices of hope.

Design/methodology/approach – After briefly describing my concerns about analysing Aboriginal physical activity practices from a deficit perspective, I outline, apply and argue for the benefits of a research approach that begins with a strengths perspective and incorporates practices of hope.

Findings – I argue that all individuals have strengths and places where they can exercise power. An adoption of complementary power relations framed within the practices of hope, which include availability and listening with an openness to co-transformation, further clarifies how to adopt a strengths perspective analysis of Aboriginal physical activity practices.

Originality/value – In adopting a strengths perspective, I am committed to actively identifying existing strengths as a starting point, along with resources that can be used to further those strengths. Strengths are then used to address identified barriers to physical activity. The practices of hope outline how non-Aboriginal allies can work alongside Aboriginal individuals to co-transform physical activity in a manner that enhances physical activity practices for all those involved.