Idiosyncratic Strategies Research Articles

The recognition and negotiation of class-based barriers to progression and inclusion in accounting professional services firms

Drawing on interviews with accountants working at professional services firms (PSFs) in the UK, we explore how reflexivity enables accountants to recognise and negotiate class-based barriers to progression and inclusion. We identify a range of reflexive practices (including conversations with colleagues and clients, observations, mentoring, mulling over, and imagining) and show how these interact with habitus to structure the individual (mis)recognition of class-based barriers in the workplace. We find that reflexivity can engender an awareness of ‘difference’ and sense of inferiority relative to others, primarily for those from less privileged backgrounds. We provide evidence of the enabling role of reflexive practices which lead to purposive action for negotiating class-based barriers. However, we also find that reflexivity can lead to idiosyncratic strategies which support assimilation to (rather than challenging) existing practices in the accounting field. We find contradictory accounts of the effects of class, where class is recognised as a barrier, yet individuals are thought to progress through merit. We explain this tension through the limitations of reflexivity, restricted opportunities for reflexivity, and misrecognition of the effects of class in a seemingly meritocratic system. We provide examples of enduring and unrecognised class-based inequalities in accounting PSFs, including team composition and work allocation, class-segmented service lines, and the long-term consequences for those from less privileged backgrounds of having to work harder to ‘reach the same level’. Our findings suggest that PSFs must facilitate ‘difficult’ conversations aimed at breaking the culture of silence around class.

A case study of corporate diversification and vertical integration in Africa

Africa is home to some of the world’s most original, resilient, and remarkable companies. The singular challenges and opportunities of the continent’s economic environment have given rise to idiosyncratic strategies and business models. However, there is a notable absence of studies on African companies. While there are numerous noteworthy companies in Africa, there are few as relevant, successful, and influential as the Dangote Group. This paper aims to add to the limited literature in the area by analyzing the business model and strategic choices of Dangote Cement, the Group’s flagship business and one of Africa’s industrial giants. In particular, it explores its corporate diversification and vertical integration strategies, which are at the core of its success. This article is based on 7 interviews with internal and external Dangote stakeholders and a detailed questionnaire completed by the Strategy Department of the firm, together with public data of the company. While the topics of diversification and integration have been studied in multiple contexts, this article provides an original perspective by applying existing research and management thinking to the specific business environment of Africa. This paper explores how and why Dangote Cement diversifies and how it identifies and integrates the advantages and disadvantages of its strategic choices. We believe it provides an original perspective that furthers our limited collective understanding of and research on strategic practices in Africa, the world’s last business academic frontier.

Relative Versus Absolute Performance Evaluation and CEO Decision-Making

AbstractWe provide new evidence on how performance-based compensation plans affect CEO decision-making, especially risk-taking. Our main finding is that relative performance evaluation (RPE) plans provide incentives for CEOs to make decisions that generate more idiosyncratic performance outcomes; absolute performance evaluation (APE) plans do not. After switches from APE to RPE, the correlation between firm stock return and industry index return falls and firm idiosyncratic risk increases. Further, switches to RPE are followed by larger deviations in financial, investment, and operating policies from industry norms (i.e., more idiosyncratic strategies). All results are opposite for switches to APE.

Scale and Scope: Idiosyncratic CSR Strategies and Their Impact on Firm Financial Outcomes

Current research on CSR mainly treats CSR as an aggregated concept of scale, focusing on the overall goal of a firm’s CSR strategy while ignoring the idiosyncratic nature of CSR strategies. This paper contributes to the theorization of CSR by treating it as a two-facet concept of both scale and scope, and, thus, measuring it using a matrix of performance. The scope of CSR represents how a firm distributes its resources among different CSR activities to achieve the goals of its CSR strategy. Using a sample of firms in the US retail industry between 2000 and 2015, we investigate whether the influence of idiosyncratic CSR strategies on firm financial outcomes are different when the scale and scope of CSR strategies vary. Our results suggest that firms with a broad CSR scope are more likely to financially benefit from a high CSR scale, whereas firms with a focused CSR scope may not benefit from a high CSR scale at all. This effect is consistent through both the profitability enhancement and the risk reduction mechanisms of CSR. Considering CSR as a matrix of idiosyncratic strategies provides significant practical implications for managers to effectively implement CSR strategies to achieve distinct corporate objectives.

Solving a Mystery in Levels-of-Processing Research: The Word-First Paradigm

Abstract In the standard levels-of-processing (LOP) paradigm, subjects are presented with a question directing them to attend to surface features (case), phonetic features (rhyme), or semantic features (category) of an upcoming word. Answering the question greatly affects recall and recognition for the word, and this outcome is attributed to differing LOP of the word. Craik (1977) reasoned that if the words appeared before the questions (i.e., the word-first paradigm) under intentional learning instructions, the LOP effect would disappear. However, when he conducted experiments using the word-first paradigm, the effect remained. We conducted 2 experiments to try to explain this puzzle. In the first experiment, we replicated Craik’s findings in one condition, and in other conditions we asked subjects to make judgments of learning (JOLs) in an attempt to eliminate the LOP effect because JOLs seem to promote deep processing. However, the LOP effect still occurred, albeit in attenuated form. In Experiment 2, we tested 2 new conditions to overcome and explain the LOP effect in the word-first paradigm. In one case, subjects were instructed to use idiosyncratic study strategies to memorize the word; the second condition required subjects to perform pleasantness judgments on the words. The pleasantness rating condition eliminated the LOP effect, but the first did not. We conclude that in the word-first paradigm, subjects typically keep the word in mind without semantic processing using rote rehearsal, despite intentional learning instructions.

Why do Chinese MNEs Acquire Unrelated Foreign Businesses?

Unrelated product diversification via cross-border M&A appears comparatively common in Chinese MNEs. This phenomenon has not been well explained in research to date. We hypothesize that affiliation to diversified business groups, owing to beneficial knowledge and resource combinative effects pre- and post-acquisition, encourages such strategies. We hypothesize, moreover, that motives derived from private ownership and strategic asset seeking amplify the effect from domestic business group diversification. Employing ordered logit modelling on a sample of 662 Chinese international M&As (from 2006 to 2015) we find strong support for our hypotheses. Our results underscore the paradoxical nature of unrelated diversification in the context of a dominant resource- and institution-based narrative of Chinese firms attempting to spring-board and catch-up. Business group diversification, ownership structure and strategic asset seeking motives combine to provide both inducement and ability to cope with unrelated acquisitions in foreign locations. Our findings contribute to the theoretical discussion regarding the potentially idiosyncratic strategies of emerging market MNEs.

How Do Mutual Funds in China Exploit Investor Sentiment?

ABSTRACT Mutual funds in China that invest heavily in stocks with high sentiment beta deliver poorer performance when standard risk factors and fund characteristics are controlled. However, these funds attract more new investment, which is somewhat puzzling. Funds adopting such a sentiment-catering strategy follow less idiosyncratic strategies and tend to increase risk taking. The impact of fund sentiment beta is more significant in bull markets than in bear markets, and more pronounced for growth and balanced funds than for value funds. Together, the findings suggest that Chinese mutual funds exploit investor sentiment for self-serving purposes.

Polyglot orientalist-translator Joseph Benoliel: a study of his Hebrew translations for the Lisbon 1892 International Congress of Orientalists

ABSTRACTAs a field of study that developed under a philological impulse, Orientalism created its own sites of knowledge exchange and sociability, well-illustrated by the International Congresses of Orientalists (1873–1973). This article focuses on Hebraist and Arabist Joseph Benoliel (1857–1937) who published two Hebrew translations within the orientalist congress that was supposed to have taken place in Lisbon in 1892. These translations will be examined peritextually so as to analyse the orientalist translation paradigm followed to voice otherness considering the (con)texts selected for translation, to unveil perceptions about translation, and inquire into a discursive form of knowledge as subordinated to an epistemological or hermeneutical agenda. To this end, the article is structured as follows: first, I will outline Benoliel’s life narrative to shed light on his polyglot background; second, I will formally describe the translations he prepared for the Lisbon congress in which Hebrew is the privileged target language; third, the peritextual analysis of these texts will be discussed against the voices paratextually framing them. The last part reviews the implications of Benoliel’s idiosyncratic translation strategy under the idea of a translational epistemology, or hermeneutics, in that Benoliel openly relies on the use of the Bible as intertext.

Monumental Panic: Reconciliation, Moral Regulation, and the Polarizing Politics of the Past

In 2018, the City of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada removed a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald from the grounds of City Hall. As Canada’s first prime minister, Macdonald is both revered for the role he played in Confederation and vilified for enacting and promoting racist if not culturally genocidal policy initiatives aimed at destroying Indigenous cultures in the last part of the 19th century. Set in the context of truth and reconciliation politics playing out across the country, this article explains the removal of the monument and the social reactions it provoked, using the sociologies of moral panic and moral regulation. By focusing on one city council’s efforts to interpret and act on the moral imperatives associated with political reconciliation in post-colonial Canada, insights are provided into some of the practical challenges and potential contradictions that municipal governments can encounter when they adopt idiosyncratic strategies to atone for historical injustices in non-transitional democratic nations.

Characterization of inter-speaker articulatory variability: A two-level multi-speaker modelling approach based on MRI data.

Speech communication relies on articulatory and acoustic codes shared between speakers and listeners despite inter-individual differences in morphology and idiosyncratic articulatory strategies. This study addresses the long-standing problem of characterizing and modelling speaker-independent articulatory strategies and inter-speaker articulatory variability. It explores a multi-speaker modelling approach based on two levels: statistically-based linear articulatory models, which capture the speaker-specific articulatory variability on the one hand, are in turn controlled by a speaker model, which captures the inter-speaker variability on the other hand. A low dimensionality speaker model is obtained by taking advantage of the inter-speaker correlations between morphology and strategy. To validate this approach, contours of the vocal tract articulators were manually segmented on midsagittal MRI data recorded from 11 French speakers uttering 62 vowels and consonants. Using these contours, multi-speaker models with 14 articulatory components and two morphology and strategy components led to overall variance explanations of 66%-69% and root-mean-square errors of 0.36-0.38 cm obtained in leave-one-out procedure over the speakers. Results suggest that inter-speaker variability is more related to the morphology than to the idiosyncratic strategies and illustrate the adaptation of the articulatory components to the morphology.

Nutrition and Bipartite Metabolism of Intracellular Pathogens.

The host is a nutrient-rich niche for microbial pathogens, but one that comes with obstacles and challenges. Many intracellular pathogens like Legionella pneumophila, Coxiella burnetii, Listeria monocytogenes, and Chlamydia trachomatis have developed bipartite metabolism within their hosts. This style of metabolic regulation enables pathogen sensing of specific nutrients to engage them into catabolic and anabolic processes, and contributes to temporal and spatial pathogen phenotypic modulation. Not only have intracellular pathogens adapted their metabolism to the host, they have also acquired idiosyncratic strategies to exploit host nutritional supplies and intercept metabolites. Francisella tularensis and Anaplasma phagocytophilum alter host autophagy, Shigella flexneri intercepts all host pyruvate, while L. pneumophila induces host protein degradation and blocks protein translation. Strategies of pathogen manipulation of host nutrients could serve as therapeutic targets.

Terms in Popular Science Communication: The Case of TV Documentaries

Science documentaries on television aim to provide easy and entertaining access to research findings. To do so, producers need to know how to explain complex content for non-expert audiences in a comprehensible way. At the same time, they have to decide what aspects of a subject might be relevant for viewers, or how the subject matter could be rendered more interesting by employing strategies such as personalisation or emotionalisation. One specific decision concerns the use of terms. Both existing research and journalistic handbooks suggest that terms should be or are, in fact, avoided in popular science contexts. However, there is only little empirical research on the topic. This contribution seeks to test several pre-existing hypotheses on terms in documentaries for adults and show how often terms are used and whether/how they are explained when they appear. Examining terms in four English and four German science documentaries, the analysis points out which communicative resources are used to facilitate the comprehension of terms, and where an explanation seems to focus primarily on entertainment rather than ease of comprehension. The results challenge some of the previous views on terms in popular science communication and reveal that documentaries display highly idiosyncratic strategies when it comes to the use of terms.

Influenced but not determined by historical events: genetic, demographic and morphological differentiation in Heleobia ascotanensis from the Chilean Altiplano.

In the present study, we focus on the phylogeographic pattern, demographic history and morphological differentiation of Heleobia ascotanensis, a freshwater gastropod restricted to the Ascotán saltpan in the Chilean Altiplano. The current distribution of the species is limited to twelve isolated or partially isolated springs that were affected by transitions between humid and arid periods during last glaciations. The genetic analysis of 322 specimens showed that H. ascotanensis is subdivided into three genetically divergent populations, with low and moderate degrees of historical gene flow among them and incipient morphological differentiation as a consequence of genetic and geographical isolation. Molecular analyses revealed different demographic histories among populations which seem to respond independently to climatic events, probably due to an environmental imposition and idiosyncratic strategies developed to cope with water availability. The results of this study and co-distributed taxa support the hypothesis that contemporary and historical events have influenced microevolutionary differentiation of these snails, although there is a need to complement further information to predict genetic or morphological divergence at microgeographic scale.

Prospective motor control obeys to idiosyncratic strategies in autism

Disturbance of primary prospective motor control has been proposed to contribute to faults in higher mind functions of individuals with autism spectrum disorder, but little research has been conducted to characterize prospective control strategies in autism. In the current study, we applied pattern-classification analyses to kinematic features to verify whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) children altered their initial grasp in anticipation of self- and other-actions. Results indicate that children with autism adjusted their behavior to accommodate onward actions. The way they did so, however, varied idiosyncratically from one individual to another, which suggests that previous characterizations of general lack of prospective control strategies may be overly simplistic. These findings link abnormalities in anticipatory control with increased variability and offer insights into the difficulties that individuals with ASD may experience in social interaction.

GLIMPSE: Google Glass interface for sensory feedback in myoelectric hand prostheses

Objective. Providing sensory feedback to the user of the prosthesis is an important challenge. The common approach is to use tactile stimulation, which is easy to implement but requires training and has limited information bandwidth. In this study, we propose an alternative approach based on augmented reality. Approach. We have developed the GLIMPSE, a Google Glass application which connects to the prosthesis via a Bluetooth interface and renders the prosthesis states (EMG signals, aperture, force and contact) using augmented reality (see-through display) and sound (bone conduction transducer). The interface was tested in healthy subjects that used the prosthesis with (FB group) and without (NFB group) feedback during a modified clothespins test that allowed us to vary the difficulty of the task. The outcome measures were the number of unsuccessful trials, the time to accomplish the task, and the subjective ratings of the relevance of the feedback. Main results. There was no difference in performance between FB and NFB groups in the case of a simple task (basic, same-color clothespins test), but the feedback significantly improved the performance in a more complex task (pins of different resistances). Importantly, the GLIMPSE feedback did not increase the time to accomplish the task. Therefore, the supplemental feedback might be useful in the tasks which are more demanding, and thereby less likely to benefit from learning and feedforward control. The subjects integrated the supplemental feedback with the intrinsic sources (vision and muscle proprioception), developing their own idiosyncratic strategies to accomplish the task. Significance. The present study demonstrates a novel self-contained, ready-to-deploy, wearable feedback interface. The interface was successfully tested and was proven to be feasible and functionally beneficial. The GLIMPSE can be used as a practical solution but also as a general and flexible instrument to investigate closed-loop prosthesis control.

The Artist as Agent: Noria Mabasa and the Book

ABSTRACTThis article traces the multiple ways in which Noria Mabasa reaffirmed her creative agency after the publication on her in 2003 of a Taxi Art Book monograph without her knowledge. In support of the artist’s efforts to reclaim control over the ways in which her works have circulated in the urban art world, it pays careful attention to Mabasa’s own voice, effectively challenging the widespread tendency to ignore the idiosyncratic interpretative strategies commonly developed by marginalised rural artists. While exploring various intersections between Mabasa’s artistic production and aspects of her own gendered history, the article raises a number of issues related to the ways in which, and why, interpretations of her sculptures have either underestimated, or in some cases completely overlooked, the primary inspiration for her work in lived experience. Keenly attentive to events in her immediate environment, and in the public spectacle of media images, Mabasa has repeatedly turned to newspaper photographs and other popular sources for inspiration. For Mabasa, these visual “texts” have acted as mnemonic devices, encouraging her to “read” events in a variety of ways, sometimes as movements flowing through time, in other cases as isolated moments divorced from a larger sense of place and space. But regardless of whether she witnesses events first-hand in rural Limpopo, or draws them from popular media sources, importantly, her interpretative strategies often also include the practice of mapping personally constructed symbols onto her generally very complex, and often very emotive, narratives.

Do Different Attention Capture Paradigms Measure Different Types of Capture?

When something captures our attention, why does it do so? This topic has been hotly debated, with some arguing that attention is captured only by salient stimuli (bottom-up view) and others arguing capture is always due to a match between a stimulus and our goals (top-down view). Many different paradigms have provided evidence for 1 view or the other. If either of these strong views are correct, then capture represents a unitary phenomenon, and there should be a high correlation between capture in these paradigms. But if there are different types of capture (top-down, bottom-up), then some attention capture effects should be correlated and some should not. In 2 studies, we collected data from several paradigms used in support of claims of top-down and bottom-up capture in relatively large samples of participants. Contrary to either prediction, measures of capture were not strongly correlated. Results suggest that capture may in fact be strongly determined by idiosyncratic task demands and strategies. Relevant to this lack of relations among tasks, we observed that classic measures of attention capture demonstrated low reliability, especially among measures used to support bottom-up capture. Implications for the low reliability of capture measures are discussed. We also observed that the proportion of participants demonstrating a pattern of responses consistent with capture varied widely among classic measures of capture. Overall, results demonstrate that, even for relatively simple laboratory measures of attention, there are still important gaps in knowledge regarding what these paradigms measure and how they are related.

Use of social media across the trip experience: An application of latent transition analysis

ABSTRACTRecent advanced technologies have enabled travelers to communicate, interact, and form relationships with destinations, businesses, and other travelers through social media. However, the nature/patterns of use of social media by travelers varies substantially between travelers and across the trip experience (e.g. pre-, during, and post-trip); consequently, travelers develop their own idiosyncratic strategies (i.e. media repertoires) for information searching, communicating, and storing memories. There are four distinct and dominant repertoires of social media use across the three stages of the trip experience. As such, the findings clearly indicate that destination marketers should target the respective groups very differently.

Vestibular compensation: the neuro-otologist's best friend.

Why vestibular compensation (VC) after an acute unilateral vestibular loss is the neuro-otologist’s best friend is the question at the heart of this paper. The different plasticity mechanisms underlying VC are first reviewed, and the authors present thereafter the dual concept of vestibulo-centric versus distributed learning processes to explain the compensation of deficits resulting from the static versus dynamic vestibular imbalance. The main challenges for the plastic events occurring in the vestibular nuclei (VN) during a post-lesion critical period are neural protection, structural reorganization and rebalance of VN activity on both sides. Data from animal models show that modulation of the ipsilesional VN activity by the contralateral drive substitutes for the normal push–pull mechanism. On the other hand, sensory and behavioural substitutions are the main mechanisms implicated in the recovery of the dynamic functions. These newly elaborated sensorimotor reorganizations are vicarious idiosyncratic strategies implicating the VN and multisensory brain regions. Imaging studies in unilateral vestibular loss patients show the implication of a large neuronal network (VN, commissural pathways, vestibulo-cerebellum, thalamus, temporoparietal cortex, hippocampus, somatosensory and visual cortical areas). Changes in gray matter volume in these multisensory brain regions are structural changes supporting the sensory substitution mechanisms of VC. Finally, the authors summarize the two ways to improve VC in humans (neuropharmacology and vestibular rehabilitation therapy), and they conclude that VC would follow a “top-down” strategy in patients with acute vestibular lesions. Future challenges to understand VC are proposed.

Eye movement strategies are not optimal: People simply employ reasonable but idiosyncratic search strategies

Eye movement strategies are not optimal: People simply employ reasonable but idiosyncratic search strategies