Intro to the Special Issue on Theory: Theory at the Level of the Profession

Reviewed by: Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840 by Rana A. Hogarth Dale Kretz (bio) Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840. By Rana A. Hogarth. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 290. Cloth, $90.00; paper $27.95.) Rana A. Hogarth's Medicalizing Blackness examines how white physicians in the Greater Caribbean defined blackness as a clinically significant [End Page 140] marker of difference. Their efforts helped to sanction white control over black bodies, both slave and free. However, the writings of these physicians in the decades surrounding the turn of the eighteenth century were not simply a byproduct of the growing proslavery ideology. Although the claims physicians made about the perceived peculiarities of black bodies served those who wanted to justify slavery, Hogarth argues that, before the 1840s, professional authority and financial gain were the most important factors driving such claims. Hogarth divides her study thematically into three parts. Part 1 demonstrates how physicians used blackness as a form of medical shorthand for understanding a person's susceptibility to yellow fever, widely recognized as a scourge of the Americas. In her first chapter, Hogarth shows how the medical theories of John Lining, a physician in South Carolina, were adopted by Benjamin Rush during the famous 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia. Influenced by Lining's assertion that blacks were immune to yellow fever, America's preeminent physician begged Philadelphia's African Americans to remain in the city to assist its victims. The direct application of the black-immunity thesis proved tragic, and Rush later repudiated Lining's claim—though not as strongly as Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two leaders in the city's black community. Nevertheless, the theory had remarkable staying power. Chapter 2 explores the attractiveness of the black-immunity claim to the British military, which sought to deploy black troops in service to Britain's Caribbean empire. When eight hundred Africans aboard the Regalia were stricken with yellow fever, British physicians, rather than invalidate the immunity thesis, blamed poor management. They concluded that "blackness, in conjunction with external factors, played a role in how bodies experienced disease" (62) and that diet and work regimens therefore could and should be properly manipulated by the British military. According to Hogarth, both cases—the 1793 epidemic and the Regalia episode—show how the growing corpus of medical knowledge worked to subjugate black bodies and silence black suffering and enabled white physicians to build a transnational professional network based on ideas about black health. The collective gaze of white physicians fell most heavily on so-called slave diseases. Part 2 focuses on how one such disease, Cachexia Africana (also known as dirt eating), allowed physicians to pathologize blackness, earn professional credibility, and mandate tighter white control over enslaved bodies. Whereas the subject has been only a marginal note in many medical histories of slavery, Hogarth places Cachexia Africana at the center of a high-stakes contest. In chapter 3, she argues that white physicians used the disease "to secure their tenuous positions as medical [End Page 141] authorities in the face of competition from enslaved healers, skepticism on the part of overseers and owners, and resistance from the enslaved" (83). In Jamaica, the Afro-Caribbean spiritual practice known as Obeah threatened physicians' authority. Unable to master Cachexia Africana, Jamaican physicians blamed the disease on recalcitrant slaves influenced by Obeah and prescribed greater mastery over them. Helpless as these physicians were in treating Cachexia Africana, chapter 4 contends that the professional identities of Caribbean and southern physicians nevertheless "depended on the construction of racial pathologies" (106). By the 1830s, dissertations, medical journals, and plantation guidebooks brimmed with insider information on how to manage enslaved black bodies. Part 3 moves beyond physicians' ideas about black health to explore medical spaces outside the plantation, from workhouses and public hospitals in Jamaica to private and teaching hospitals in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Chapter 5 argues that the Hospital and Asylum for Deserted Negroes in Kingston, Jamaica, became an apparatus of social control over the colony's black population as well as a convenient means to undercut abolitionist accusations of slavery's...

The popular and professional press is filled with discussions of major changes on the organizational landscape, including organizational design experiments at entrepreneurial firms as well as at major corporations, the slashing of corporate staffs, the downsizing, delayering and revitalization of firms, the emerging electronic organization, mergers and acquisitions, failures of high reliability organizations, and time-based competition. Each of these issues has been associated with the redesign of organizations, yet these redesigns seem far removed from academic research, and they do not typically utilize the academic body of knowledge. Although the field has progressed enormously in new methods and insights during a century of research, it seems to us that organization studies have been a source of recurrent disappointment for practitioners and academics alike (Bedian 1989; Cummings 1983; Luthans 1986; Slocum 1984). For example, Miner (1984) analyzed 32 established organizational science theories and concluded that with the exception of theories of motivation there is no relationship between usefulness and validity. Is the field of organization studies irrelevant? Organizations have become the dominant institution on the social landscape. Yet the body of knowledge published in academic journals has practically no audience in business or government. Unlike a field such as economics, research on organizations has not typically focused on problems relevant to business and government organizations, and the real world of organizations has not drawn on the work undertaken by organizational scientists. From colleagues within our field and in allied disciplines, we hear complaints that manuscripts espousing radical ideas, or topics outside the mainstream, are difficult to publish. Reviewers for established journals seem to value papers whose theses are anchored in established theories or that use "legitimate" methods, thus implicitly creating a publication barrier for research that falls outside mainstream topics or methods. Moreover, we observe that scholars with interests in organizations span many disciplines and fields of inquiry such as anthropology, economics, history, information science, communication theory, artificial intelligence, systems theory, psychology, sociology, political science, policy sciences, as well as organization behavior, strategic management and organization theory. We sense that a new discipline of organization science is evolving and we envision that a new journal can become a forum for a discipline defined more broadly. The purpose of this essay is to discuss these issues and the need for reorienting research away from incremental, footnote-on-footnote research as the norm for the field. Although current research approches have made solid contributions, they do not

The initial public offering (IPO) is one of the most critical events in the lifetime of a young firm. Prior research has shown that firms tend to have successful IPOs if they go public with the endorsement of a prestigious lead underwriter. This paper examines the antecedents to receiving endorsement by a prestigious underwriter and links this to the experience base of a firm's upper echelon. We theorize that the amount and type of upper echelon experience serve as important symbols of a young firm's legitimacy to critical outsiders. We introduce a typology of upper echelon experience that distinguishes between upper echelon upstream, horizontal, and downstream employment-based affiliations and suggest that these different types of upper echelon affiliations allay different types of endorser concerns regarding firm legitimacy, affecting the endorsement process. Further, we theorize that the relationships between upper echelon experience and investment bank prestige will be moderated by technological uncertainty. We test our assertions on a comprehensive sample of public and private biotechnology firms that were founded between 1961 and 1994 and that went public between 1979 and 1996. Analyses of the five-year career histories of the over 3,200 executives and directors that make up the upper echelons of these firms show that firms with upper echelons with affiliations with prominent downstream organizations (i.e., pharmaceutical and/or healthcare companies) and with prominent horizontal organizations (i.e., biotechnology companies) are more likely to attract the endorsement of a prestigious investment bank. We also find that the greater the range of upper echelon affiliations across the categories of upstream, horizontal, and downstream affiliations, the more prestigious the firm's lead underwriter. We also find that these latter results are moderated by technological uncertainty. The present research has implications for the study of organizational legitimacy, interorganizational endorsements, and entrepreneurship.

“Most reviewers’ checklists of leading management journals list the criterion, “relevance for practice.” Authors comply with this criterion by pointing out what implications their results might have for practice. Evidence in the form of successful implementations of the results in practice is not required. Essentially, the authors are only supposed to point out what implications practitioners, as they socially construct them, can possibly draw from their results. If the reviewers’ construction of relevance is in accordance with the author’s, the criterion of relevance has been met . . .” (Kieser & Leiner, 2009: 522–523; italics in original).

The role of time and time dynamics is crucial to our understanding of important Organizational Psychology phenomena such as organizational change, work–family experiences, in-role and extra-role performance, deviance, job insecurity, work design, job crafting, psychological contracts, organizational justice, incivility, talent management, human resource management, organizational decision-making, organizational commitment, personality, leadership, emotions, motivation, team work, employee well-being and health, safety, and so forth. Specifically, the inclusion of time and temporal dynamics is essential to better explain “when” a phenomenon occurs, “what” aspects of the phenomenon are being influenced, “how” these aspects are being influenced, and “why” this influence occurs. Such a dynamic way of thinking can challenge existing knowledge and traditional ways of theory building and conducting empirical research in the field of Organizational Psychology. Despite the crucial role of time and temporal dynamics, it receives little acknowledgement in the Organizational Psychology literature and most published work has not made reference to time and/or time dynamics in its methods, findings, or conclusions. This stands in stark contrast with Organizational Psychology, a field that is devoted to the study of processes and guided by the principles of time and temporal dynamics. Several scholars have expressed concerns about this inconsistency in the literature and its detrimental consequences for the validity and accuracy of the field’s corpus of knowledge. It is therefore important to clarify what is meant by time and temporal dynamics and how the Organizational Psychology literature has dealt with this operationalization of time. An ideal way to do so is to provide a review (for the period 2000–2020) of the Industrial and Organizational Psychology literature with reference to the word “time.” This review reveals that the most popular approach to time has been that of “time as a construct or variable” (43.28%), followed by “time as future prediction” (29.48%), “time in theory development or improvement” (18.28%), and “time in methodology” (8.96%). Following this review, it is imperative to propose the essential elements to which “good” time-sensitive theory and research should adhere: (a) constructs and psychological phenomena should be clearly defined with reference to the time window within which they are expected to fluctuate and/or change, (b) relationships between constructs should be defined in relation to time and/or the unfolding nature of a construct or psychological phenomena should be specified, (c) temporal features of a construct or psychological phenomenon should be defined and described in detail, and (d) temporal metrics should be defined with reference to the specific timescales, time frames, and time lags that should to be used to measure the construct or psychological phenomenon. In addition to incorporating these essential elements of “good” time-sensitive theory and research, researchers should be made aware of possible future trends for the inclusion of time and temporal dynamics in theory building and empirical research. As a corollary, this inspires and directs future research in Organizational Psychology to acknowledge and incorporate the important role of time and temporal dynamics.

Nearly fifty years after the incorporation of the International Society for Knowledge Organization and the introduction of its formal scientific journal Knowledge Organization, a comprehensive encyclopedia of the domain appeared. The practice of domain analysis for knowledge organization, twenty years after its introduction as a core methodology, has created the largest corpus of theoretical knowledge in the domain analysis of knowledge organization itself. A substantial body of research data, therefore, is available in the corpus of articles and conference papers reporting on the epistemological and ontological pillars of the science of knowledge organization. This paper is a report on the evolution of a formal taxonomy of knowledge organization, which is a product of an exhaustive meta-analysis of the KO domain. Our team compiled the corpus of twenty-nine formal published analyses together with key formative historical documents. We then analyzed the corpus thematically, bibliographically, and using co-word analysis to extract key concepts and the underlying faceted conceptual infrastructure. The taxonomy itself is faceted and is linked where possible to published definitions in the KO literature and as well as to the online ISKO Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization. A dynamic project, the taxonomy will be maintained as linked open data and will grow as emergent research contributes new concepts or generates new facets.

: If organization theory finds it useful to draw upon some of the ideas that have emerged in cognitive psychology, it will be advantageous to borrow also the terminology used in discussing these ideas. Without working toward a higher level of consistency in terminology than prevails in organization theory today, it will be difficult or impossible to cumulate and assemble into a coherent structure the knowledge we are gaining from individual case studies and experiments. We will be continually reinventing wheels. That is a luxury we cannot afford. The happy band of researchers on organization theory is sufficiently small to be kept fully occupied discovering and verifying the theory just once. (Author) (kr)

Articulating the theory of bullying intervention programs: Views from social psychology, social work, and organizational science

Over the past decades, the psychological science has accumulated a large corpus of empirical knowledge about police interviews, deception detection, and suspects’ confessions. However, it is unclear whether European police forces’ practices and beliefs are consistent with recommendations derived from this empirical literature. The study described in this report is part of a larger research project examining European police investigators’ practices and beliefs. An online survey was administered to Guardia Civil (n = 89) and Policía Nacional investigators (n = 126). The survey inquired about the length, frequency and electronic recording of interviews, the suspects’ use of their right to remain silent, investigators’ self-reported skills in distinguishing between truthful and deceptive statements, their estimates of the frequency of (false) confessions, and their use of specific interview tactics. The outcomes provide insights into investigators’ knowledge and practices, highlight specific needs, and allow for a comparison between European and North American police forces.

The US Army employed organizational and behavioral sciences in the context of the emerging Postindustrial political economy to shape its new strategic thought in the 1980s. This article examines how a group of military intellectuals in the Army applied ideas from these sciences to promote officer decision-making and decentralization while maintaining the Army's culture and ethics. They had significant reservations about bringing new ideas from the social sciences into the Army because Robert McNamara's modern cybernetic strategy had scarred the Army's morale and sense of self during the Vietnam War. Instead, the intellectuals carefully adapted ideas into the Army with an unsentimental attitude as it emerged from its post-Vietnam decline so it could fight complex maneuver warfare. Their strategic thought in the late Cold War made the Army a flexible global-spanning force for the unipolar moment in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Richard M.McFall(b. 1939) is an eminent psychological scientist at Indiana University whose integrative research bridges clinical, cognitive, and neural science and whose professional contributions have advanced both clinical science and psychological science immeasurably. His research contributions include documenting the effect of self‐monitoring on behavior; examining the components of social skills training; evaluating the role of social competence in clinical phenomena; developing the social information‐processing model; and conducting integrative research that bridges clinical, cognitive, and neural science. Professionally,McFallauthored a “Manifesto for a science of clinical psychology,” developed the clinical science training model in clinical psychology, chaired the conference that led to the founding of the Academy of Psychological Clinical Science, and developed the firstNIMH‐funded training program in integrative psychological science at Indiana University. Currently, he is the executive director of the Psychological Clinical Science Accreditation System.

This chapter bridges the organizational sciences and social psychology to better understand group dynamics. For the organizational sciences, group dynamics are most relevant in small interacting groups. Group members must perceive that they are in a functioning group before they engage in group processes and experience group outcomes. Organizational science research focuses on member interactions and group structure, including group cognition, psychological safety, leadership, faultlines, and multiteam systems. Sociomateriality and construal theory build on the strong history of social psychology in the study of online groups. The chapter concludes with some of the empirical approaches in the organizational sciences that could be of interest to experimental social psychology.

Research has established that groups are pervaded by feelings. But group emotion research within organizational science has suffered in recent years from a lack of terminological clarity, from a narrow focus on small groups, and from an overemphasis on micro-processes of emotion transmission. We address those problems by reviewing and systematically integrating relevant work conducted not only in organizational science, but also in psychology and sociology. We offer a definition of group emotions and sort the conceptual space along four dimensions: group emotion responses, recognition, regulation, and reiteration. We provide evidence that group emotions occur at all levels of analysis, including levels beyond small work groups. The accounts of group emotion emergence at higher levels of analysis differ substantially between organizational science, psychology, and sociology. We review these accounts—emergence through inclination, interaction, institutionalization, or identification—and then synthes...

Introduction. The first study of the history of Saratov organizational psychology was carried out by L. N. Aksenovskaya, who traced the development of the industrial and organizational direction at Saratov State University from 1971 to the present. The purpose of our research was to analyze the process of formation of organizational and psychological science in Saratov in the 1920s–1930s. Such historical and psychological methods as the analysis of information presented in scientific and reference publications, historical reconstruction, interpretation of factual material were used. Theoretical analysis. A study was conducted on the development of Saratov organizational psychology in the 1920s–1930s as an integral part of two directions – scientific organization of labor and psychotechnics. Conclusion. It is established that organizational psychology in Saratov developed in accordance with the general trends of the scientific process for the whole country. For research and practical work, divisions were created at provincial administrative institutions, regional branches of All-Russian scientific communities, experimental laboratories. The article presents the activities of three Saratov laboratories organized by engineers at the Saratov Institute of National Economy, doctors at the Provincial Department of Public Education, psychologists at the Department of Philosophy and Psychology of Saratov University (the heads respectively N. M. Dyakonov, I. L. Stychinsky, A. A. Krogius).

The question of whether psychology can properly be regarded as a science has long been debated (Smedslund in Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science, 50, 185-195, 2016). Science is typically understood as a method for producing reliable knowledge by testing falsifiable claims against objective evidence. Psychological phenomena, however, are traditionally taken to be "subjective" and hidden from view. To the extent that science relies upon objective observation, is a scientific psychology possible? In this paper, I argue that scientific psychology does not much fail to meet the requirements of objectivity as much as the concept of objectivity fails as a methodological principle for psychological science. The traditional notion of objectivity relies upon the distinction between a public, observable exterior and a private, subjective interior. There are good reasons, however, to reject this dichotomy. Scholarship suggests that psychological knowledge arises neither from the "inside out" (subjectively) nor from the outside-in (objectively), but instead intersubjective processes that occur between people. If this is so, then objectivist methodology may do more to obscure than illuminate our understanding of psychological functioning. From this view, we face a dilemma: Do we, in the name of science, cling to an objective epistemology that cuts us off from the richness of psychological activity? Or do we seek to develop a rigorous intersubjective psychology that exploits the processes through which we gain psychological knowledge in the first place? If such a psychology can produce systematic, reliable and useful knowledge, then the question of whether its practices are "scientific" in the traditional sense would become irrelevant.