Extant Constructs Research Articles

Concepts Describing and Assessing Individuals' Environmental Sustainability: An Integrative Review and Taxonomy.

The need to encourage individuals as active change agents for sustainability transitions has led researchers across disciplines to conceptualize over 70 constructs to assess relevant dispositions to environmental protection and green consumption behaviors. The generated knowledge is, however, fragmented by an unconsolidated set of constructs developed within parallel literature streams. We, hence, use an integrative review method to capture conceptual and operational similarities and distinctiveness of constructs across disciplines in the literature, attempting to unify the knowledge base. Thereby, we identify 34 conceptually distinct constructs (along with 38 synonyms and 76 scales) relevant for the thematic synthesis on individual-level constructs framing contributions to environmental measures and issues. We followingly propose a taxonomy, systemizing constructs based on their concept type(s) (e.g., value, attitude, behavior) and contextual scope(s) of the environmental challenge (e.g., product choice, household practice) addressed. We capture these dimensions in critically assessing relevant and salient conceptual and operational features. We thus create a consolidated picture of extant constructs capturing individual-level environmental sustainability by which we intend a three-fold contribution to the interdisciplinary field. First, the taxonomy and guiding framework for the choice of constructs should assist substantive researchers in identifying appropriate constructs of interest. Second, the systematic integration of (dis)similar concepts available in parallel literature streams should assist future endeavors aiming at integrating substantive findings with regard to antecedents, consequences, and other relevant variables. Finally, the taxonomy revealed that conceptualizations mainly scatter around specific combinations of types and scopes while others remain unaddressed. Based on our critical assessment of the relevant features and resulting taxonomy, we identify avenues for future research dedicated to (i) enhancing conceptual rigor and measurement quality in the field and (ii) introducing concepts addressing missing but potentially valuable combinations of types and scopes (e.g., antecedents capturing green consumption contexts). We conclude that researchers engaging in the proposed avenues with conceptual, methodological, or empirical contributions should consider four critical aspects to advance knowledge accumulation and prevent fragmentation in the interdisciplinary field. We thereby hope to pave the way for a collective, interdisciplinary knowledge base of concepts used to describe and assess individual’s pro-environmental dispositions and practices of green consumption.

Sustainable Government Policy: A Catalyst for Sustainable Incubator Performance

One of the policy tools that a government uses to actualize entrepreneurship development is the business incubation program. These government policies come in several forms: fiscal, financial, as well as developmental. The business incubation program has been acknowledged as an instrument to achieve economic development, hence, the adoption of the concept by various nations. Studies have been advanced concerning business incubation performance, however, empirical scholarly works have shown that such studies have been inconclusive for the reason that results of empirically validated studies were inconsistent. The key objective of this study is to examine the contribution of government policies in the relationship between the critical success factors (CSFs) and the incubator performance. The study involves a data collection process of tenant firms of the Nigerian business incubation program using a population of 253 and a sample size of 153 for questionnaire administration and a focus group interview comprising of 10 respondents, which cut across both tenant firms and incubator managers. The results show that the independent variables and the moderator are indeed predictors of the criterion variable. As the predictors contributed merely 29.4% of the criterion variable, future studies may perhaps examine other critical factors alongside the extant constructs, which may contribute further to incubator performance.

Citizen grit: Effects of domain-specificity, perseverance, and consistency on political judgment

Tenaciousness and persistence contribute to achievement in key areas such as school and work. Research on Grit has helped demonstrate such effects, but also has raised questions regarding whether Grit is best examined as a global or a domain-specific construct, whether it is most insightful to treat Grit as a single property or to model its perseverance and consistency domains separately, and what Grit contributes to analyses that is not already captured by extant constructs highly correlated with Grit measures. These questions are addressed in the present study, with focus on the possible impact of Grit on the nature and quality of citizens' judgments in the political sphere, and with data from 2500 respondents on a nationally representative U.S. survey. Analyses reveal domain-specific Grit effects on political knowledge, rejection of conspiracy theories, and differentiation between high- and low-quality political candidates. In contrast with research that has identified strong effects for Grit's perseverance dimension, effects on political judgment emanate primarily from consistency of interest.

The seven dimensions of Skunk Works: a new approach and what makes it unique

PurposeThis paper aims to study the definition and formation of Skunk Works and how it may present itself as a viable theoretical alternative to other mainstream concepts of collective/corporate entrepreneurships, while dissecting some of the prevalent misconceptions of the extant literature regarding the application of Skunk Works.Design/methodology/approachThis is a literature-based conceptual study that compares and differentiates various forms of group entrepreneurships as discussed in the academic debate.FindingsThis study shows how Skunk Works differs from other forms of collective/corporate entrepreneurship through its seven dimensions (isolation, customer needs, focus, planning, trusted project manager, cross-functional teams and leveraging overlaps) while challenging the dominant extant contenders of collective/corporate entrepreneurship.Practical implicationsSkunk Works remains a sustainable form of entrepreneurship, and it is still viable to consider it as a practical construct for smaller as well as larger organisations as a means of solving complicated innovative tasks requiring a multidisciplinary team with expert competence in a relatively quicker period of time.Social implicationsOrganisations may take greater initiatives towards assembling entrepreneurial teams in the Skunk Work tradition.Originality/valueAs a means of understanding collective/corporate entrepreneurship, this study dissects some of the original fundamental cornerstones of Skunk Works entrepreneurship in an effort to present it as a viable alternative construct to the dominant construct of entrepreneurial orientation as well as other extant constructs.

Measuring Cognitive Integration Processes in the Teams: Scale Development and Validation

Collective cognition in contemporary teamwork increasingly mandates the use of complex communication processes, such as information elaboration and ideas evaluation, to integrate the distributed expertise of members into joint, innovative solutions to multifaceted problems. This is particularly true of teams of expertise-diverse individuals, whose highly specialized members possess task-relevant perspectives that are intellectually distant from their teammates. While many communication behaviors associated with innovative outcomes have been documented, little is known about the underlying individual cognitive processes triggered during group interaction, such as knowledge evaluation, that subsequently influences collective creative output. This theoretical gap is due in part to the limited measurement alternatives with which to assess specific changes in the minds of team members before team-level innovation, including the extent to which they consider or incorporate their teammates’ perspectives–their cognitive integrative capability index (CICI). To address this, we conducted a three-phase, five-study investigation using four independent samples of online respondents, student, and professional interdisciplinary teams to create a valid, reliable, and generalizable measure of CICI. The results of Studies 1-3 demonstrate that it is composed of two dimensions: knowledge consideration and knowledge accommodation/assimilation, while Study 4 reveals its meaningful associations with extant constructs. Lastly, Study 5 demonstrates that the CICI scale can act as a mediator between communication behaviors and innovation in medical interdisciplinary research teams (IDR).

The polysemy network of Chinese ‘one’-phrases in a diachronic constructional perspective

Abstract This study investigates the development of a polysemy network within a constructional framework. The synchronic variation of Chinese ‘one’-phrases is explained by diachronic developments. The results of a quantitative corpus analysis show that each of the senses of the ‘one’ phrase tends to occur in specific syntactic constructions due to inheritance from extant constructions. The results contribute to explaining the formation of a diachronic polysemy network by investigating the hierarchical structure of its constructions, thus allowing a deeper understanding of how semantic extensions have been formed through gradual constructional association.

On the distribution of bids for construction contract auctions

The statistical distribution representing bid values constitutes an essential part of many auction models and has involved a wide range of assumptions, including the Uniform, Normal, Lognormal and Weibull densities. From a modelling point of view, its goodness is defined by how well it enables the probability of a particular bid value to be estimated – a past bid for ex-post analysis and a future bid for ex-ante (forecasting) analysis. However, there is no agreement to date of what is the most appropriate form and empirical work is sparse. Twelve extant construction data-sets from four continents over different time periods are analysed in this paper for their fit to a variety of candidate statistical distributions assuming homogeneity of bidders (ID not known). The results show there is no one single fit-all distribution, but that the 3p Log-Normal, Fréchet/2p Log-Normal, Normal, Gamma and Gumbel generally rank the best ex-post and the 2p Log-Normal, Normal, Gamma and Gumbel the best ex-ante – with ex-ante having around three to four times worse fit than ex-post. Final comments focus on the results relating to the third and fourth standardized moments of the bids and a post hoc rationalization of the empirical outcome of the analysis.

Lyon, das fontes escritas ao SIG histórico – método e exemplos de aplicação

O SIG histórico de Lyon foi desenvol­vido a partir do final da década de 1990, com o objetivo de chegar a um novo entendimento da transformação dos espaços urbanos e sociais pela espacialização dos dados à escala dos edifí­cios. Pensamos que, por tal salto na precisão de um fator 100, de uma subdivisão por 36 bairros para uma por 3.500 edifícios no período moderno, o mapeamento levaria a novas perspectivas e no­vos resultados a história urbana. Isso envolveu o trabalho ao longo de dois séculos de documentos de arquivo, registros de impostos, censos, licenças de construção, alterações de propriedade, a fim de criar bases de dados criticamente pesquisados, seguidos por layers de SIG vetorizados. Foi neces­sário desenvolver um método para revelar a espa­cialidade implícita dessas fontes escritas, estabe­lecer um mapeamento da topografia, permitido pela reconstrução cuidadosa do padrão de trama da cidade, juntamente com sua variação antes de 1800, e levar em conta a transformação do espaço, estudado na escala real de investimentos indivi­duais, através das licenças de construção verifi­cadas com as construções ainda existentes, e o re­gistro administrativo.

Dirichlet is Natural

Giry and Lawvere's categorical treatment of probabilities, based on the probabilistic monad G, offer an elegant and hitherto unexploited treatment of higher-order probabilities. The goal of this paper is to follow this formulation to reconstruct a family of higher-order probabilities known as the Dirichlet process. This family is widely used in non-parametric Bayesian learning.Given a Polish space X, we build a family of higher-order probabilities in G(G(X)) indexed by M⁎(X) the set of non-zero finite measures over X. The construction relies on two ingredients. First, we develop a method to map a zero-dimensional Polish space X to a projective system of finite approximations, the limit of which is a zero-dimensional compactification of X. Second, we use a functorial version of Bochner's probability extension theorem adapted to Polish spaces, where consistent systems of probabilities over a projective system give rise to an actual probability on the limit. These ingredients are combined with known combinatorial properties of Dirichlet processes on finite spaces to obtain the Dirichlet family DX on X. We prove that the family DX is a natural transformation from the monad M⁎ to G∘G over Polish spaces, which in particular is continuous in its parameters. This is an improvement on extant constructions of DX [17,26].

On Statistical Wizardry, Construct Proliferation, and Other Challenges for Our Science

Research in counseling psychology (and most social sciences) has come to rely on powerful data analytic strategies and computer software that allow researchers to test complex multivariate models quickly and easily. New constructs also appear in our literature with regularity. Although complex models and new constructs have benefits for advancing knowledge and application, they also have drawbacks. The purpose of this article is to caution readers to (a) choose designs and data analytic strategies that are minimally sufficient to address their research questions, and (b) ensure that new constructs are empirically as well as conceptually distinguishable from extant constructs.

Corporate Frugality: Theory, Measurement and Practice*

Abstract This paper uses a mix of field research and survey methods to provide evidence on the existence of ‘frugality’ as a company characteristic. Drawing upon established scales of frugality in the literature on consumer psychology, we develop and validate a multi-item measure of corporate frugality. A key part of scale development is establishing discriminant validity, the uniqueness from and relatedness to extant constructs. We demonstrate that frugality differs from budgetary control, and is not associated with organizational culture types in the Competing Values framework (Quinn and Rohrbaugh, 1981). Further, we investigate the association between frugality and business strategy using Porter’s (1980) typology of low cost and product differentiation strategies and find that frugality is equally present in companies with both strategies. Having established frugality as a distinct construct, we examine its nomological validity, the consequences of frugality for cost management practice. We find that frugal companies control cost differently and make greater use of a broad range of cost management practices. In sum, we develop and validate a theory-consistent measure of corporate frugality; a construct that has been present in descriptions and anecdotes of business practices of cost management for decades, but which has gained new currency in modern economic times.

Corporate Frugality: Theory, Measurement and Practice

This paper uses a mix of field research and survey methods to provide evidence on the existence of 'frugality' as a company characteristic. Drawing upon established scales of frugality in the literature on consumer psychology, we develop and validate a multi-item measure of corporate frugality. A key part of scale development is establishing discriminant validity, the uniqueness from and relatedness to extant constructs. We demonstrate that frugality differs from budgetary control, and is not associated with organizational culture types in the Competing Values framework (Quinn and Rohrbaugh, 1981). Further, we investigate the association between frugality and business strategy using Porter's (1980) typology of low cost and product differentiation strategies and find that frugality is equally present in companies with both strategies. Having established frugality as a distinct construct, we examine its nomological validity, the consequences of frugality for cost management practice. We find that frugal companies control cost differently and make greater use of a broad range of cost management practices. In sum, we develop and validate a theory-consistent measure of corporate frugality; a construct that has been present in descriptions and anecdotes of business practices of cost management for decades, but which has gained new currency in modern economic times.

Diachronic construction grammar and grammaticalization theory

Grammaticalization theorists are becoming increasingly aware of the relevance of constructions to their discipline, to the point that one of its leading exponents has recently defined grammaticalization as the creation of new constructions. This is precisely the problem which construction grammarians engaging in diachronic research are addressing — or one they should be addressing, because to date diachronic construction grammar has not really taken off as a discipline. The question arises of whether grammaticalization theory could simply be turned into the historical branch of construction grammar, or whether diachronic construction grammar has its own raison d’être as a separate discipline. Since grammaticalization theoretical practice is fairly narrowly focused on the change of extant constructions along a path towards the grammatical end of the meaning continuum, there is a need for a wider discipline that also concerns itself with the primary emergence of constructions. Though grammaticalization presupposes ‘constructionalization’, the two developments need to be kept apart because not all constructions go on to grammaticalize.

Content and Reliability of Discrepancy-Defined Self-Awareness in Multisource Feedback

Although researchers have documented multiple antecedent and outcome correlates of the self-awareness construct, relatively little work has focused on placing the construct within a nomological network. Using item response theory (IRT) analyses of differential item functioning (DIF), the authors compared the relationships between observed and latent performance domains on a 360° assessment for high- and low-self-aware individuals. The reliability of discrepancy-defined self-awareness was assessed and deemed adequate, and indices of graded response model fit to 360° data were recorded. As an initial step toward defining this discrepancy-defined construct within a larger nomological network, extant constructs of personal warmth, self-promoting, and self-monitoring were identified as potential contributors to self-awareness using the DIF investigative framework.

“A Place for the Better Technical Education of Nurses”: The Dublin Metropolitan Technical School for Nurses, 1893–1969

Founded on December 16, 1893 to provide place for the better technical education of nurses in the Dublin Metropolitan Technical School for Nurses is reputed to have been the first centralized nurse training school in the world.1 At the time the School was founded, training schools for nurses in the Nightingale tradition had been established at all the principal voluntary hospitals in Dublin. However, these schools existed in a nominal sense only, and they generally did not operate as separate institutions with a formal curriculum. As local training schemes, the hospital training schools provided a schedule of lectures that were normally delivered during the probationers' rest periods. This system could not always guarantee that instruction would be delivered as planned, as it was vulnerable to the vagaries of the clinical situation in busy hospitals. With its standardized curriculum, the Dublin Metropolitan Technical School for Nurses offered the hospitals of Dublin a program of systematic teaching and uniform examinations on a centralized basis. Probationers and trained nurses from most of the large voluntary hospitals and some of the smaller specialist hospitals attended the three-year program, which the School conducted at one or more sites in the center of Dublin. Founded by Ireland's most influential nursing leader, Margaret Rachel Huxley,2 and by a number of other senior physicians, and surgeons in Dublin, the School came into being at a time when hospital nursing reform in Dublin was all but complete. The Nightingale system had been introduced into Ireland, replacing untrained nurses with lady nurses, young, educated, middle-class women who received probationer nurse training of the type offered by the London voluntary hospitals. The establishment of the School, with its formal, regularized curriculum consolidated the reforms that had been achieved up to that time. It was also part of the strategy of the advocates of state registration to demonstrate the benefits of such a system. As a central school offering uniform instruction and examinations, the Dublin Metropolitan Technical School provided the prototype for a regulated system of nurse training. The School was founded at a time when the campaign for the advancement of women's education was beginning to secure a tenuous foothold in areas of higher education, albeit on the basis of extant constructions of womanhood and their putative educational needs. Through the operation of guilds and apprenticeships and the propagation of scientific treatises on women's physical and mental inferiority, higher education remained for the most part the preserve of men.3 In the broader context of the women's education movement of the time, therefore, the School presented a unique example of an educational institution for women. The principal voluntary hospitals in Dublin maintained affiliation with the Dublin Metropolitan Technical School, taking advantage of its program of lectures and examinations until the School ceased to operate in 1969. This article critically examines the history of an institution that played an integral part in the education of nurses in Dublin for more than 75 years and considers the School's contribution to the development of modern nursing in Ireland. It is based on the Minutes of Proceedings of the Governing Authority of the School and related documentary primary sources.4 Background to the Establishment of the School: Health Care in Dublin in the Late 19th century Medical care for the sick poor of Ireland in the 19th century was provided through voluntary and state systems that became more organized as the century progressed. State provision of relief was through structures for outdoor relief, including a public dispensary service and a domiciliary nursing service, and institutions for indoor relief, comprising county infirmaries, fever hospitals, lunatic asylums, and workhouse infirmaries.5 Voluntary care took place in the context of Christian charity and philanthropy, including that offered by Catholic sisterhoods and voluntary hospitals. …

Joseph Urban: Architecture, Theatre, Opera, Film

This is the first biography of Joseph Urban designer of furniture, stage, opera and film sets, also interiors, decorative objects and buildings. He was a household name in his time and his reputation is now set for a revival. Born in Vienna in 1872, the multi-talented Urban was already enjoying a career in archiecture, stage design, and book illustration before he was brought to America in 1911 to do stage settings for the Boston Opera. By 1914 his highly regarded productions had caught the eye of impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, who lured him away to design nearly all of his shows and Follies on through the 1920s. His lush stagecraft soon revolutionized all of American theatre design, attracting the attention of William Randolph Hearst, who enticed Urban into becoming artistic director for his Cosmopolitan movie studio, where he designed all of the Marion Davies films. During this period he also operated a showcase on Fifth Avenue for the Wiener Werkstatte and was artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera. Many of his original opera settings continued in use well into the New York cityscape, many of which, unfortunately, have been demolished, including the original Ziegfield Theatre and Central Park Casino. However, the Hearst Building and the New School for Social Research, the city's first International Style building, remain. Several of his works in Palm Beach still stand, including his most extravagant extant construction, Mar-a-Lago, the former Post estate now owned by Donald Trump.