Contradictory Prescriptions Research Articles

Institutional complexity and consumer wellbeing: Navigating the conflicting logics of religion, state, and market during the COVID-19 pandemic

Institutional complexity arises when multiple institutional logics prescribe divergent and incompatible behaviors. Studies show that exposure to contradictory prescriptions of multiple logics may trigger identity tensions, strategic challenges, and legitimacy problems. We add to this research stream by exploring the implications of the incompatibility between religion and other logics on consumer wellbeing. Extant research reports a generally positive effect of religion on wellbeing but limits the analytical attention to the individual effects of religiosity. Viewing religion as part of an inter-institutional system, we seek to understand why religion and other institutional logics might come into a conflictual relationship with each other and destabilize wellbeing. We find that critical events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, change the relative centrality of logics and prompt individuals to engage in incompatible behaviors. We also discuss how consumers manage the sudden and unexpected institutional complexity they face and seek to restore their wellbeing.

The Procedure of Morality

Does morality have a procedure? Unlike law, morality is arguably neither posited nor institutional. Thus, while morality undeniably prescribes various procedures, that morality itself has a procedure is less obvious. Indeed, the coexistence of procedural moral norms alongside substantive moral norms might seem paradoxical, given that they often yield contradictory prescriptions. After all, one may wonder, is morality not substantive all the way down? Nevertheless, the paper argues that morality has a “procedural branch” containing numerous norms that are themselves procedural. These norms comprise what we hold are the three hallmarks of a procedural norm: second-orderness, providing reasons on how to engage with other norms, and outcome-neutrality. In this respect, morality is more like law than what one might have expected.

The UNESCO site of the Casbah in the Master Plan of Algiers (PDAU): between heritage requirements and the need for coordination

This article addresses the question of how to protect those historical, urban sites, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, from the negative impact of stress, caused by the urban dynamic. We put forward the hypothesis that, as part of a holistic vision of protection, safeguard measures must be integrated into the urban development plans for those towns in which these sites are an integral part. This will avoid conflict between the demands of development, and the safeguard measures. Through the example of the UNESCO site of the Casbah, we will examine the strategy of the PDAU of Algiers, to safeguard of the UNESCO site and its reintegration into the Algiers agglomeration. This article adopts a methodology based on a critical, comparative analysis of the strategic heritage plan, as laid down in the PDAU. It examines the proposed safeguarding measures and evaluates its coordination with the safeguarding plan. An examination of the solutions proposed by the PDAU reveals several morphological weaknesses and contradictory prescriptions, favoring a poor connection between the safeguard plan and the PDAU. Consequently, only an integrated approach to urban conservation will reinforce the protection of the site and ensure its reconnection with the Algiers metropolis.

Test-enhanced learning versus errorless learning in aphasia rehabilitation: testing competing psychological principles.

Because individuals with acquired language disorders are frequently unable to reliably access the names of common everyday objects (i.e., naming impairment), rehabilitation efforts often focus on improving naming. The present study compared 2 rehabilitation strategies for naming impairment, reflecting contradictory prescriptions derived from different theoretical principles. The prescription derived from psychological research on test-enhanced learning advocates providing patients opportunities to retrieve target names from long-term memory (i.e., retrieval practice) in the course of treatment. In contrast, the errorless learning approach derived from cognitive rehabilitation research eschews retrieval practice in favor of methods that minimize naming errors, and thus the potential for error learning, in the course of treatment. The present study directly compared these approaches and showed that, despite superior (and errorless) performance during errorless treatment, treatment that prioritized retrieval practice produced greater retention 1-day and 1-week following treatment. These findings have implications for clinical practice, as well as theoretical accounts of lexical access and test-enhanced learning.

Understanding the Manufacturing Location Decision: The Case for the Transaction Cost and Capability Perspectives

This article highlights the value of employing the resource‐based view (RBV) and transaction cost economics (TCE) to understand the manufacturing location decision. The RBV can assist with analyzing manufacturing capabilities, which can link the decision with performance and the competitive position of the organization. TCE provides a powerful theoretical lens to augment this analysis. Understanding transaction costs allows an organization to adopt a relationship strategy, which reduces the risks of outsourcing while at the same time leverages the specialist capabilities of suppliers. Moreover, further research is required to enhance our understanding of how the variables from the RBV and TCE interact in sourcing decisions. In particular, it is argued that employing these theories in the manufacturing location decision would contribute to the academic debate on the complementary and contradictory prescriptions of TCE and the RBV in outsourcing decision‐making contexts.

Competing Discourses for Older Women: Agency/Leadership vs. Disengagement/Retirement

Older women are targets of competing discourses. On one hand, they are urged to maintain or even increase their engagement, to translate their experience and seniority into leadership roles finally available to women after many years of struggle. On the other hand, they are reminded that they have earned the right to retire and rest, and are bombarded with messages reminding them to be concerned about the encroaching limitations and problems associated with aging. These competing prescriptions are most evident in the realms of work/career and physical health/activity, where either early disengagement or refusal to disengage can cause problems. Women who exit early from employment may face poverty and deprive society of important contributions; those who resist retirement may face stress, exhaustion, and missed opportunities for fulfillment in other domains. Women who stop physical activity as they age face a variety of health consequences; those who persist run the risk of injury. Thus, women's negotiation of these contradictory prescriptions requires a complex balancing act. Therapists can assist older women in finding the right balance by acknowledging their own biases, helping women both to acknowledge their internalization of ageist stereotypes and to recognize ways in which ageing may increase their empowerment by releasing them from certain constraints. They can encourage their clients to maintain and increase their power through physical activity and support women's resistance to debilitating messages by exposing them to a wide range of older women as role models.

What’s the Harm?: An Evolutionary Theoretical Critique of the Precautionary Principle

The precautionary principle has been hailed as the new paradigm for contending with health and environmental risk in the context of emerging technologies. In the philosophical literature, however, it has been met with skepticism. Weaker conceptions of the precautionary principle are accused of being trivial or vacuous, while stronger versions are criticized for issuing irrationally restrictive or even contradictory prescriptions. Although the precautionary approach suffers from a number of conceptual defects, it nonetheless could be justified in certain biological domains if it were the case that evolution tended to produce optimal, delicately balanced equilibria that generally coincided with what we value. This justification fails, however, since it is premised on assumptions about the causal structure of the world that do not accord with contemporary evolutionary theory. This does not exclude the possibility that the precautionary principle may be warranted for other reasons or in certain settings, but it does remove a potentially powerful rationalization, one that has motivated much of the scholarship, law, and policy that is inclined toward the precautionary approach.

How the transaction cost and resource-based theories of the firm inform outsourcing evaluation

Transaction cost economics (TCE) and the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm have been extremely influential in the study of outsourcing both in theory and practice. This paper argues that neither transaction cost economics nor the resource-based view alone can fully explain the complexities of outsourcing. A review and critique of these theories as a means of understanding the complexities of outsourcing is presented. A prescriptive framework for outsourcing evaluation is presented, which was developed from integrating TCE and the RBV, and carrying out in-depth case study research in a number of organizations. The research findings emphasize the utility of integrating TCE and the RBV, and highlight the importance of operations management concepts such as performance management, operations strategy, business improvement and process redesign to the study of outsourcing. However, the findings have shown that these theories should be applied with caution due to contradictory prescriptions in some instances.

Envisioning Positions of Leadership: The Expectations of University Students in Virginia and Puerto Rico

Eighty‐six university students in Virginia and 46 in Puerto Rico were asked to imagine themselves in a series of powerful roles, describe what they imagined, and rate each role's positivity and possibility. Among the Virginia students, women were more likely than men to anticipate relationship problems with powerful roles and to mention physical appearance. The Virginia women rated images of themselves in powerful roles more negatively than did the Puerto Rico women. Women in the two samples did not differ in their frequency of anticipating relationship problems with powerful roles, but they differed in the correlates of such anticipation. For the women in the Virginia sample only, anticipating relationship problems was associated with low self‐rated possibility of achieving these roles. Whereas young women do envision ambitious leadership possibilities for themselves, they apparently struggle to accommodate these visions to the contradictory prescriptions for powerful women.

Prescriptions for Public-Sector Information Management

This article reviews, analyzes, and assesses prescriptions for public-sector management of information technology (IT). It draws on four sources of such prescriptions: (a) the best-practices literature, based primarily on expert opinion and focused on managerial processes; (b) the empirical IT research literature, based primarily on quantitative analyses of the IT function; (c) benchmarks (the attempt to develop objective measures of the success of IT in public-sector organizations); and (d) the problem/disaster literature, based primarily on analyses of problems and disasters that have occurred in public-sector IT systems. The best-practices literature offers guidance, but the prescriptions are too general, and the methods for identifying best practices need expansion. The empirical literature is valuable and can provide prescriptions for specific technological questions, but the body of research is too sparse and offers contradictory prescriptions. Benchmarking has potential, but the approach is very undeveloped and subject to corruption. The problem/disaster literature offers cautionary examples, but its empirical base is unrepresentative of most failures.

Value Incongruity and Strategic Choice

Research addressing how values held by individuals in organizations influence strategy choice and implementation is as yet fragmented. Different strands of this research have yielded contradictory prescriptions for strategy. This paper examines how values affect strategy, by focusing on the social control they exert. Social control manifests itself through the behaviours permitted and proscribed by given values.We call a value a core value when the social control it exerts supersedes that of most other values in a value system. When the social control a value exerts is itself superseded by that exerted by most other values in a system, we call the value a peripheral value in that system.Strategies could be depicted as containing implicit values, in that they too entail prescriptions for behaviour. Thus, core values implicit to strategies enable behaviour essential for the success of strategies. Values seemingly peripheral to strategies enable behaviour peripheral or even tangential to their success. This paper discusses several contingencies – clashes between core values of decision makers and values implicitly at the core of strategies, core and peripheral values, as well as clashes between peripheral values – in the context of both corporate and competitive strategies. Finally, some factors that might mitigate these clashes, are also discussed

Environmental Decline and Organizational Response.

A typology of environmental decline and organizational response, based on two dimensions of environmental change, is proposed. The typology provides a much finer-grained basis for examining organizational decline than is currently available. It also provides a mechanism through which the contradictory prescriptions for the management of decline that are found in the literature can be integrated.

Reality construction, reality exploration and treatment in two therapeutic communities1

Abstract Data collected by participant observation in two contrasting types of therapeutic community are compared to reveal broad similarities in the treatment process. In both communities treatment was centrally concerned with reality construction: patients/residents learned to follow, assimilate and reproduce accounts of the community structure and prescriptions for behaviour, and these accounts and prescriptions reflexively constituted the social world of patients/residents. Further, in both communities staff recognised and made deliberate therapeutic use of an aspect of accounts and behavioural prescriptions much reported on in sociological literature, namely their essentially contingent and defeasible character. Thus, alongside processes of reality construction we note processes of reality exploration, whereby patients/residents are encouraged to inspect apparently contradictory prescriptions and accounts within the socially constructed reality of the communities. Staff believed that, in coming to terms with the contingent and defeasible character of accounts and prescriptions within the community, patients/residents would be able to deal with the contingent and defeasible character of social life outside the community less pathogenically.

Therapeutic paradox - the patient culture and the formal treatment programme in a therapeutic community.

Data collected by participant observation in a day hospital are used to examine the complex relationship between informal patient interaction and the formal group therapy programme of this therapeutic community. It was evident that staff might view apparently similar informal patient activities in quite different lights, as either complementary or as detrimental to the work of the formal groups. This apparent inconsistency in staff prescriptions was turned to a therapeutic purpose. Staff would point out to patients the "paradox" of the constant inconsistency of prescriptions for behaviour in daily life: parallels were drawn with the contingent and defeasible prescriptions to which patients were subject in most spheres of human activity. In learning to cope with incipiently contradictory prescriptions inside the day hospital it was felt that patients might learn to cope with incipiently contradictory prescriptions in their relationships outside the day hospital.

Adiabatic modifications to plasma turbulence theories

Improved particle trajectories are employed to treat the adiabatic or Maxwell–Boltzmann response of a plasma in order to choose between contradictory prescriptions for obtaining the nonlinear dispersion relation from the linear one.

The kidney in relation to protein catabolism; effects of abstention from food and fluid after sudden loss of renal tissue.

VARYING and contradictory prescriptions for consumption of food and fluid have been offered for treatment of patients in the initial stage of glomerular nephritis. 1 Basing his rationale on a particular concept of the pathogenesis of the disease, Volhard 1a proposed that patients abstain from food and fluid for several days at the beginning of the disease. Such therapy has been widely used, and with apparent success. It has been used with the knowledge that it would not be the procedure to be recommended if a lessening of nitrogen retention were the sole consideration of treatment. The experiments described in this paper were performed in the hope that, even though indirectly and by analogy, some indication might be obtained as to the probable effect of this treatment on the retention of nitrogen which always supervenes in some degree during the onset of glomerular nephritis. There is nothing in these results