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Purpose: Prior work has convincingly argued that social inequalities arise from the basic human tendency to place others into social categories with different cultural meanings and to allocate resources unequally across those categories. However, few studies have sought to identify the micro-level mechanisms that sustain and justify this categorical inequality. In this research, I show how affect control theory (ACT) can be used to generate novel predictions about the interaction processes that perpetuate stratification.

Methodology/Approach: I present a series of analyses based in ACT that examine (1) whether categorical inequality is reflected in cultural sentiments for social groups, (2) whether patterns of normative behavior and social treatment vary based on category membership, and (3) whether interactions produce different emotions based on category membership.

Findings: Analysis 1 identifies four distinct patterns of cultural meanings that differentiate the groups studied. Analyses 2 and 3 show how these differences in cultural meanings produce categorical inequality through interpersonal behavior and emotional experiences in normative social encounters. Unequal cultural meanings for social groups correspond with their positionality in the social order and support patterns of situated behavior and emotions that keep groups with different levels of status and power separate and unequal.

Originality/Value: This research shows how social norms constrain and enable actions and emotions by members of different social categories, how they depend on the combinations of actors who appear together in a given social encounter, and how they contribute to the reproduction of inequality in ways not well accounted for by earlier work.

The present research builds on three complementary theories to explore how social influence processes in interaction bring about opinion and sentiment change: expectation states theory, affect control theory, and social influence network theory.

An experimental study is used to test intersections between the theories and assess how performance expectations, affective impressions of group members, and emergent perceptions of their influence work together to generate opinion and sentiment change.

Respondent opinions shifted in the direction of group leaders’ opinions, regardless of behavioral interchange patterns. Opinion change was greater when a third group member shared the leader’s opinion. Change in affective impressions was shaped by the group leader’s opinion, the assertiveness of their behavior, and the support of a third group member. The perceived influence composition of the group predicted opinion and sentiment change, above and beyond the effects of conditional manipulations. Features of the group interaction led to inferences about status characteristics that reinforced the influence order of the group.

The chapter tests hypotheses from earlier work and explores status signals not yet tested as predictors of opinion change – behavioral interchange patterns and the degree of support for one’s ideas. In addition, it examines inferences about status characteristics following the group discussion, and influence effects on the prevailing definition of the situation.

This chapter contributes to recent integrative work that explores the relationship between performance expectations, affective impressions, and social influence. Synergistic processes forwarded by earlier research are tested, along with several newly proposed linkages.

Various mass shooters have explained their violent actions as a response to failing at dominant forms of masculinity, including rejection from women and negative social comparisons to other men. The affect control theory of self (ACT-Self) posits that interactions that violate one's sense of self cause inauthenticity. This disequilibrium motivates behaviors that restore self-meanings, which may partially explain the link between challenges to the self and compensatory violence.

In Study 1, we use ACT-Self to examine the relationship between inauthenticity, violent fantasies, and physical aggression in the autobiography of one mass shooter. We quantify self-sentiments and inauthenticity using ACT-Self measures and methods, and perform a thematic analysis of the shooter's interpretations of and responses to disconfirming events. In Study 2, we examine the relationship between these same concepts in a survey of 18-to-32-year-old men (N = 847).

Study 1 shows that the shooter's inability to achieve popularity, wealth, sex, and relationships with beautiful women (compared to other men) produced inauthenticity that he resolved through violent fantasies, increasingly aggressive behavior, and ultimately, mass violence. Study 2 finds that inauthenticity arising from reflected appraisals from women predicts self-reported violent fantasies and physical aggression in a convenience sample of men in emerging adulthood.

This work leverages a formal social psychological theory to examine the link between self-processes and violence. Our findings suggest that men's inauthenticity, particularly produced by reflected appraisals from women, is positively associated with violent fantasies and acts. Further work is needed to assess whether this relationship is causal and for whom.

I. INTRODUCTION This study attempts to extend and expand previous research conducted by the Department of Marketing at Strathclyde on the adoption and diffusion of industrial products.

This study investigates electronic customer service, e‐service, by Australian organisations, replicating and building on Heuchan et al.’s study of relationships among organisational characteristics and e‐service. Compared to one year earlier, the study found more organisations with Web sites, shorter response times to customer e‐mails and higher response quality to customer e‐mails. Response rate and response quality, however, was virtually the same – poor. Australian organisations have e‐service tools such as Web sites and e‐mail, yet they face an assimilation gap delivering e‐service. Organisational diffusion of innovations provides a theoretical base for these results and future research. The paper gives manager insights into existing e‐service and ways to improve e‐service in their organisation.

The purpose of the study is to test the utility of a taxonomy of innovation based on perceived characteristics in the context of healthcare by exploring the extent to which discrete innovation types could be distinguished from each other in terms of process antecedents.

A qualitative approach was adopted to explore the process antecedents of nine exemplar cases of “challenging”, “under‐cover” and “readily‐adopted” healthcare innovations. Data were collected by semi‐structured interview and from secondary sources, and content analysed according to a theoretically informed framework of innovation process. Cluster analysis was applied to determine whether innovation types could be distinguished on the basis of process characteristics.

The findings provide moderate support for the proposition that innovations differentiated on the basis of the way they are perceived by potential users exhibit different process characteristics. Innovations exhibiting characteristics previously believed negatively to impact adoption may be successfully adopted but by a different configuration of processes than by innovations exhibiting a different set of characteristics.

The findings must be treated with caution because the sample consists of self‐selected cases of successful innovation and is limited by sample size. Nevertheless, the study sheds new light on important process differences in healthcare innovation.

The paper offers a heuristic device to aid clinicians and managers to better understand the relatively novel task of promoting and managing innovation in healthcare. The paper advances the argument that there is under‐exploited opportunity for cross‐disciplinary organisational learning for innovation management in the NHS. If efficiency and quality improvement targets are to be met through a strategy of encouraging innovation, it may be advantageous for clinicians and managers to reflect on what this study found mostly to be absent from the processes of the innovations studied, notably management commitment in the form of norms, resource allocation and top management support.

This paper is based on original empirical work. It extends previous adoption related studies by applying a configurational approach to innovation attributes to offer new insights on healthcare innovation and highlight the importance of attention to process.