Search results

Instinct and experience tell us that a majority of instruction librarians would likely agree that the presence of the professor during a library instruction session will positively affect his or her students’ learning experiences. To test this notion, instruction librarians were surveyed for their perceptions regarding the impact of professor attendance on library instruction effectiveness. The results indicate the majority of subjects surveyed feel that learning is enhanced when professors attend library instruction sessions along with their students. Additional objective research is needed, however, to determine the validity of this perception.

A great deal of literature exists for leadership educators related to programs design, delivery, and student learning. However, little is known about leadership educators, who have largely been left out of contemporary leadership education research. We looked to teaching and teacher education literature to derive a model for leadership educator professional identity development. The four spaces of identity development are exploration, experimentation, validation, and confirmation. We propose that an individual can move forward and backwards through the model as a result of both ongoing influences and positive or negative critical incidents. We discuss implications for professional development and future research.

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate how the segmentation of voters based on decision‐making processes, using means‐end laddering research innovations and real‐time interactive online interviewing, can aid in the formation of political communications strategy, including theme and message development.

To demonstrate the application of these innovations in a political context, the paper uses data from a sample of 114 voters who were interviewed during the 2004 US presidential election campaign. The paper draws on three recent innovations to the means‐end laddering methodology: elicitation questioning techniques that allow for a decision equity analysis between targeted groups; decision segmentation analysis; and real‐time interactive online interviewing; and applies them to an electoral context. It provides an interpretation of the identified decision segments and an exposition of how these common networks of meaning can serve as the basis for targeted theme and message development.

These three innovations, in concert, were found to provide an efficient set of methods to serve as the foundation for the campaign message development process.

This paper provides deterministic research techniques for campaign strategists who want to understand voter decision making and demonstrates a combination of methodological and technological innovations that addresses the time, cost, and geographic limitations often associated with conducting voter decision making research.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an evaluation of a newspaper insert survey and web‐based voter surveys associated with the same newspaper, conducted before and after the 2004 US presidential election.

The study compares response rates, demographics, and political profiles of voters responding to these two different channels of communication and evaluates the success of each in predicting the election outcome.

The study results show some significant differences between the two methods of voter data collection; nevertheless, each is useful in a comprehensive system that attempts to follow voter attitudes and intentions before the election and predict election outcome.

The study relies on the use of an innovative marketing poll that goes beyond simple prediction of a voter's behavior and offers an explanatory component useful in the development of marketing strategies during a campaign.

While a number of scholars have observed that the contemporary self has to negotiate a “push and pull” between autonomy and a desire for community (Austin & Gagne, 2008; Bauman, 2001a, p. 60; Coles, 2008; Giddens, 2003, p. 46, the struggle between the “self” and “others” that is at the heart of symbolic interactionist (SI) understandings of the self is often missing from sociological discussion on the “making of the self” (Coles, 2008, p. 21; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000), and the current chapter contributes to this literature.

To gain insight into “the making of the self,” in-depth life history interviews were conducted with 23 former members of new religious movements (NRMs) specific to their construction of self. Interview data was analyzed for variations in the ways in which individuals describe their construction of self. To make sense of these variations, SI understandings of the self are applied.

Analysis indicates that the extent to which individuals are informed by the social versus the personal in their self-construction is a continuum. From an SI perspective the self is conceptualized as to varying degrees informed by both the personal and the social. These two “domains” of the self are interrelated or connected through an ongoing process of reflexivity that links internal experiences and external feedback. From this perspective, “healthy” selves reflexively balance a sense of personal uniqueness against a sense of belonging and social connectedness. While a reflexive balance between the “self” and “others” is optimal, not everyone negotiates this balance successfully, and the extent to which individuals are informed by the social versus the personal in their self-construction varies and can be conceptualized as on a continuum between autonomy and social connectedness. The current findings suggest that where individuals are positioned on this continuum is dependent on the availability of cultural and personal resources from which individuals can construct selves, in particular in childhood. Those participants who described themselves as highly dependent on others report childhood histories of control, whereas those who described themselves as disconnected from others report histories of abuse and neglect.

The problems of relying on retrospective accounts of former members should be noted as such accounts are interpretive and influenced by the respondents’ present situation. However, despite their retrospective and constructionist nature, life history narratives provide meaningful insights into the actual process of self and identity construction. The analysis of retrospective accounts is a commonly recommended and chosen method for the study of the self (Davidman & Greil, 2007; Diniz-Pereira, 2008).

The current findings suggest that significant differences may exist in the way in which individuals construct and narrate their sense of self, in particular in regards to the way in which they experience and negotiate contemporary tensions between social connectedness and individuality. In particular, the findings highlight the importance of childhood environments for the construction of “healthy” selves that can negotiate contemporary demands of autonomy as well as social connectedness.

The field of Human Resource Management (HRM) has long recognized the importance of interpersonal influence for employee and organizational effectiveness. HRM research and practice have focused primarily on individuals’ characteristics and behaviors as a means to understand “who” is influential in organizations, with substantially less attention paid to social networks. To reinvigorate a focus on network structures to explain interpersonal influence, the authors present a comprehensive account of how network structures enable and constrain influence within organizations. The authors begin by describing how power and status, two key determinants of individual influence in organizations, operate through different mechanisms, and delineate a range of network positions that yield power, reflect status, and/or capture realized influence. Then, the authors extend initial structural views of influence beyond the positions of individuals to consider how network structures within and between groups – capturing group social capital and/or shared leadership – enable and constrain groups’ ability to influence group members, other groups, and the broader organizational system. The authors also discuss how HRM may leverage these insights to facilitate interpersonal influence in ways that support individual, group, and organizational effectiveness.

Misbegotten, misnamed, antisocial homo oeconomicus is now contrasted with the more human personae of homo oeconomicus honorabilis, the “open”/ “Semi‐economic Man” of Pantaleoni and Marshall, the still arcane homo oeconomicus humanus of Nitsch and Malina, and (most recently) the positivistic (neo‐) homo socio‐economicus of Etzioni et al., which ‐‐in turn – harks back to Smith′s Theory of 1759‐90. Showing the essential identity of modern economics and Aristotle′s oikonomikē, and recognising the ozone layer as pre‐eminent among once‐free but now very scarce resources (chrēmata ) that have to be utilised efficiently and administered prudently, the author joins forces with Herman Daly et al. in proposing an Aristotelian/Biblical homo oeconomus as a “Good Steward” in the spirit of Frigerio′s L′Economo Prudente (1629) and qualitative improvement over the being who has masqueraded as homo oeconomicus. Uniting this prudent conservator and caretaker of our natural endowment with “Homo Faber, the Subject‐creator of Social Economy” of an earlier work yields the antithesis of the veritable homo oeconomicus impudens of Classical‐Neoclassical infamy.

In an effort to better understand leadership educator preparation, this qualitative study explores leadership educators’ identity constructions, or (re)presentations of experiences, beliefs, and practices that contribute to one’s professional identity. We used three narrative approaches (storytelling, symbolic interactionism, and anticipatory reflection) to capture short stories of leadership educators’ lived experiences and life perspectives. Analysis of these narratives illustrate the kinds of past experiences that led to shifts in thinking or practice. Leadership education was seen as a process of leadership development, with teachers and students both exercising leadership. And participants’ reflection on their intentions for future practice emphasize learning that is both personal (relational) and procedural (developing knowledge and skills). Findings offer insight into recommendations for intentional professional development experiences and future research.