Work as good‐minded undertakings and effortless assignments: Chinese meaning of working for hospitality workers and its motivational implications

Meaning of working (MOW) or the understanding of the purpose of working is a cornerstone in organizational behavior. This study answers the call to explain the MOW in Eastern contexts characterized by interdependent identities. We collect our data from hospitality workers in Taiwan, where Chinese Confucian and Taoist cultural precepts are strong. Our findings reveal that our informants use 25 typical vocabularies of motive in establishing and maintaining five salient identities that gain significance through two Chinese work meanings (i.e., good‐minded undertakings and effortless assignments). These meanings demonstrate the theoretical contributions of our findings to the MOW literature. We also explore the interplay between our emic findings (grounded in Taoism and Confucianism Chinese cultures) with etic motivation theory to advance understanding of prevention and promotion foci.     

Who gets the benefit of the doubt? The impact of causal reasoning depth on how violations of gender stereotypes are evaluated

A large body of research demonstrates that women encounter severe penalties for violating gender stereotypes. In this paper, we explore the conditions under which the reverse is true—when being subject to a stereotype can actually benefit a woman compared to a man who is not subject to the same stereotype. In particular, we suggest that in situations of causal ambiguity—uncertainty about the reasons that a behavior occurred—differences in how men and women are evaluated will be moderated by the extent to which observers engage in a low or a high level of deliberative causal reasoning. In 3 experimental studies, participants were asked to make judgments about an employee who violated a female gender stereotype by failing to provide help to a coworker when asked to do so, but the reasons for this behavior were unclear. When participants were prompted to engage in deliberative causal reasoning, women were evaluated more positively than men, but not in the absence of such a prompt. Moreover, when participants did engage in deliberative causal reasoning, the more positive evaluations of women compared to men were driven by participants' beliefs that women's behavior was due more to situational constraints than the same behavior by men.     

Influence of pedestrian age and gender on spatial and temporal distribution of pedestrian crashes

Objectives: Every year, about 1.24 million people are killed in traffic crashes worldwide and more than 22% of these deaths are pedestrians. Therefore, pedestrian safety has become a significant traffic safety issue worldwide. In order to develop effective and targeted safety programs, the location- and time-specific influences on vehicle–pedestrian crashes must be assessed. The main purpose of this research is to explore the influence of pedestrian age and gender on the temporal and spatial distribution of vehicle–pedestrian crashes to identify the hotspots and hot times.

Methods: Data for all vehicle–pedestrian crashes on public roadways in the Melbourne metropolitan area from 2004 to 2013 are used in this research. Spatial autocorrelation is applied in examining the vehicle–pedestrian crashes in geographic information systems (GIS) to identify any dependency between time and location of these crashes. Spider plots and kernel density estimation (KDE) are then used to determine the temporal and spatial patterns of vehicle–pedestrian crashes for different age groups and genders.

Results: Temporal analysis shows that pedestrian age has a significant influence on the temporal distribution of vehicle–pedestrian crashes. Furthermore, men and women have different crash patterns. In addition, results of the spatial analysis shows that areas with high risk of vehicle–pedestrian crashes can vary during different times of the day for different age groups and genders. For example, for those between ages 18 and 65, most vehicle–pedestrian crashes occur in the central business district (CBD) during the day, but between 7:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., crashes among this age group occur mostly around hotels, clubs, and bars.

Conclusions: This research reveals that temporal and spatial distributions of vehicle–pedestrian crashes vary for different pedestrian age groups and genders. Therefore, specific safety measures should be in place during high crash times at different locations for different age groups and genders to increase the effectiveness of the countermeasures in preventing and reducing vehicle–pedestrian crashes.     

Co-Creating Green Transition: How Municipality Employees Negotiate their Professional Identities as Agents of Citizen Involvement in a Cross-Local Setting

Citizen involvement plays an important role in many governmental and municipal attempts towards green transition, reflecting a departure from a deficit model of public communication towards participatory ambitions of engaging citizens. Recently, the notion of co-creation or co-production has gained importance as a way of conceptualizing and organizing citizen involvement. The current study examines how four municipality partners in Sweden and Denmark embark on a common project on citizen involvement and co-creation as an avenue to green transition, addressing private decisions of individual citizens or families where the municipality has no legislative competence. By analysing how several local authorities with different but similar challenges negotiate and jointly identify themselves as agents of citizen involvement, the study offers an upscaling to what may be termed the plura-local level. Analytically, the study takes a discourse approach, combining close readings of texts and talk with an interdiscursive and diachronic analysis.     

相对地位变化对中国省际能源消耗的影响机制

由于在现有政治晋升体制中,各省在经济增长和节能降耗过程中对竞争地位的追求,导致各省的相对地位在能源消耗决策过程中起到十分重要的作用。本文基于中国省际政府官员考核和晋升机制现实背景,从相对身份效应理论的角度构建了省际能源消耗的理论模型,探讨了相对地位、地位变化对省际能源消耗的影响机制,具体表现为各省能源消耗的当期和上一期相对地位对能源强度具有行为理论上决策作用机制,当期人均GDP增速与上一期人均GDP绝对水平对能源强度具有行为意义上的理论解释机制,省际能源消耗具有的动态自适应机制。在理论分析基础上,进一步实证检验了省际能源消耗的相对身份效应理论,实证结果表明:(1)各省在当期能耗排名上竞争对节能具有积极作用,上一期能耗排名越靠后的省份在当期节能降耗的动机比排名靠前的省份更强烈,从而使得当期能耗下降。此外,在不同的考核时期和不同节能任务要求下,能耗排序对节能的影响存在差异,该影响也因各省所处相对位置高、低而不同。(2)当期经济增长与当期能源消耗呈现出同向变化的互补机制,上期经济增长与当期能源消耗呈现出反向变化的替代机制。(3)上一期能源强度下降会降低当期能源强度,省际能源强度存在着逐渐下降的动态自适应机制。基于此,我国对地方政府节能降耗的政策设计应当实施多节能目标、多奖惩措施的差异化模式,从而实现不同类别省份的有效节能和粗放型经济增长方式的快速转型。     

Examining the agricultural producer identity: utilising the collective occupational identity construct to create a typology and profile of rural landholders in Victoria,Australia

Multifunctional rural landscapes are often characterised by contrasting values, land uses and land management practices of rural property owners. It seems these trends are, in part, an expression of rural landholder's identification as farmers. Existing typologies of rural landholders seldom take into account occupational identity. Research discussed in this paper addresses that gap. The objective was to apply the collective occupational identity construct to address the challenges of profiling rural landholders and test its effectiveness at distinguishing between different types of landholders. A 12-item scale was used to explore the extent rural landholders in south-eastern Australia held an agricultural producer identity. Cluster analysis resulted in the creation of four clusters of rural landholders with distinctive characteristics, suggesting the approach can provide researchers with a theoretically sound construct and practitioners with a useful tool as they attempt to better understand and engage rural landholders in sustainable agriculture.     

Place attachment and place identity: First-year undergraduates making the transition from home to university

This paper examines the issues emanating from the transition into a new social and cultural environment distant from the home, the context of which is provided by the transition from home to university. The study analyses the transitional process over a period of 5 months, using data obtained from in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observation of ten first-year undergraduates who moved to study at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham. It explores the mediating variables that impact place attachment and place identity during the transition from home to university. Within this context consideration is given to how participants made sense of changes in their socio-spatial environment, the ensuing problems and challenges of doing so, and how these meanings affected self-perceptions and self-evaluations. The analysis demonstrates how participant's stories of the transition evince an abiding concern with the loss of place, manifest in terms of an erosion of a sense of belonging, attachment and continuity and an undermining of home's capacity to symbolise the self. The implications of such accounts for our understanding of place attachment and identity are then explored. The paper concludes by advocating a holistic approach to our conceptualisation of place, given that place meanings are constantly being evaluated and redefined in light of changing social and physical relationships with place and between people and place.     

Sustainable development in East Africa: impact evaluation of regional agricultural development projects in Burundi,Kenya, Rwanda,Tanzania, and Uganda

Investments in agricultural technologies, capacity building and policy harmonization are needed to support sustainable development across Africa. Regional development projects can facilitate the adoption of agricultural technologies and innovations across nation-state borders and generate benefits for shared prosperity. This paper uses panel data from 1,160 smallholder households including beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries from five countries in East Africa - Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. From a pool of over 90 projects implemented over a span of 15 years, 23 regional projects are included in this study. The major economic benefits to smallholder participants are higher crop productivity and income, access to adaptable technologies, access to markets, higher livestock and milk production, gender equality, enhanced food security, resilience and capacity building for uptake and scaling up of future innovation platforms. For example, the adoption of low-cost tissue culture banana by the beneficiaries increased their incomes by 15% in Rwanda while the adoption of appropriate land and water management technologies increased the potato yields from 2.8 tons (USD 2,840/ha) to over 7.5 tons (USD 7,410/ha) in Kenya. The beneficiaries ensured value added to commodities like bananas (for export) and orange-fleshed sweet potatoes (a nutrition-sensitive intervention for enhancing domestic intake of vitamin A) in Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. Additionally, milk production increased from 6 to 11 L per cow per day in Uganda and from 6 to 8 L per cow per day in Tanzania, with increases in sales generating USD 115 per cow per month above the non-beneficiaries. These results are supported by previous studies on technology adoption, investments in agriculture and well-being outcomes. Our findings with the higher farm income Difference-in-Differences (DiD) estimator for the female beneficiaries compared to male beneficiaries might have important implications for investing in regional development projects that will close the gender gap in agricultural productivity in Africa. Regional projects can also support post-conflict development efforts for food security and peace in fragile contexts such as in Burundi. Our findings might serve as an input to the African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, localization of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals related to food security and agriculture in Africa and an input to monitoring, evaluation and learning.     

Variations in public and private employees’ perceptions of organizational preparedness for natural disasters

Studies have demonstrated that public and private organizations differ in many respects (e.g. funding mechanisms and risk-taking capabilities). Based on this scholarship, we expect to see differences in their disaster preparedness levels. Hence, we propose the following research question: Are there variations in public and private employees’ perceptions of organizational preparedness for natural disasters? We answer this question by employing the theories of publicness and social identity. We define publicness through the core approach arguing that public and private organizations are uniquely different based on their legal status or ownership and social identity as an individual’s feeling of oneness or belongingness to a particular group or organization. Using data gathered in 2014 from a nationally representative sample of 1634 public and private employees in the United States, we posit that employees of private organizations will report higher preparedness levels in comparison to employees of public organizations. Our proposition is based on scholarship that found a negative relationship between publicness and organizational identification and a positive relationship between organizational identification and organizational performance. Contrary to our proposition, but in line with the disaster literature, the results showed that in general, employees of public organizations reported a higher preparedness level than employees of private organizations.     

南丹矿业活动影响区人群头发中重金属含量特征

为探讨矿业活动对"有色金属之乡"南丹矿区周边常住居民健康的影响,采集矿业活动影响区车河镇、大厂镇、长老乡及对照区六寨镇中典型村庄居民发样200个,用原子荧光形态分析仪(AFS-9700)、石墨炉原子吸收分光光谱仪(AA 700)和电感耦合等离子发射光谱仪(Optima 7000)测试其重金属含量.结果表明,受影响区人群发样中As、Sb、Cd和Pb的平均含量分别为1.260、2.161、2.466和20.92μg·g-1,分别是对照区的4.0、20、2.1和1.9倍,且车河、大厂人群发样中Sb含量超出推荐正常范围;受影响区人群发样中Zn含量与居民年龄呈负相关(P0.05,n=151),Cd和Pb含量与居民年龄呈弱负相关(P0.1,n=151);通过独立样本t检验,受影响区男性居民发样中Cd含量显著高于女性(P0.05),而女性居民发样中Cu和Zn含量显著高于男性(P0.05).调查区域人群发样中As与Sb、Cd与Pb、As与Cd呈显著相关性(P0.01).可见,南丹矿业活动对周边常住人群人发重金属积累效应明显.