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Purpose – To explore an ethics of entanglement in the context of mental health and psychosocial research.

Design/methodology/approach – To bring together debates within body and affect studies, and specifically the concepts of mediated perception and the performativity of experimentation. My specific focus will be on voice hearing and research that I have conducted with voice hearers, both within and to the margins of the Hearing Voices Network (see Blackman, 2001, 2007).

Findings – The antecedents for a performative approach to experimentation and an ethics of entanglement can be found within a nineteenth-century subliminal archive (Blackman, 2012).

Originality/value – These conceptual links allow the researcher to consider the technologies that might allow them to ‘listen to voices’ and introduce the non-human into our conceptions of listening and interpreting. This directs our attention to those agencies and actors who create the possibility of listening and learning beyond the boundaries of a humanist research subject.

Organizational demography research tends to invoke multi-level concepts that require multi-level theories and analysis. Scholars originally paid little attention to this multi-level work. However, the complex issues involved in studying multi-level demographic phenomena are receiving increasing scrutiny. Three historical oppositions in social science have contributed to current limitations: the disciplinary differences between psychology and sociology; the analytical antagonism between quantitative and qualitative analysis; and the rhetorical distinctions between deductive and inductive discussion. These oppositions suggest that a more qualitative, inductive approach may uncover new directions for multi-level demographic theory. Two possibilities are discussed. One is to refocus on the phenomena themselves instead of their outcomes. Another is to explore how demographic misperceptions influence individual behavior.

The goal of this chapter is to explore the requirements modern companies expect of HR professionals’ competences.

Departing from the widely acknowledged HR competence studies of Ulrich and associates, we extended them with the continuous learning competence profile and HR professionals’ individual job performance. The empirical study is built on open interviews with HR leaders of ten large Dutch companies.

The study offers a new set of HRM competences. This set includes six HRM profiles: Business Focus, Learning Focus, Strategic Focus, HR Technology, HR Delivery, and Personal Credibility. Several contingency factors are thought to play a role in supporting these HRM competences: company culture, strategy, size, sector, scope, and position of HR professionals.

Based on these contributions, we recommended conducting a quantitative study to gain understanding of the relevance of the individual HRM job performance and to find associations between the HRM competences and the individual HRM job performance.

The focus of this chapter is a combination of HRM competences and the individual job performance of HR professionals.

For many years now, both organizational researchers and practitioners alike have been interested in the role played by employee happiness on a number of workplace outcomes. In particular, many have been fascinated by the happy/productive worker thesis. According to this hypothesis, happy employees exhibit higher levels of job-related performance behaviors than do unhappy employees. However, despite decades of research, support for the happy/productive worker thesis remains equivocal. These inconsistent findings primarily result from the variety of ways in which happiness has been operationalized. Most typically, organizational theorists have operationalized happiness as job satisfaction, as the presence of positive affect, as the absence of negative affect, as the lack of emotional exhaustion, and as psychological well being. I will review this literature using the circumplex framework as the taxonomic guideline. In addition, drawing on the impetus of the “positive psychology” movement, I propose Fredrickson’s (1998, 2001, 2003) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions as one approach especially well-suited for future research to better understand the happy/productive worker thesis.

The notes reproduced below were taken by a student, Maurice Beck Hexter, at Harvard University during the academic year 1921–1922. The notes are typewritten and handsomely bound, entitled:

This is a comparison of the emotions we have in watching a movie with those we have in everyday life. Everyday emotion is loose in frame or context but rather controlled and regulated in content. Movie emotion, in contrast, is tightly framed and boundaried but permissive and uncontrolled in content. Movie emotion is therefore quite safe and inconsequential but can still be unusually satisfying and pleasurable. I think of the movie emotions as modeling clay that can symbolize all sorts of human troubles. A major function of movies then is catharsis, a term I use more inclusively than usual.

Throughout I use a pragmatist approach to film theory. This position gives the optimal distance to the study of ordinary, middle-level emotion. In contrast psychoanalysis is too close and cognitive theory too distant. This middle position is similar to Arlie Hochschild’s symbolic interactionist approach to the sociology of emotions, which also mediates between psychoanalysis and cognitive theories.