Previous Theorizing Research Articles

WRAP YOUR HEAD AROUND IT: BRAZILIAN USERS’ ALGORITHMIC IMAGINARIES OF SPOTIFY WRAPPED

‘Spotify Wrapped’ is a promotional initiative offered by the music platform consisting of a summary of each user’s yearly listening habits. Although Spotify is generally classified as a streaming service, initiatives such as Wrapped have a clear component of sociability (Hagen & Lüders 2017) – in this case, not only because they are based on the harvesting of users’ behavioural data but also because they are created to be shared on platforms such as Instagram and Twitter/X. Indeed, Spotify Wrapped has acquired its own role in digital popular culture, inciting anticipation and excitement from users worldwide and becoming an 'algorithmic event' (Annabell & Vindum Rasmussen 2023) in and of itself. In this paper, we propose to scrutinise how this algorithmic event is perceived and understood by Brazilian users, whilst also identifying and unpacking the platform affordances and algorithmic imaginaries (Bucher, 2017) that inform those interpretations and their associated performances of taste and identity (Airoldi, 2019, Prey, 2018). We explore in particular how users negotiate the tensions between algorithmic personalisation and individuation and the possibilities for shared experience to emerge during this event. Through a mixed-method approach, we argue that the 'eventness' (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2018) of Spotify Wrapped is distributed, clustered but sparsely connected, and marked by fleeting, fluid and ephemeral feelings of shared experience and recognition rather than by enduring communities, which in turn reflects and extends previous theorisations of affective publics (Papacharissi, 2014) and social media liveness (Lupinacci, 2021)

Increased cooperation in stochastic social dilemmas: Can it be explained by risk sharing?

A potential mechanism to explain changes in cooperativeness in the presence of risk may be opportunities for informal risk sharing. Using a novel experimental design, we show that the presence of both independent and correlated risk prevents the typical decay of cooperation in a laboratory social dilemma game. Notably, this result seems to rule out risk sharing as a possible mechanism behind the cooperation increase. Exploratory analyses tentatively suggest that behavior consistent with a risk sharing account may emerge late in the game, congruent with previous theorizing of slow learning in stochastic environments.

Sowing Indigenous Autonomy: Building a Common Political-Ethical Territory of Struggle with Zapatista Seed Pedagogics

This article inquires into the workings of Zapatista Seed Pedagogics’ (ZSP) building of a political-ethical commons outside the movement’s autonomous territories. Parting from a previous theorization of ZSP as a decolonizing educational process, this writing draws on interviews with external activists of neozapatista networks who have encountered and/or accompanied the movement in the last three decades. These evolving conversations reflect on their learnings in what is a life-long pedagogical process. These include: 1) an ongoing struggle for dismantling internalized hierarchies and vanguards in habits of thinking, being, and doing; 2) the recuperation of historical ancestral memory that builds collective subjectivity; and 3) the organization of collectivities that participate in a common political-ethical territory of struggle transcending nation-state identities. This exploration of ZSP reveals reflexive conscientization in subjects willing to learn and listen differently, suggesting the emergence of a transgeographic political-ethical subject immersed in a co-construction of knowledge with Zapatismo itself.

Crip translingualism

Abstract Forms of immobility both limit unqualified human agency and enable diverse channels of mobility. In this sense, mobility and immobility work together. Certain philosophical movements such as Southern theories and disability studies treat constraints, sedentariness, and boundaries as needing to be respected and accommodated in any inquiry. This article draws from these schools to theorize disruptions and constraints as resources in the circulation of languages, texts, and meanings. To index this generative role of constraints in communication, I adopt the term “crip” from theorizations in disability studies. “Crip” invokes the paradoxical reality that while being crippled poses disruptions in mobility, this rupture also generates new knowledge and possibilities into the flow of life (McRuer, 2006). This article explains how crip translingualism would treat ruptures, constraints, and boundaries as resourceful for meaning making. This is a corrective to certain previous theorizations that have treated translingualism as based on unrestricted flows and fluidities, influenced by dominant orientations to mobility. I illustrate from a classroom literacy interaction where the ruptures posed by the heritage languages of multilingual students motivated everyone to adopt creative strategies to expand the meaning of “meaning,” redefine literacy as negotiated, and develop ethical dispositions to collaborate in communicating across language boundaries. I argue that the incomprehensions and vulnerabilities created by language diversity actually motivate everyone to develop strategies to creatively read and write. In this manner, constraints don’t stifle the text or students, but mobilize new flows of meanings and interactions.

Waka waka politician: what are the drivers of party switching in Nigeria?

AbstractMost existing literature on the causes of party switching both in Africa and around the world is built on tenuous empirical foundations. The question of why members of parliament (MPs) switch parties has hardly been asked directly either to the MPs themselves or to everyday voters. While MPs could lie or give more favourable accounts that suit their interests, putting this question to them could uncover other crucial factors that have fallen through the cracks in previous theorizations. This article takes a triangulation approach by drawing from the viewpoints of researchers, voters and MPs themselves to give a more holistic picture of the drivers of party defection. Through a combination of a nationwide representative survey and elite and key informant interviews, I situate the trend of party switching in Nigeria within broader comparative literature on the subject, showing how Nigeria conforms and deviates from existing conceptualizations of party switching around the world. I find evidence of interactions between formal and personal drivers of party switching in Nigeria. I also discover that while a majority of Nigerian voters are suspicious of defectors, defectors point accusing fingers at the lack of internal democracy within political parties, thereby exposing an issue not adequately addressed in existing literature.

Stronger together: Building nonprofit resilience through a network with a shared Mission and organizational humility

AbstractNonprofit organizations increasingly face surprising and disruptive shocks, beyond financial setbacks, that challenge an organization's operations, long‐term survival, and success. To continue to execute their mission, nonprofits must be resilient. Despite the importance of resilience in nonprofits, more research is needed to understand the factors that build organizational resilience and how leaders can help promote resilience. We conducted a qualitative case study, consisting of 23 interviews with organizational members and key partners, fieldwork, and archival information, of a documented resilient nonprofit organization. Our findings suggest that leaders can enhance resilience by gaining access to resources through collaboration, which is in line with previous theorizing. Our results add to previous research by providing a more nuanced understanding of how collaboration can facilitate resilience. Specifically, our findings suggest that resilience may be enhanced when organizational humility drives leaders to strategically constrain their network primarily to partners that share a common mission. Our research contributes predominantly to the organizational resilience literature, while offering more auxiliary contributions to the organizational humility literature. Further, our research offers practical guidance for how leaders of nonprofits can develop resilience in their organizations.

Increased display complexity reveals effects of salience in action control.

In action-control research, typically, stimulus sparse displays are used. This might be one reason why previous theorizing focuses on the (top-down) demands of response selection (e.g., what key to press), while often ignoring (bottom-up) demands of stimulus selection (e.g., what stimulus to attend). However, complex perceptual situations may pose selection demands that make additional, response-unrelated feature dimensions relevant for response selection. The major stimulus characteristic affecting perceptual selection is salience. In research on visual attention, there is a debate about the conditions under which salience becomes effective. We related both debates in two experiments, in which we modulated display set size as well as salience in a stimulus-response binding task. In sum, the data of these experiments (pooled N = 138) demonstrated that salience furthered the integration of stimulus features in displays with many stimuli more than in sparse displays. Our results demonstrate the neglected impact of salience on action-control when going beyond the very simplistic displays common in action-control research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Theorising Fatness as an Ordering Issue: A Conceptual Framework for Analysing the Construction of Fatness as Disorder

Previous research has both implicitly and explicitly discussed, and partly shown, that fatness can be viewed as an ordering issue. In Western countries, fat bodies are constructed as deviant and as disorder, while thin bodies are constructed as normal and in order. In line with Mary Douglas’s and Judith Butler’s theorisation around separating and purifying/subsuming processes, this article develops previous theorisations around fatness and social order. Two analytical concepts for understanding processes for ordering people based on body size are suggested. Both processes aim at preserving the social order but differ in how this is achieved. The first, maintaining order, refers to the processes that maintain separation between thinness and fatness and preserve social order. The second, putting in order, refers to the processes aiming to subsume fat bodies into social order and covers various activities for weight loss. Together, these concepts allow analysis of fatness as an ordering issue.

The Resilient Stain. Book review of The Three Sustainabilities: Energy, Economy, Time

This article is a book review of The Three Sustainabilities: Energy, Economy, Time (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) by Allan Stoekl. The book marks a new contribution to the critical theory of ecology by one of the translators of the writings of George Bataille. The article situates the book in relation to Stoekl’s previous theorization of postsustainability, and considers its insights with regard to recent accounts of systems theory, energy humanities, continental philosophy and literature. The author considers how the spectre of extinction governs Stoekl’s theorization of three interleaved versions of sustainability.

The impact of supportive leadership on employee outcomes during organizational mergers: An organizational-level field study.

Past merger and acquisition research has reported mixed findings on the impact of mergers on workforces. To address these ambiguities and advance merger research at the organizational level of analysis, we present a natural quasi-experiment focusing on mergers in the English National Health Service. Building on organizational support theory and conservation of resources theory, we propose that merger events represent environmental stressors, with negative implications for employees' subjective (job satisfaction) and objective (absenteeism) outcomes. However, extending previous theorizing, we argue that by increasing their supportive leadership, midlevel management can compensate for the resource losses incurred during mergers, and in doing so, minimize the adverse impact on their workforces. We test our predictions in the context of multiple primary care trust mergers, which took place in 2006. We analyzed the annual staff surveys, combined with objective information on employee absenteeism, and compared merging organizations with nonmerging organizations before (2005) and after (2007) the mergers. As expected, employees of merging (vs. not merging) organizations showed stronger decreases in job satisfaction, and these decreases in subjective outcomes were associated with increases in absenteeism over the course of the merger process. However, consistent with our propositions, we found that increases in supportive leadership during the merger period served to mitigate these negative outcomes. Our results highlight the organizational-level implications of mergers and the role that midlevel management can play in compensating for the losses experienced during (stressful) merger events. We discuss the implications for dynamic models of merger integration and leadership during change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Measuring Relational Entropy: Relational Maintenance Behavior Mediates the Association between Religious Similarity and Entropy in Friendships

ABSTRACT Entropy is the natural tendency of systems to move from a state of order to disorder, and previous theorizing has argued that close relationships are subject to entropy over time. Building from qualitative work exploring the conceptual domain, this study developed a quantitative survey measure of the perception of relational entropy. Factor analysis revealed two entropy dimensions, decay and destruction, and comparison with related measures revealed these constructs are empirically distinct. The study further validated the measures by examining their associations with friend religious similarity and relational maintenance behaviors. Positivity and supportiveness mediated the association between religious similarity and decay entropy, whereas openness and interaction mediated the association between religious similarity and destruction entropy.

Niche diversity effects on personality measurement – evidence from large national samples during the COVID-19 pandemic

We report systematic variability in the psychometric properties of a brief personality inventory during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon recent discussions about the universality vs cultural relativism of personality measures, we review and comparatively test theories predicting systematic variability in personality measurement across cultures using an established brief personality measure applied to population samples in 16 nations during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 35,052). We found systematic variation in factor replicability and effective dimensionality. In line with previous theorizing, factors replicated better in contexts with greater niche diversity. Examining possible drivers underlying this association, the investigation of the individual components in the niche construction index suggested that life expectancy and to a lesser degree economic complexity are associated with greater personality structure differentiation. Population-level indicators of acute threat due to COVID-19 did not show credible effects. These patterns suggest that a) investigation of personality structure in population samples can provide useful insights into personality dynamics, b) socioecological factors have a systematic impact on survey responses, but c) we also need better theorizing and research about both personality and culture to understand how niche construction dynamics operate.

Film and the intercultural multimodal reader: Expanding intercultural literary literacy as a theoretical and pedagogical concept

This article addresses key theoretical and practical concerns related to the intercultural encounter with multimodal literature. Previous efforts to incorporate an intercultural dimension into conceptualisations of literary literacy have primarily focused on competences associated with the reading of traditional, script-based texts. However, as the term “literature” is today associated with a wide range of new media texts, there is a need to take this into account in theoretical constructs as well as in pedagogical practice. The article provides insight into how the multimodal elements of film function as a complex meaning-making ensemble which adds layers of potential insight as well as potential misunderstanding to the text interpretation process. With a basis in the Model of the Intercultural Reader (Hoff, 2016), the article sheds light on how issues related to the narrative style and structure of a Hollywood motion picture can be navigated through an exploration of the recognisable audio-visual rhetoric of oft-repeated tropes. Drawing on Baz Luhrmann’s film Romeo + Julietas a practical example, concrete suggestions for pedagogical practice are offered. By integrating practices of script-based intercultural reading with new literacies, the article expands upon previous theorisations of the intercultural reader and provides insight into how teachers may facilitate nuanced intercultural explorations of literary multimodal texts in the 21stcentury language classroom.

The Phoenix and the Interlingual Dimensions of Early English Literary Culture

The Phoenix and the Interlingual Dimensions of Early English Literary Culture

The gender pay gap is smaller in occupations with a higher ratio of men: Evidence from a national panel study.

Gender differences in career success are still an issue in society and research, and men typically earn higher incomes than women do. Building on previous theorizing and findings with the Theory of Gendered Organizations and the Theory of Tokenism, we used a large sample of the adult starting cohort in the German National Educational Panel Study and a multilevel approach to test how the interaction between gender and the gender ratio in occupations was associated with income. We wanted to know whether the male advantage in terms of income would be equal in magnitude across occupations (as suggested by the Theory of Gendered Organizations) or if it would vary with the gender ratio in occupations (as suggested by the Theory of Tokenism and reasoning regarding person-job fit), such that people benefit either (a) from resembling the majority of employees in a field by working in a gender-typical occupation or (b) from standing out by working in a gender-atypical occupation. Analyses supported the hypothesis that employees’ incomes may benefit if they belong to the gender minority in an occupation, but this finding applied only to women. By contrast, men did not benefit from working in a gender-atypical occupation. Thus, women earned less than men earned overall, but the gender pay gap was smaller in occupations with a higher ratio of male employees. The findings can advance the understanding of gender-related career decisions for both employers and employees.

Student self-ratings of social-emotional competencies: Dimensional structure and outcome associations of the WCSD-SECA among Hispanic and non-Hispanic White boys and girls in elementary through high school

School-based assessments of students' self-reported social-emotional competencies (SECs) are an essential part of social and emotional learning (SEL) initiatives. Few studies, however, have investigated whether such assessments align with the frameworks that inform SEL practices, especially for diverse populations. In the present study we investigated the dimensional structure of the 40-item Washoe County School District Social-Emotional Competency Assessment (WCSD-SECA), which was designed to measure the five domains of SECs defined by the widely used Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning framework (CASEL 5). Findings showed that a subset of 21 items fit a 3-factor solution that reflected Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Emotion-Focused competencies, a structure consistent with previous theorizing of broad SEC constructs. This 3-dimensional structure was partially invariant, with differences especially evident in item thresholds across subpopulations (defined by the intersection of grade level, gender, and race/ethnicity). Accounting for differences in item thresholds increased mean differences among subpopulations in the three domains. Across subpopulations, Intrapersonal scores were positively associated with students' standardized test scores and GPAs, and negatively related to the number of days they were absent from school, in multilevel models that adjusted for school-level clustering and included all three SEC scores and student demographic controls. Interpersonal scores were associated with fewer suspensions. Interpersonal and Emotion-Focused scores demonstrated unexpectedly negative associations with some outcomes in these models. Findings contribute to an emerging body of research that aims to deepen understandings of the content and structure of students' SECs as well as the factors that contribute to growth in these competencies.

Breadwinning: Migrant workers’ family motivation in facing life-threatening events and its performance implications

Migrant workers face challenging work and lives, a situation particularly aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike previous theorizations predicting work intention from a self-focused approach, we focus on fundamental, family-focused reasons for engaging in a job. Our work explains why and how committing themselves to work helps migrant workers cope with the threat posed by the pandemic. Drawing on behavioral reasoning theory, we posit that this threat prompts migrant workers to think about the key reason for working, i.e., family motivation. Family motivation further enhances their intended work effort and actual job performance after returning to work. The results derived from two experiments and a two-source, two-wave field study conducted in China provide consistent support for our predictions.

From Assistants to Partners

Student-faculty partnerships are a growing practice in scholarship of teaching & learning (SoTL) projects. They can foster greater student engagement in higher education and help advance teaching & learning experiences. For graduate students, in particular those pursuing academic careers, such partnerships can offer opportunities for development of their professional identities as emerging SoTL scholars. In this article, we expand upon previous theorizations of partnerships to include the unique attributes of graduate student partnerships, such as in terms of longer timeframes, increased complexity, and long-term goals. Drawing on a two-year SoTL study, we present a three-layer framework characterizing key attributes for a successful graduate student-faculty partnership: 1) individual attributes in a partnership, 2) collective attributes for a partnership, and 3) outcomes of a partnership. The framework is grounded in literature and illustrative examples from our experiences as graduate students and faculty members working together in partnership with a SoTL project. This framework offers a structured mechanism to inform, create, and enhance the capacity of student-faculty partnerships in SoTL research.

Portuguese Version of Parker's (1998) Role Breadth Self-Efficacy Scale: Examining Its Factor Structure, Reliability and Validity to Predict Innovative Work Behaviour.

Drawing upon previous theorizing and empirical research efforts supporting the importance of role breadth self-efficacy (RBSE) as a key motivational antecedent of proactive forms of behaviour at work, including individual innovation, this paper reports the process of building and validating a Portuguese version of Parker's RBSE scale. Data from two studies with independent samples of employees (N = 103, N = 148) pertaining to an information technology company, showed that this version (RBSE-P) has, as expected, a unidimensional structure with a high level of factor structure similarity in both samples, as well as appropriate levels of internal consistency. Furthermore, evidence from the second sample (N = 148) revealed that, in line with preliminary research, this construct shows validity to predict the distinctive proactive behaviour of individual innovation, evaluated by the employee's corresponding direct supervisors. These results support the use of this scale for assessing RBSE in Portuguese-speaking work settings and the meaningful role of this construct for predicting this criterion, which is acknowledged as an important driver of organizational success and competitiveness.

Communicative Capitalism and Neo-Feudalism: An Interview with Jodi Dean

Communicative Capitalism and Neo-Feudalism: An Interview with Jodi Dean