Public Transgression Research Articles

How a publicized leader transgression can affect member outcomes and gift purchasing of associated symbolic products

PurposeThis study aims to examine the ramifications of an unfavorable public incident resulting from an organizational leader’s transgression on member outcomes and their intentions to purchase associated symbolic products as gifts. This study also considers how members’ attributions of organizational control affect the relationship between members’ organizational identification and their purchase behavior.Design/methodology/approachThe study applies a longitudinal design involving two rounds of data collection over two years to examine a case of leadership transgression. Using the customer panel of a privately owned retailer, sorority members were surveyed before and after an unfavorable public incident involving their president. This study applied t-tests of mean differences and regression analyses to test the hypotheses.FindingsAfter the leader’s transgressions were publicized, sorority members exhibited lower levels of cognitive organizational identification, satisfaction with the organization and purchase intention of organizational gifts. The association between cognitive organizational identification and gift purchase intentions was stronger after the incident. Further, controllability attributions positively moderated the association between cognitive organizational identification and the intended purchase quantity of organizational products after the incident.Research limitations/implicationsThe sample limits the generalizability of the findings, as the study is conducted on one case of a leader’s transgression in an identity-based organization (IBO).Practical implicationsThe findings imply that efforts to repair customer identification should be taken rather than satisfaction enhancement when a leader of an IBO commits a public transgression.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to apply identity threat theory to understand how an organizational leader’s public transgression affects member outcomes and purchasing. The findings imply that it is critical to repair members’ identification when these situations arise. The use of a real case and a longitudinal research design are rare contributions to this research stream.

“Instamatic living rooms of sin”: pornography, participation and the erotics of ordinariness in the 1970s

ABSTRACT This article considers the shift in 1970s Britain towards a pornography based not only on popular consumption but popular participation too. Focusing on the ‘Readers’ Wives’ genre of magazine features, it suggests that the making of soft-core pornography offered readers the possibility, through home photography, to document a ‘liberated’ sexual domesticity with growing cultural currency. This process involved the eroticisation of a broader turn to ordinariness in British culture, as well as the public transgression of the zone of sexual privacy carved out by the Wolfenden Report and the liberal sexual settlement of the 1950s and 1960s. The article therefore tracks the emergence in the late twentieth century of a new model of sexual selfhood that could be sparked into being through new ways of looking and being looked at. Especially for women, ‘Readers’ Wives’ linked sexual objectification and subjectification in a new and profound way. Overall, the development of a pornography of participation and a new erotics of ordinariness are framed in the article as constitutive of the sexual visuality of the ‘Sexual Revolution’.

Tribalism can corrupt: Why people denounce or protect immoral group members

When ingroup members behave immorally, what determines whether other group members denounce vs. protect them? We asked if concerns for group reputation might determine how people respond to the moral indiscretions of group members. In four studies, participants read about an immoral act committed by a member of their political party. The act was either publicly known to people outside of the participant's political party (i.e., “public transgression”) or hidden from public view (i.e., “private transgression”). In the public transgression condition, participants endorsed having their political party openly denounce the transgressor in an apparent effort to prevent the party's reputation from being tarnished by association. In the private transgression condition, however, they were reluctant to publicly report the transgressive party member, presumably to prevent reputational loss. Feelings of responsibility for the group arising from either identity fusion with the party or being experimentally assigned to occupy a position of responsibility for the party amplified these effects. Strongly fused participants were even willing to contemplate extreme, unethical actions aimed at protecting party reputation (e.g. tampering with incriminating evidence), regardless of the publicness of the transgression. We conclude that feelings of responsibility for the group and reputational considerations determine whether people denounce or protect ingroup transgressors.

Cultural Shifts in Russia Since 2010: Messianic Cynicism and Paradigms of Artistic Resistance

The two most important processes influencing new cultural trends in today’s Russia are the state’s annexation of transgression and the transformation of social norms. In Russia’s public space, speakers representing different official or semi-official institutions make aggressive statements and defy accepted norms of public communication. They behave as if they perform the roles of “official holy fools”. Thus, the state “annexes” the right of mediatized public transgression characteristic of contemporary art. State actors are described in the article as “active conformists” embodying the expectations and desires of TV-watching “passive conformists”. Accordingly, strategies of heroic resistance in art and literature cease to be relevant for shaping the new wave of Russia’s aesthetic nonconformism. The article discusses alternative scenarios and discourses emerging in contemporary art and literature as formative for the new type of nonconformity.

Moralising female identity in Cameroon in the 1990s: female prostitution and the song “you gu cry”

Between the 1970s and early 1980s, when Cameroon was still at the juncture of promising social plenitude, popular music genres like Makossa were a mere auditory art instead of a profit-making activity as we have in Cameroon today. Popular music at that time was simply “music for the ears”, meant to produce emotional sounds, pleasant to listen to. Bars, night clubs and streets were common environs where dancing took place as the physical expression of pleasure from music. The explosion of early music such as Makossa did not match the precarious marketable opportunities at that time. As a result, music appeared as a hobby, and not because singers derived income from its production. The themes focused on varying social experiences and problems, from love and emotional pathos to (im)morality. As such, one is tempted to assert that singers hardly expressed demur or outright lampoonery against public transgressions such as corruption, prostitution or swindling, as is the case nowadays. The themes were far less what we find in contemporary Cameroonian literate culture, namely cinema, media and popular music. This paper focuses on Misse Ngoh's popular song titled “you gu cry” as a medium of social reform through the beguiling fantasies of a female archetype, Mary, in Cameroon in the nineties. The paper contends that though this song produces laughter, rendering it a humorous piece with potential enough to entertain, the same humour turns out serious, handling prostitution and women involved in this activity in a very negative way. This is achieved when Misse Ngoh, using his female archetype Mary, constructs a problematic image of females in the Cameroon urban sphere. Taking these into consideration, Cameroon popular music as seen from Misse Ngoh's “you gu cry” takes on a different significance. Finally, in the iconography of Mary, this paper sets out to explore the agency of females who were baffled within the intricacies of urban life and modernity in the nineties. It examines the challenges of the new urban spaces (as notorious corners of prostitution) that such women chose.

Evidence for an Evolutionary Cheater Strategy—Relationships Between Primary and Secondary Psychopathy, Parenting, and Shame and Guilt

ABSTRACTIn the present study, shame and guilt proneness were investigated in relation to primary and secondary psychopathy, looking at parental care as a possible mediator. A sample of 388 volunteers participated in an on-line study, completing several self-report measurements. Primary psychopathy, robust to parental care and sex of the participant, was associated with lower guilt proneness after a private transgression and lower negative self-evaluations after a public transgression. Secondary psychopathy was not associated with guilt or shame proneness. Paternal care played a mediating role between primary psychopathy and guilt, but only in male participants. High paternal care was associated with lower guilt repair in high psychopathy males, suggesting that a positive father-son relationship might be essential for development of exploitive strategies in primary psychopathy. The results highlight the fundamental differences between primary and secondary psychopathy, and provide support for the idea that primary psychopathy is an evolutionary cheater-strategy.

Disentangling Privacy and Intimacy: Intimate Citizenship, Private Boundaries and Public Transgressions

Disentangling Privacy and Intimacy: Intimate Citizenship, Private Boundaries and Public Transgressions Recent theorisations of transformations of intimacy—like Ken Plummer's (2003) Intimate Citizenship project—concentrate on social and cultural transformations that erode the containment of intimacy within the private sphere. They have less to say about the character of and oppositions to that erosion, and specifically how far the idea of the private stands in opposition to intimacy transgressing into the public. In this essay, the private is explored through its constitutive features—liberal codifications of rights, liberty and property, medico-moral discourses and conservative values and legal and political regulation—to give a more political and critical reading. This reading suggests that an explicit disentangling of the private and the intimate is necessary if tendencies toward public and emancipated intimacies are to become meaningful transformations, and this involves a dissembling of and critical engagement with the powerful historically entrenched idea of privacy in western societies.

Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State

Despite the long and generally humorless history of statecraft, institutional forms of oppression have periodically been defeated, transformed, or at least temporarily checked by carnivalesque forms of public protest. After reviewing the political features of carnival and the carnivalesque, along with several historical and contemporary examples of carnivalesque political performances, this essay explores the possibilities for progressive public transgression and the interrelationships among carnivalesque protest, critical democratic citizenship, and state health.

Public transgression of environmental law: A preliminary study

Environmental crime, a relatively new category of criminality, has recently attracted the attention of criminologists. While large corporations and criminal organizations have been viewed as the major environmental violators and subjected to study, other groups involved in environmental crimes have been generally overlooked. The present study interviewed both offenders and investigators involved in environmental crime, reviewed a sample of case reports of environmental crimes and surveyed a sample of the general public. The results indicate that ordinary citizens also engage in environmental lawbreaking, although their violations are basically trivial in nature. The findings of this study suggest that education, instead of criminal law enforcement, would be an effective way of preventing this widespread environmental criminality of the public.

Private Reactions to Public Transgressions: Predictors of Evaluative Responses to Allegations of Political Misconduct

Effects of blameworthiness, account type, and politician power on respondents' evaluations of political offenders were examined. Political expertise and party affiliation served as additional categorical predictors of evaluations. Participants read two scenarios describing the misadventures of fictitious politicians and their accounts and evaluated the politicians. Results revealed that political novices were more generous than experts in their evaluations. Politicians who transgressed intentionally were evaluated more negatively than politicians who trans-gressed accidentally. Respondents who shared partisanship with the politicians evaluated them more positively than respondents who did not share partisanship. Finally, results revealed interactions among politician power, account type, party, and scenario. This study points to the utility of a sociolinguistic framework for the systematic investigation of respondents' private reactions to public political transgressions.