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We explore the effects and interplay of physical and social environments on the inaccessibility of gynecological health care for women with spinal cord injury. We also explore women’s responses to the inaccessibility of this care, in hopes of trying to understand better how women navigate their gynecological health and health care when faced with physical and social environmental constraints.

The data for this phenomenological study were gathered using in-depth, qualitative interviews with 20 women living with spinal cord injuries in or around Detroit, Michigan. Each interviewee was questioned about overall health and physical functioning, accessibility of doctor offices, interactions with health care providers, gynecological health-seeking behaviors, and complementary and alternative medicine use. In this paper we report on data on women’s difficulties in securing gynecological health care experiences and related attitudes and practices.

Findings echo past literature about the inaccessibility of doctor’s offices, including the lack of suitable exam tables and medical equipment. Office staff varied in their willingness to help transfer women from wheelchairs to exam tables as well, often creating what we term an inaccessible social environment. Individual women in our sample found different strategies for navigating the environmental contexts of a doctor’s office and the encounters that they had with providers within medical settings. These strategies had varying impacts on individuals’ abilities to secure gynecological health care.

Our findings point to the possibility of an interplay between and intersection of physical and social environments within medical settings that needs to be explored further and, potentially, the primary importance of the social environment over the physical environment in determining whether an individual’s disability makes health care inaccessible.

To better understand contributing factors and mediating mechanisms related to team dynamics in isolated, confined, and extreme (ICE) environments.

Literature review.

Our primary focus is on cohesion and adaptation – two critical aspects of team performance in ICE environments that have received increased attention in both the literature and funding initiatives. We begin by describing the conditions that define ICE environments and review relevant individual biological, neuropsychiatric, and environmental factors that interact with team dynamics. We then outline a unifying team cohesion framework for long-duration missions and discuss several environmental, operational, organizational, and psychosocial factors that can impact team dynamics. Finally, we end with a discussion of directions for future research and countermeasure development, emphasizing the importance of temporal dynamics, multidisciplinary integration, and novel conceptual frameworks for the inherently mixed work and social setting of long-duration missions in ICE environments.

A better understanding of team dynamics over time can contribute to success in a variety of organizational settings, including space exploration, defense and security, business, education, athletics, and social relationships.

We promote a multidisciplinary approach to team dynamics in ICE environments that incorporates dynamic biological, behavioral, psychological, and organizational factors over time.

China’s population is ageing. Continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs) are an emerging living arrangement of older Chinese. Incorporating social sustainability features into CCRCs helps to create age-friendly residential environments for residents. However, it is still unclear what kinds of social sustainability features are incorporated into the residential environments of CCRCs in China. Therefore, this study aims to address this research gap.

Qualitative content analysis is adopted to analyse the retrieved business information of representative CCRC developers in China.

This study revealed 36 social sustainability features in CCRCs, with the top-ranked ones being health care and management, social connection and engagement, high-quality and diverse services and daily life support and assistance. Additionally, a preliminary social sustainability framework of CCRCs was proposed, and this framework includes the five components of care and health, environment and management, service and facility, age-friendly life philosophy and social support and inclusion.

In theory, this research’s findings clarify the meaning of social sustainability within the context of CCRCs, which supports future relevant explorations in the CCRC research community. In practice, these findings enhance stakeholders’ understanding of the social sustainability in CCRCs, which promotes the development of age-friendly living environments for older people in an ageing society.

This study aims to reveal the constituents of seafaring service quality (physical and social environment) and their effects on seafarer employee satisfaction (job satisfaction and turnover intention) and analyse any differences among seafarer ranks. Literature on service quality has overlooked the transportation sector and seafaring in particular.

Seafaring service quality is measured by the workplace environment constituted of physical and social environments. Two types of employee (job) satisfaction were explored: overall job satisfaction and turnover intention. This study is based on a unique, large survey based on the Existence-Relatedness-Growth (ERG) needs theory. An exploratory factor analysis revealed four physical environment factors (Ship conditions, Communication facilities, Nautical health and Living conditions) and four social environment factors (Social fit, Team cohesion, Ship company support and Intercultural environment). Multi-group regression analysis assessed the effects of seafaring service quality on employee satisfaction.

The social environment has stronger effects than the physical environment on job satisfaction but not on employee retention. Team cohesion has strong effects on employee retention, while social fit has stronger effects on overall job performance. Seafarer ranks showed significant variations. The physical environment matters for 2nd engineers' and cadets’ job satisfaction but not for ratings, masters and chief officers. Team cohesion is significant to master, chief officer, engineer and cadet ranks but not for junior officers and ratings. Social fit has stronger effects on overall job performance than employee retention, particularly for ratings, cadets, master, chief officer and chief engineer ranks. Ship company support has the stronger effect on overall job satisfaction among all workplace factors; this is also observed across all ranks.

Motivation theories like the ERG theory can help understand service quality and employee satisfaction in the maritime sector; future studies should examine more behaviour variables/constructs from these theories.

Maritime companies can offer better services to seafarers, who are considered as key workers, by customising their interventions to specific seafarer ranks and developing a supportive culture that improves seafarer well-being.

This study examined the overlooked topic of maritime service quality based on a large-scale survey grounded on ERG theory and reveals how the physical and social environment has different effects on seafarer job satisfaction and retention.

Previous research on the relationship between service environments and customer emotions and service outcomes has focused on the physical environment. Among studies exploring the social environment, the emphasis has been on service employees, ignoring the impact of other customers. Recent research has further called for the need to include displayed emotion within the social environment. Therefore, this study aims to develop and test a more comprehensive model that focuses on the relationship between the social environment (employee displayed emotion and customer climate) and the physical environment (ambient and design factors) and resulting customer emotion and service outcomes.

Based on past research, a theoretical framework was developed to propose the links between social/physical environments and customer emotion/perceptions. Extant research from various academic fields, including environmental psychology, was reviewed, deriving 11 hypotheses. Data collected from fashion apparel retailers, using both observation and customer survey methods, was examined through structural equation modeling (SEM).

Results show that both social and physical environments have a positive influence on customer emotion and satisfaction, which in turn affect behavioral intentions. The physical environment exhibited more influence on customer emotion and satisfaction than social environment.

This research explains how both social and physical environments affect customer emotion and perceptions. Future research directions are discussed, with an emphasis on incorporating customer characteristics, industry attributes, and cultural variables to better understand the influence of service environments in different service settings.

Social and physical environments influence customer emotional states within the service delivery context, which in turn affect customer service evaluations. Therefore, both social and physical service environments should be emphasized by service firms.

This research represents an early attempt to develop a more comprehensive model explaining how both social and physical environments affect customer emotion and perceptions. This study also represents the first empirical study of service environment research to include employee displayed emotion as part of the social environment.

The purpose of this paper is to treat WeChat moments as social media environments and applies the research model to explore the effect of social media environments on perceived interactivity from the perspective of environmental psychology.

This paper proposes social media environments as effective stimuli for future participate in online social interactions. First, two cues of social media environments (user-to-system cues and user-to-user cues) can be important antecedents of users’ perception of interactivity. Second, users’ intention of future participates in online social interactions can be influenced by three dimensions of perceived interactivity (action control, connectedness and responsiveness). Using data from 334 users of WeChat moments, the authors conduct partial least squares analysis to validate the research model.

The results indicate that both technological and social environments positively affect three dimensions of perceived interactivity, respectively, including action control, connectedness and responsiveness. Moreover, actual findings also suggest that higher perceived interactivity increases users’ intention of future participate in online social interactions.

This work contributes to in-depth research on the relationships between social environments and perceived interactivity. Besides, this paper demonstrates that both technological and social cues of social media environments are significant elements in simulating users’ internal experience and behavioral intention. The main conclusions of this study can be valuable to social media developers and managers.

Driven by artificial intelligence technology, chatbots have begun to play an important customer service role in the online retail environment. This study aims to explore how conversational styles improve the interaction experience between consumers and chatbots in different social crowding environments, and the moderating role of product categories is considered.

Three studies are conducted to understand the influences of conversational styles, social crowding and product categories on consumer acceptance, assessed using situational experiments and questions.

In a low social crowding environment, consumers prefer chatbots with a social-oriented (vs. task-oriented) conversational style, while in a high social crowding environment, consumers prefer a task-oriented (vs. social-oriented) conversational style, and warmth and competence mediate these effects. The moderating effect of product categories is supported.

This study expands the application of the stereotype content model to improve the interaction experience level between consumers and chatbots in online retail. The findings can provide managerial suggestions for retailers to select a chatbot's conversational style and promote a more continuous interaction between consumers and chatbots.

Purpose – We outline how research on groups in disrupted environments can advance research on group processes.

Design/Methodology/Approach – We review studies of groups in disrupted environments, drawing mostly on military research to generate understanding of intra- and intergroup dynamics. We also identify new technologies and methods to improve measurement and modeling of groups.

Findings – When consolidated, the research documenting challenges groups operating in disrupted environments face suggests the importance of considering them as a unique set of circumstances for groups. It also identifies methods for objectively measuring and modeling groups in these environments.

Practical Implications – This chapter will help practitioners determine factors pertinent to groups working in disrupted environments, identify group processes that generate success and those that undermine group effectiveness, and point to emerging technologies to better measure and model group processes in disrupted environments.

Social Implications – Group processes affect both individuals and societies. In the context of the disrupted environments, group performance translates to enormous consequences for individuals, as well as national security and humanitarian implications.

Originality/Value of the Chapter – This chapter uniquely consolidates the vast amount of research on groups operating in disrupted environments and also is innovative in emphasizing the disrupted context as a generalizable situation that elucidates key dimensions of group processes and performance in disrupted environments.

This paper uses systems theory to clarify the crucial point that there is a basic, inborn, bodily motivation, and that a social theory of the self cannot simply be a theory of process. By bridging across current neuroscience, cognitive science, and systems theory, I propose a self that is fundamentally emotional energy seeking. There are other bodily needs (food, drink, etc), but these satiate quickly, and although they can override everything else at moments when they are low, they are not the central switching mechanism, the top of the hierarchy in the subsumption architecture of the self. Basing the formation and ongoing processes of the self in the motive to maximize emotional energy can explain the seeming conflict between tendencies towards self-consistency and the potential for creativity and change. It also allows us to detail the mechanisms that underlie the process of individuals drawing on culture as a resource and in turn diffusing new symbols and meanings into the larger culture.

This chapter compares interdisciplinary research that engages genomic science from economics, political science, and sociology. It describes, compares, and evaluates concepts and research findings from new and rapidly developing research fields, and develops a conceptual taxonomy of the social environment.

A selection of programmatic and empirical articles, published mostly since 2008 in leading economics, political science, and sociology journals, were analyzed according to (a) the relationship they pose between their discipline and genomic science, (b) the specific empirical contributions they make to disciplinary research questions, and (c) their conceptualization of the “social environment” as it informs the central problematique of current inquiry: gene-environment interaction.

While all three of the social science disciplines reviewed engage genomic science, economics and political science tend to engage genomics on its own terms, and develop genomic explanations of economic and political behavior. In contrast, sociologists develop arguments that for genomic science to advance, the “environment” in gene-environment interaction needs better theorization and measurement. We develop an approach to the environment that treats it as a set of measurable institutional (rule-like) arrangements, which take the forms of neighborhoods, families, schools, nations, states, and cultures.

Interdisciplinary research that combines insights from the social sciences and genomic science should develop and apply a richer array of concepts and measures if gene-environment research – including epigenetics – is to advance.

This chapter provides a critical review and redirection of three rapidly developing areas of interdisciplinary research on gene-environment interaction and epigenetics.