Configuration Of Beliefs Research Articles

Shaping individual paths for decision-making: a fuzzy set approach of religious and humanistic beliefs leading to the (non)acceptance of euthanasia

PurposeWhile the influence of individual beliefs on decision-making has been widely acknowledged, the interaction of different types of beliefs remains an under-researched topic. This study analyses how the simultaneous influence of religious beliefs and nonreligious beliefs shapes individual decision-making. This study aims to contribute to inform organizational decisions on topics potentially associated with these two types of beliefs, including corporate social responsibility matters. This study also aims to provide insights to ethical decision-making in situations of absence of social consensus, a subject that is relevant for individuals, organizations and policymakers.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to identify how different configurational groupings of Christian beliefs and humanistic beliefs lead to the acceptance or nonacceptance of euthanasia in a sample of individuals who identify as Catholic.FindingsAmong individuals sharing a Catholic religious affiliation, the authors identify three different configurations of beliefs – Cultural Catholics (religious beliefs are absent and humanistic beliefs are present), Observant Catholics (religious beliefs are present and humanistic beliefs are irrelevant) and Secular Catholics (both religious beliefs and humanistic beliefs are present).Originality/valuePrevious research has put forward the role of religion-related variables, such as religious affiliation and level of religiosity, for views on euthanasia. This study provides a more detailed analysis of the role of belief systems, identifying how different configurational groupings of beliefs lead to a decision grounded in moral and ethical considerations but for which there is an absence of social consensus.

A critical discourse analysis of the link between professional culture and organisational culture

PurposeDespite the fundamental role of culture in an organisational setting, little is known of how organisational culture can be sometimes determined/influenced by professional culture, particularly in the global south. Using Nigeria as a research focus, this article uses critical discuss analysis to examine the link between professional and organisational culture.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses qualitative research approach to establish the significance of professional culture as a determinant of organisational culture among healthcare organisations.FindingsWe found that the medical profession in Nigeria is replete with professional duties and responsibilities, such as professional values and beliefs, professional rules and regulations, professional ethics, eagerness to fulfil the Hippocratic Oath, professional language, professional symbols, medicine codes of practice and societal expectations, all of which conflate to form medical professionals' values, beliefs, assumptions and the shared perceptions and practices upon which the medical professional culture is strongly built. This makes the medical professional culture stronger and more dominant than the healthcare organisational culture.Research limitations/implicationsThe extent to which the findings of this research can be generalised is constrained by the limited and selected sample of the research.Practical implicationsThe primacy of professional culture over organisational culture may have dysfunctional consequences for human resource management (HRM), as medical practitioners are obliged to stick to medical professional culture over human resources practices. Hence, human resources departments may struggle to cope with the behavioural issues that arise due to the dominant position taken by the medical practitioners. This is because the cultural system (professional culture), which is the configuration of beliefs, perceived values, code of ethics, practices and so forth. shared by medical doctors, subverts the operating system. Therefore, in the case of healthcare organisations, HRM should support and enhance the cultural system (the medical professional culture) by offering compatible operating strategies and practices.Originality/valueThis article provides valuable insights into the link between professional culture and organisational culture. It also enriches debates on organisational culture and professional culture. We, therefore, contend that a strong professional culture can overwhelm and eventually become an organisational culture.

The Patterns of Explicit and Subtle Racism and Self-reported Color in Health Services

In this research, racism is defined as a multidimensional configuration of beliefs, emotions and behavioral guidelines to discriminate against black individuals.
 A representative survey was applied to 634 workers of public and private health services in the municipality of Camaçari, State of Bahia, Brazil, to explore technical knowledge, perceptions, attitudes and behaviors regarding to inequalities and racism. Principal Component Analysis was used to reduce and classify 40 sentences into standardized profiles of sets of components represent the sharing of social attitudes, beliefs on racism among health personnel.
 Results show that racism is expressed mainly through subtle expressions. Most of the health personnel disagree to asking the patients’ color. Health personnel who self-declare as white would accept explicit expressions of racism: that black patients would be more violent by nature; those who self-declared as brown would accept that humiliating jokes against black patients are normal expressions of Brazilian culture. These perceptions are based more on social prejudices, oriented by ideology, with contradictions and ambiguities in racism perceptions and with the values in modern society, such as universalism and equality. Racism in health services works as a barrier to complete and improve data on color-race inequalities in health and to implement affirmative policies.

Norm Contestation and Global Governance: Taking Actor Configurations and Practical Reasoning Seriously

Norm Contestation and Global Governance: Taking Actor Configurations and Practical Reasoning Seriously

An Impossibility Theorem on Beliefs in Games

A paradox of self-reference in beliefs in games is identified, which yields a game-theoretic impossibility theorem akin to Russell's Paradox. An informal version of the paradox is that the following configuration of beliefs is impossible:Ann believes that Bob assumes thatAnn believes that Bob's assumption is wrongThis is formalized to show that any belief model of a certain kind must have a “hole.” An interpretation of the result is that if the analyst's tools are available to the players in a game, then there are statements that the players can think about but cannot assume. Connections are made to some questions in the foundations of game theory.

The Symbolic and Material Nature of Physician Identity: Implications for Physician–Patient Communication

This field study considers the implications of the symbolic and material nature of physician identity for communication with patients. In-depth interviews of physicians across multiple organizational contexts reveal that physician identity is a discursive process of situated meaning in which particular configurations of beliefs, values, and actions are constructed within specific contexts. The content of individual physician identity was related to the general environment of medicine and its local medical context. The identities of physicians working in private practice were linked to the economic, legal, and social environment of medicine, whereas physicians working as employees had identities related to working in a setting that buffered the effects of the environment. Specific implications of the symbolic and material nature of physician identity for physician–patient communication are examined. Understanding physician identity is important to health communication scholarship because of the ongoing and central nature of physicians in health-care decision making and delivery.

Understanding the Brandenburger-Keisler Paradox

Adam Brandenburger and H. Jerome Keisler have recently discovered a two person Russell-style paradox. They show that the following configurations of beliefs is impossible: Ann believes that Bob assumes that Ann believes that Bob’s assumption is wrong. In [7] a modal logic interpretation of this paradox is proposed. The idea is to introduce two modal operators intended to represent the agents’ beliefs and assumptions. The goal of this paper is to take this analysis further and study this paradox from the point of view of a modal logician. In particular, we show that the paradox can be seen as a theorem of an appropriate hybrid logic.

An Impossibility Theorem on Beliefs in Games

A paradox of self-reference in beliefs in games is identified, which yields a game-theoretic impossibility theorem akin to Russell’s Paradox. An informal version of the paradox is that the following configuration of beliefs is impossible:

Talking Toads and Chinless Ghosts: The Politics of "Superstitious" Rumors in the People's Republic of China, 1961-1965

SINCE THE DEATH OF MAO ZEDONG in 1976, there has been an astonishing revival in the People’s Republic of China of what the government calls “feudal superstition”; this in spite of the fact that under Mao the regime waged a fierce onslaught against the “four olds”—old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits—especially during the Cultural Revolution. The 1980s and 1990s saw a rush to rebuild temples and ancestral halls, the resurgence of spirit mediumship and exorcism, renewed interest in divination and geomancy, the reemergence of heterodox religious cults, notably Falungong, and the appearance of “jade emperors descended from heaven.” 1 The rapidity and extent of this upsurge in once-proscribed beliefs and practices raised questions about the power of the Maoist state, suggesting that despite its intensive propaganda campaigns and bouts of repression, its capacity to remold popular thinking and behavior was much less than scholars had once supposed. This, in turn, raised questions about the nature of the beliefs and practices that revived during the era of economic reform. Were these manifestations of a tradition that had been preserved unscathed in the face of turbulent socioeconomic and political transformations? Or were these substantially new configurations of beliefs and practices adapted to the changed power relations of the reform era? 2 One form of “feudal superstition”—what the authorities call “superstitious rumors”—maintained a vigThis article was written during spring semester 2004 while I was a fellow at the International Center for

Does society benefit from investor overconfidence in the ability of financial market experts?

This paper develops a securities market model in which participants’ beliefs diverge and prices are monotonic in beliefs. Relative to rational expectations (i.e., correct and unanimous beliefs), overconfidence among uninformed traders about the precision of experts’ information leads to Pareto-superior equilibria. Efficiency-enhancing departures from rational expectations occur over a dense subset of parameter space, but only for one configuration of beliefs: uninformed traders must be more confident than informed experts. Overconfidence in the form of excessive trust in the predictive ability of experts sets off a virtuous cycle of increased trading that improves liquidity and reduces transaction costs for everyone.

Discourses of Writing and Learning to Write

This paper presents a meta-analysis of theory and research about writing and writing pedagogy, identifying six discourses – configurations of beliefs and practices in relation to the teaching of writing. It introduces and explains a framework for the analysis of educational data about writing pedagogy in which the connections are drawn across views of language, views of writing, views of learning to write, approaches to the teaching of writing, and approaches to the assessment of writing. The framework can be used for identifying discourses of writing in data such as policy documents, teaching and learning materials, recordings of pedagogic practice, interviews and focus groups with teachers and learners, and media coverage of literacy education. The paper also proposes that, while there are tensions and contradictions among these discourses, a comprehensive writing pedagogy might integrate teaching approaches from all six.

The Heart of the Atlantic Constitution: International Economic Stability, 1919-1998

enough to be relevant in the more rarified, infinite dimensional context of beliefs and very general social choice rules. In the world, however, beliefs need not be convex. An individual may hold two conflicting views, assigning to each differing probabilities of truth, or indeed, as Keynes noted, may be completely uncertain. Because of the failure of convexity, the heart can fail continuity at certain configurations of beliefs. By analogy with dynamic systems, the failure of continuity is called a catastrophe. A cascade is precisely the catastrophic change from one heart configuration to a completely different one. This very simple notion of a catastrophic cascade is adapted from Zeeman’s earlier ideas. However, the extension of the idea that I have proposed is made in the attempt to include more general transformations than those considered by Zeeman. The abstract object that I call a heart may not, in fact, be an equilibrium, if by this we mean that it is associated with unchanging beliefs and constant behavior on the part of the members of the society. However, the heart is defined by certain boundaries in the domains of beliefs and actions. An important feature of the heart is that when the equilibrium or core is, in fact, nonempty, then the heart and core coincide. On the other hand, when the core is empty, then behavioral cycles are certainly possible inside the heart. In normal circumstances, such cycles need not prove destructive to fundamental belief coherence in the Constitution. By analogy with the notion of an economic core, I use the term core belief to refer to the set of collective beliefs that are mutually compatible within the community. Under the circumstance of a catastrophe, the core belief can become empty. The heart of the Constitution is the exceedingly complex pattern of beliefs and actions, all of which are individually rational with respect to empirical reality and tenable according to the philosophical attitudes of the members of the community. It is defined by certain barriers, or boundaries, to belief, cognition, and behavior. What I have termed the chaos hypothesis (my interpretation of Keynes’s key insight), I see as a device by Keynes to overcome a belief barrier that prevented an understanding of the Depression. Keynes’s insight made accessible a number of different possible hearts, one of which eventually came into focus in the period after World War II. The earlier discussion of the implementation of hegemonic internationalism was intended to show how this depended on core beliefs about the nature of the international system and of the necessity of Soviet containment held by