Search results

The interpersonal theory of suicide proposes that fearlessness about death, one aspect of the capability for suicide, may explain men’s greater risk for death by suicide. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether violence perpetration and victimization would mediate the relation of gender with fearlessness about death in suicidal psychiatric inpatients.

The current study used a cross-sectional survey design in a sample of 196 psychiatric inpatients admitted for suicide risk.

Men endorsed greater fearlessness about death compared to women. The relation of gender with fearlessness about death was partially mediated by violence perpetration, but not victimization. Violence perpetration may play a more central role in the development of fearlessness about death, the capability for suicide, and the transition from suicide ideation to action compared to violence victimization.

The current study was cross-sectional and not able to definitively answer questions about the development of the capability for suicide. Future research must examine how fearlessness about death evolves over time.

Suicide risk assessment should include history of violence perpetration, as this may better identify those who may be at greater risk for suicide due to greater fearlessness about death.

The current study adds to the growing literature that aims to understand variables that explain the transition from suicide ideation to action.

This paper aims to examine women leaders from diverse career backgrounds and ethnicities to discover their perspectives of their leadership roles and empowerment to determine similarities and differences among them, focusing on the perspectives of African American women.

The review process began with a comprehensive review of African American women in history in the context of leadership and empowerment. Next, a Q-sort methodology was used as a semi-qualitative approach for women leaders to rank words of empowerment and facilitate discussions among these women. The Q methodology is known for exploring issues that are correlated with individuals who are influenced with personal feelings and opinions.

The paper concludes that perceptions of leadership roles differ among the African American women leaders when compared to other ethnicities. The results support the idea that women from diverse ethnic backgrounds have different experiences in the workplace, and these experiences influence how they identify factors they perceive as beneficial to them in terms of their perspectives on leadership and empowerment. Several themes emerged for African American women leaders including being overlooked, marginalized, undervalued and unappreciated in their professions as leaders due to their dual minority status. As it is now as it was in the past, such barriers can deter or stop progression for African American women leaders.

The history of African American women in leadership roles is scantily recognized or not recognized at all. This paper highlights leadership roles and barriers for African American women currently in leadership roles in contrast to other women. The issues they face are still similar to those faced by African American women in earlier decades in spite of increased career mobility. A relatively understudied topic in leadership and management history in general, this paper provides a unique lens from which to build awareness about the leadership roles and empowerment of African American women and to effect needed change.

It is an arduous process for corporations to determine if social action advertising is a complementary fit with their respective brands. This study aims to explore opportunities and disadvantages when brands consider cause-related partnerships as part of their overall marketing strategy. There are motivators and detractors related to social actions promoted by brands. It is essential for organizations, institutions and corporations to better understand if, or when, to use advertising that contributes to the social good.

Phase one of the study was a qualitative analysis conducted through personal interviews. Coded passages from interviews were aggregated into themes, which later defined ten social action advertising measures. The second phase in the study was a quantitative analysis (N = 506) that tested consumer involvement with the social action advertisement “You Love Me.” The spot was designed for the Dr. Dre Beats brand, in response to the George Floyd murder in 2020.

Brands need to carefully examine their own histories, political associations and concern for all consumer segments, prior to evoking social change. Differentiations arising from political views and gender identity are discussed. Regressions indicate “social ads that use stereotypes” was the key significant predictor of emotional involvement. Consumers feeling “respected and represented in social action ads” was the key significant predictor of fact-based cognitive involvement. “Social action ads distorted through virtue signaling” were 38% more likely to effect brand purchase when consumers viewed the social action ad.

This is a nonfunded research study. Respondents who participated in interviews, and those selected for data collection, were solicited through convenience and judgmental nonprobability sampling. These data are racially and financially biased. Seventy-six percent of respondents in the racial variable were white; 51% stated they were “wealthy and have a lot of assets.” Neither variable is representative of the general population. In the future, researchers should collect a nonbiased stratified probability sample that would more closely reflect the general population and consumer audience.

This paper builds on the recommendations of Farrukh et al. (2021) who call for more published research in the areas of human rights violations and social change. The results of this study represent a cautionary tale. Political dogma within a polarized society has created pressure for chief marketing officers to integrate political values into brand values. The risk of creating adversarial factions has created a risky environment for brand developers and strategists (Mahoney, 2022).

The purpose of this paper is to produce a critical history of MP3 technology in an effort to show how its stature as the digital music format of choice had nothing to do with music or associated industries and that its configuration as a product to be bought and sold was unintended.

The approach is reminiscent of Michel Foucault's critical histories, which sought to problematise our current understanding of existing cultural arrangements by unearthing the conditions that made the production of knowledge and their accompanying artefacts possible.

The paper documents how MP3s emerged by outlining the conditions that made its production viable, showing how before MP3s were profiled as commodities to be bought and sold online, the composite of technologies making up the standard MPEG1‐Layer III were objects of knowledge within the fields of electrical engineering and psychoacoustics, and later a process of compression used mainly by audio broadcasting professionals. The paper concludes by examining MPEG1‐Layer III's reconstitution as MP3: its formal configuration and valuation, first as a license for the broadcasting industry to compress sound and then as a “free‐ware” application distributed online.

The paper problematises the taken for granted status of commodities, in this case, MP3s, as digital music to be bought and sold, by revealing how they emerged. At a more parochial level, it produces a competing history of MP3 technology which until now has not been told.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of corporate brand experience (CBE) on customer value co-creation attitude and behaviour (CVCCA and CVCCB). By integrating congruity theory with the theory of reasoned action, the study proposes an integrated model for developing CVCCB in a retailing context.

Structural Equation Modelling, using AMOS software was conducted using a sample of 711 respondents from four hypermarkets located in five Malaysian states.

The research findings indicate that CBE plays a significant role for developing customer attitude and behaviour of value co-creation activities. Results show that CBE has a strong positive influence on CVCCA and subjective norms (SN) which further lead to CVCCB. SN were found to be a partial mediator between CBE and CVCCA. CVCCA was found to be a partial mediator between SN and CVCCB. Full mediation of CVCCA and SN between CBE and CVCCB is confirmed.

The research contributes to value co-creation literature by proposing an integrated model for developing CVCCB in retailing. This research opens avenues for future research to consider the importance of brand experiences in value co-creation practices.

Neuroscientists act as proxies for implied anthropomorphic signal-processing beings within the brain, Homunculi. The latter examine the arriving neuronal spike-trains to infer internal and external states. But a Homunculus needs a brain of its own, to coordinate its capabilities – a brain that necessarily contains a Homunculus and so on indefinitely. Such infinity is impossible – and in well-cited papers, Attneave and later Dennett claim to eliminate it. How do their approaches differ and do they (in fact) obviate the Homunculi?

The Attneave and Dennett approaches are carefully scrutinized. To Attneave, Homunculi are effectively “decision-making” neurons that control behaviors. Attneave presumes that Homunculi, when successively nested, become successively “stupider”, limiting their numbers by diminishing their responsibilities. Dennett likewise postulates neuronal Homunculi that become “stupider” – but brain-wards, where greater sophistication might have been expected.

Attneave’s argument is Reductionist and it simply assumes-away the Homuncular infinity. Dennett’s scheme, which evidently derives from Attneave’s, ultimately involves the same mistakes. Attneave and Dennett fail, because they attempt to reduce intentionality to non-intentionality.

Homunculus has been successively recognized over the centuries by philosophers, psychologists and (some) neuroscientists as a crucial conundrum of cognitive science. It still is.

Cognitive-science researchers need to recognize that Reductionist explanations of cognition may actually devolve to Homunculi, rather than eliminating them.

Two notable Reductionist arguments against the infinity of Homunculi are proven wrong. In their place, a non-Reductionist treatment of the mind, “Emergence”, is discussed as a means of rendering Homunculi irrelevant.

Anthropology was a late‐comer to the Caribbean and only after World War II did the study of Caribbean culture and societies become less exceptional. Early in this century when anthropology was first making itself over as an ethnographic science, anthropologists concentrated on tribal peoples. For most of the post‐Columbian era, the Caribbean region, with a few minor exceptions, was without indigenous tribal societies. Even after anthropology turned its attention to the study of peasantries, Caribbean peasantries were ignored in favor of more stable and tradition‐oriented peasant societies in other parts of Latin America. When anthropologists began to study Caribbean peoples in a more serious and systematic fashion, they found that they had to develop new concepts to explain the variation, flexibility, and heterogeneity that characterized regional culture. These concepts have had a significant impact on social and cultural theory and on the broader contemporary dialogue about cultural diversity and multiculturalism.

Combining the goal-setting and job demands-resources (JD-R) theories, we examine how two project resources, collaborative project leadership and financial project resources, enhance high project performance in community-academic health partnerships.

With a sequential explanatory mixed-method research design, data were collected through a survey (N = 318) and semi-structured interviews (N = 21). A hypothesised three-path mediation model was tested using structural equation modelling with bootstrapping. Qualitative data were examined using thematic analysis.

Project workers’ hope, goal-commitment and -stress: (1) fully mediate the hypothesised relationship between highly collaborative project leadership and high project performance; and (2) partially mediate the relationship between financial project resources and high project performance. The qualitative data corroborate and deepen these findings, revealing the crucial role of hope as a cognitive-motivational facilitator in project workers’ ability to cope with challenges.

Project leaders should promote project workers’ goal commitment, reduce their goal stress and boost project performance by securing financial project resources or reinforcing workers’ hope, e.g. by fostering collaborative project leadership.

The findings contribute to the project management and JD-R literature by considering the joint effects of project workers’ hope and two commonly studied project resources (collaborative project leadership and financial project resources) on high project performance. Moreover, we demonstrate the importance of the goal-setting and JD-R theories for understanding complex health-promotion projects connecting academic to community work.

The purpose of this article is to increase the understanding of how improvements can be facilitated in a public service containing multiple actors in terms of identifying, aligning and prerequisites for the improvements.

The research utilizes an interactive research approach where data were gathered though a conference, workshop and a survey. The study alternately combines quality management methods such as affinity and interrelationship diagrams with computer aided text mining and latent semantic analysis.

The research shows that practitioners must consider interconnectedness between improvements and benefits that are crossing organizational levels of the public service system as well as professional borders. In public service systems, the complex reality can be better understood when improvements and benefits are classified into different organizational layers and an interconnectedness and sequence of improvement areas are acknowledged.

The research is set in the Swedish public service of the tax-paid sick leave insurance. Future research would benefit by investigating similar cases in other nations and other services.

The used methodology can be applied by practitioners to enhance a unified understanding of the system required to improve. The study also guides practitioners for how to support, relive hinders and prioritize improvements.

The research fills a gap of understanding of improvements in public services with multiple actors. As this area is difficult to improve, a novel combination of qualitative and quantitative methods paved the way for deeper and more unified understanding of the system.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to formulate an exhaustive list of the issues, gaps, and barriers at each level of the agri-food value chain in North Carolina (NC), and second, to identify the issues of greatest importance to its members.

This research employed the Delphi technique in two stages of input. The first round of input was designed to create a comprehensive list of issues for each of nine “stages” of the agri-food value chain. In round two, the issues were prioritized.

The top ten responses of each stage were aggregated into themes that represent the most critical issues identified by respondents: connectedness within the value chain, access to markets and marketing, affordability/availability of food and food distribution, farm profitability, societal awareness, and education about healthy, local food, and supporting institutions.

The findings could be used by practitioners to inspire innovation in food-related products, programs, processes, organization, and marketing. The findings can help farmers, institutions, food distributors, policy makers, and other members of the agri-food value chain to make decisions about food distribution and access in NC and in other states facing similar issues and circumstances. The findings of this research also have further reaching implications, such as the connectivity of members along the agri-food value chain, the impact of a strong agri-food value chain on agritourism and the potential value of state marketing initiatives.