Social Psychological Work Research Articles

A THEORETICAL MODEL OF SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL SUPPORT WORK PROCESSES FOR MANAGEMENT OF PRODUCTION TEAM

В данной статье рассматривается вопрос управления производственным коллективом, в частности разработана теоретическая модель социально-психологической работы по сопровождению процессов управления производственным коллективом. Автором исследования сформулированы цель и задачи социально-психологической работы по управлению производственным коллективом. Разработанная в исследовании теоретическая модель нацелена на определение условий и выявление особенностей эффективного управления предприятием с учетом социально-психологических характеристик его коллектива. Задачами являются: определение основных характеристик производственного коллектива и степени их выраженности, анализ этих характеристик и определение возможностей их трансформации, разработка рекомендаций по ведению социально-психологической работы по воздействию на характеристики коллектива предприятия. Практическое изучение деятельности ряда предприятий показало необходимость совершенствования социально-психологического сопровождения процессов управления производственным коллективом: ввести социальное и психологическое планирование коллектива и развивать практику социологических исследований состояния коллектива, обеспечить сглаживание отношений между работниками и руководством посредством проведения периодических совещаний, созданий условия для обратной связи, поддержания здоровой конкуренции между членами коллектива.

Moving backward and moving on: nostalgia, significant others, and social reintegration in nineteenth-century British immigrant personal correspondence

Nostalgia among immigrants frequently has been conceived of as a brooding and obsessive homesickness that leads to depression, lassitude, and neurotic misery among those who have left their original home and resettled elsewhere. Recent social psychological, literary and philosophical work, however, has sought a reformulation of nostalgia that instead emphasizes the positive uses to which memory, even painful memory, may be put in the effort to confront the challenges to personal identities of such massive changes in the lives of an individual as immigration. Through exploration of the letters to family members of three British immigrants to North America in the nineteenth century, this essay seeks to demonstrate how symbolic representations of the personal past inscribed creatively in letter-writing may function, or alternatively fail to function, to provide associations that bridge the gaps between past and present. The past may serve up mental images of pleasant circumstances involving people, places and events that serve as metaphoric building blocks by which the mind may ultimately place the individual in new circumstances, now made more familiar by virtue of their comparability to the past. Or, the tendency toward nostalgic memory may simply be overtaken by immersion in new circumstances that work in time to lead individuals realistically to draw pleasure from the past, while understanding its declining day-to-day relevance.

Shame, and a Challenge for Emotions History

This article uses historical analysis of shame (primarily in American history) to argue for a more active connection between emotions history and the other disciplines that deal with emotion. It assesses the current state of historical work on shame, including the argument for a 19th-century decline; it juxtaposes current social psychological and anthropological work with this argument. Additional data allow more precise consideration of changing patterns of shame, reasons for change, and probable impacts including increasing complexity in individual and social reactions alike. Evaluation includes the unexpected increase in shame discussions in recent decades; the possibility that shame and “modernity” are ultimately incompatible; and some larger problems attached to the decline of shame.

A sociohistorical examination of George Herbert Mead's approach to science education.

Although George Herbert Mead is widely known for his social psychological work, his views on science education also represent a significant, yet sometimes overlooked contribution. In a speech delivered in March 1906 entitled "The Teaching of Science in College," Mead calls for cultural courses on the sciences, such as sociology of science or history of science courses, to increase the relevancy of natural and physical science courses for high school and university students. These views reflect Mead's perspective on a number of traditional dualisms, including objectivity versus subjectivity and the social sciences versus natural and physical sciences. Taking a sociohistorical outlook, I identify the context behind Mead's approach to science education, which includes three major influences: (1) German intellectual thought and the Methodenstreit debate, (2) pragmatism and Darwin's theory of evolution, and (3) social reform efforts in Chicago and the General Science Movement.

Learning Chinese as a heritage language in Australia and beyond: the role of capital

The benefits of learning and retaining heritage languages are well documented in the literature. Chinese heritage language learners’ commitment to their heritage language learning has gained significant research ground in social psychological and post-structural schools, with empirical evidence predominantly emerging from the North American contexts. There is scant sociological examination of similar problems conducted outside North America. The current study aims to make a contribution in this regard. The use of Bourdieu's sociological notion of capital in the Australian context complements the social psychological and post-structural work predominantly produced in the North American contexts. The initial quantitative sub-study analyses the impacts of various resources on the Chinese heritage language proficiency of 230 snowball-sampled Chinese Australian respondents to an online survey. The subsequent qualitative sub-study explores the profits of learning Chinese heritage language through interviews with a subset of the survey sample. Findings indicate that cultural, social, and symbolic capital significantly positively contributes to Chinese Australians’ Chinese heritage language proficiency, which, in return, produces profits in different forms of capital. The study suggests a reciprocal relationship between ‘capital’ and Chinese heritage language proficiency.

Perceptual symbols of creativity: Coldness elicits referential, warmth elicits relational creativity

Research in the cognitive and social psychological science has revealed the pervading relation between body and mind. Physical warmth leads people to perceive others as psychological closer to them and to be more generous towards others. More recently, physical warmth has also been implicated in the processing of information, specifically through perceiving relationships (via physical warmth) and contrasting from others (via coldness). In addition, social psychological work has linked social cues (such as mimicry and power cues) to creative performance. The present work integrates these two literatures, by providing an embodied model of creative performance through relational (warm=relational) and referential (cold=distant) processing. The authors predict and find that warm cues lead to greater creativity when 1) creating drawings, 2) categorizing objects, and 3) coming up with gifts for others. In contrast, cold cues lead to greater creativity, when 1) breaking set in a metaphor recognition task, 2) coming up with new pasta names, and 3) being abstract in coming up with gifts. Effects are found across different populations and age groups. The authors report implications for theory and discuss limitations of the present work.

Perceptual Symbols of Creativity: Coldness Elicits Referential, Warmth Elicits Relational Creativity

Research in the cognitive and social psychological science has revealed the pervading relation between body and mind. Physical warmth leads people to perceive others as psychological closer to them and to be more generous towards others. More recently, physical warmth has also been implicated in the processing of information, specifically through perceiving relationships (via physical warmth) and the distancing from others (via coldness). In addition, social psychological work has linked social cues (such as mimicry and power cues) to creative performance. The present work integrates these two literatures, by providing an embodied model of creative performance through relational (warm = relational) and referential (cold = distant) processing. The authors predict and find that warmth cues lead to greater creativity when 1) creating drawings, 2) categorizing objects, and 3) coming up with gifts for others. In contrast, cold cues lead to greater creativity, when 1) breaking set in a metaphor recognition task, 2) coming up with new pasta names, and 3) being abstract in coming up with gifts. Effects are found across different populations and age groups. The authors report implications for theory and discuss limitations of the present work.

Noble cause corruption as a consequence of role conflict in the police organisation

This article proposes a theoretical framework with which to examine and understand noble cause corruption. Specifically, it draws on the social psychological work of Katz and Kahn, integrating role theory and role conflict with previous research into policing behaviour and misconduct. After proposing the theoretical framework, research directions are presented along with related methodological challenges. This article accomplishes the following: it provides a stepping off point for research into an under examined and thus far atheoretically understood phenomenon, it increases the academic understanding of noble cause corruption, and it assists practitioners in creating policies aimed at combating corruption generally.

Why Do Black Men Suffer from Low Self-Rated Job Productivity? A Multi-Theory Approach*

This article uses data from a national representative employer–employee matched dataset to assess the race/sex disparity in workers’ self-rated productivity levels. Findings show that a significant proportion of black men report that they cannot achieve high job productivity. We conduct regression analyses based on human capital, social closure, and social psychological models to identify the specific mechanisms that account for black men’s low self-rated job productivity. We find that social psychological work relational issues such as closeness of supervision and job evaluation explain the race/sex disparity in self-rated productivity. Findings are considered in the context of emergent intersections of race and gender in accounting for disparities in workplace outcomes.

The rhetorical construction of polity membership: Identity, culture and citizenship in young people's discussions of immigration in northern England

AbstractIn this paper, we argue for a social psychological approach to citizenship which focuses on how social actors define competent and legitimate polity membership, together with the associated rights and responsibilities that this entails. A perspective based on the principles of rhetorical psychology is adopted in order to explore these issues in an analysis of a sample of young people's talk about issues of immigration to the UK. Analysis considers how matters of ‘race’, national identity and culture were oriented to and constructed during the interviews. We then explore how rights and responsibilities concerning cultural expression, interpersonal civility/courtesy and (implicitly acultural) legal frameworks were articulated as practical criteria for judgements about competent and legitimate polity membership. These findings are discussed in relation to existing social psychological work on issues such as racism and national identity, with a view to situating these matters within an overarching concern for the construction of polity membership. We conclude by briefly considering the implications of these findings for contemporary debates concerning citizenship education in the UK. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Masculinities, Femininities, Behaviour and Health

AbstractUsing the notion that gender is performed in daily life and through daily activities, I review some of the health behaviour literature which employs ideas about masculinity and femininity. I argue that recent theorising about both masculinities (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005) and femininities (Schippers, 2007) can be extremely useful in this field. I consider two specific health behaviours in light of this theorising, namely healthy eating and drinking alcohol, and explore how and which versions of masculinities and femininities are played out, which are problematic, and what they mean for gender hegemony. I argue that across both areas (and across other health behaviours), there are three specific issues that are important and require further conceptual development and empirical work: (1) the relationality of gender; (2) masculinities and femininities as embodied; and (3) the local, contingent and intersectional nature of masculinities and femininities. This conceptual framework and the aspects of relationality, embodiment and intersectionality have important implications not only for understanding health behaviours, but for any social psychological work theorising identities and everyday social practice.

Is the Future more or less Human? Differing Views of Humanness in the Posthumanism Debate

A debate has emerged in the bioethics literature about the use of biotechnology to modify human nature. A failure to define humanness has produced conceptual confusion in this debate. We draw upon recent social psychological work on folk concepts of humanness and dehumanization to analyse the understandings of humanness that underpin the rival positions. We argue that advocates and opponents of human nature modification employ distinct conceptions of humanness, and that their differing evaluations of modification make sense in light of these conceptions. Advocates view modification as the enhancement of a non‐essentialist sense of humanness that takes us further from animal nature. Opponents view it as the loss of an essentialist sense of humanness that takes us closer to a robotic state. Recognition that humanness has multiple senses implies that there is no mutually exclusive choice between seeing the outcome of modification as a quantitative gain in humanness or a fundamental, qualitative loss of it.

The effortful citizen: Discursive social psychology and welfare reform

AbstractThe present study applies a broadly discursive approach to the representation of welfare reform and unemployment through an analysis of the deployment of an interpretative repertoire of effortfulness in posts to an internet discussion forum. It is argued that when posters construct versions of unemployed people or welfare recipients as characterized by ‘laziness’ or lack of ‘effort’ the attribution of responsibility for unemployment is frequently not the only piece of discursive business being attended to. In addition, posters attend to issues of their own accountability and, significantly, the accountability of the government or welfare system itself for the extent to which welfare recipients are formally held to account. It is argued that this approach extends previous social psychological work on the explanation of unemployment insofar as it pays attention to the context‐specific functions performed by such explanations. Moreover, in orienting to the welfare system as having a responsibility to hold welfare recipients to account, posters are drawing on a set of discursive resources which essentially treat the government of individual psychology as a legitimate function of the welfare system. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Fritz Heider’s Legacy

This article reviews some of the central ideas in Heider’s (1958 ) book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations: common-sense psychology, personal causality, causal attribution, and the social perception of mental states. Relying on Heider’s own words to introduce these topics, the review shows that post-Heiderian attribution research overlooked and misunderstood several of Heider’s contributions. For example, he has been falsely portrayed as postulating a person-situation dichotomy as the core of people’s understanding of behavior; and his analysis of dispositions as primarily mental states has been mistaken for one of dispositions as stable traits. Heider’s original ideas are, however, firmly connected to cognitive science research on the folk theory of mind and provide a foundation for recent social-psychological work on inferences of other people’s mental states.

‘It's not racist. It's common sense’. A critical analysis of political discourse around asylum and immigration in the UK

AbstractThis paper looks at a political speech given by the leader of the opposition party during the run up to the UK elections in 2005. Using this speech as a starting point, we attempt to trace the path of ‘racism’ within a text that makes explicit claims to being ‘not racist’. Drawing on a number of theoretical and methodological resources, this paper approaches the analysis by focusing on a number of conceptually heterogeneous elements that, in relation with each other, function to produce, re‐produce and stabilize ‘racism’. One of the difficulties commonly encountered in social psychological work, we would suggest, is that an explicit statement of allegiance to a particular methodological and theoretical tradition can also result in a restriction of theorization to a particular ‘level of analysis’. That is to say, a methodological process that constructs a pre‐given category, presets the criteria by which ‘racism’ can be identified and fixes the ‘level of analysis’ at which it can be studied risks ignoring the multiple points of contact at which ‘racism’ can be made visible or made to disappear. The concern here it that such a process can work to reinscribe the very ‘racisms’ we aim to disrupt. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Advantages of Multilevel Approaches

Editors' introduction: Thomas F. Pettigrew was born and raised in tightlysegregated Richmond, Virginia in 1931. But his Scottish‐immigrant family did not subscribe to the South's racist norms, and he identified with and had early positive contact with African Americans. As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, he discovered that there was a discipline that studied and resisted racism. These formative experiences forged his career path in social psychology to study intergroup relations. As a student of Allport's, Pettigrew is widely recognized as having expanded personality‐oriented perspectives on prejudice to include a more social, contextualized orientation (Kimmel, 1986). In that same vein, he focuses his commentary on incorporating multiple levels of analysis as we integrate theory, research and practice on intergroup relations. He emphasizes the importance of macro‐level—institutional and societal—contextualization of social psychological work. Pettigrew thoughtfully considers each article in the issue and contends that multiple level analyses, and incorporating the macro‐level, are critical for theoretical and empirical progress as well as maximizing effectiveness of interventions.

Dislocating identity: Desegregation and the transformation of place

Whatever other changes it engenders, desegregation invariably produces a re-organization of space and place, a fact whose implications the psychological literature on the process has generally disregarded. The present article begins to address this gap. Drawing on research on place–identity processes, we argue that desegregation may alter not only the relationship between self and other, but also the relationship between self and place. As such, it may be experienced as a form of dislocation: an event that undermines shared constructions of place and the forms of located subjectivity they sustain. In order to develop this idea, we analyse a series of interviews conducted with holiday-makers on a formerly white but now multiracial beach in South Africa. The analysis demonstrates how white respondents’ stories of desegregation evince an abiding concern with the loss of place, manifest in terms of an erosion of a sense of place belonging, attachment and familiarity and an undermining of the beach's capacity to act as a restorative environment of the self. The implications of such accounts for understanding personal and ideological resistance to desegregation are explored. The paper concludes by arguing that this problem provides an opportunity to conjoin environmental and social psychological work.

Improving Race Relations in Higher Education

This article suggests that colleges and universities can improve intergroup relations on campus by implementing a cooperative learning technique known as the jigsaw classroom. What is argued is that use of the jigsaw classroom will facilitate a recategorization process by which members of racial-ethnic groups other than one’s own (“them”) will begin to be seen as being members of a more inclusive “we.” Included in this article is an examination of on-campus racial discrimination, a discussion of some social psychological work that is useful in helping us understand why this discrimination exists, and a discussion of the ways in which the jigsaw classroom has the potential to reduce this discrimination.

Foxes, green fields and Britishness: on the rhetorical construction of place and national identity.

This paper explores an accepted but under researched feature of national categories: their complex relationship with social constructions of place. We argue that social psychological work on national identification and mobilization would benefit from closer attention to this relationship. In order to develop this argument, we analyse a series of newspaper accounts published on behalf of the Countryside Alliance, a coalition formed to preserve rural 'ways of life' in the UK and, more specifically, to defend extant practices of hunting. Applying a discourse analytic method, we show how the Alliance has exploited the rhetoric of place in order to portray the preservation of hunting as an issue of national significance. By associating British identity with the 'rural idyll' of the English countryside, the organization has appealed to a place construction in which hunting and its associated activities become cast as essential expressions of the national character. Building on relevant work in geography and discursive psychology, we trace some wider implications of this process for social psychological research on category construction, reification and collective mobilization.

The Role of the Physical Environment in Supporting Organizational Creativity

Creativity has been underscored as a key factor to organizational adaptability and competitiveness in today's rapidly changing business environment. Designing as well as managing work environments that facilitate creativity have therefore received growing attention, resulting in a multitude of research examining the social–psychological work environment. Few studies, however, have focused on the contribution of the physical work environment to supporting creativity in the workplace. This study focuses on the role of the physical environment in supporting creativity in organizations by identifying specific physical features and attributes of the work environment perceived to promote or inhibit creativity. The research design compares four organizations publicly acclaimed for their innovative social–psychological work environments, but which are distinctly different in terms of the physical work environment. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected by means of survey questionnaires (N = 130). Results indicate that the physical work environment exerts indirect influence on creativity by contributing to two significant social–psychological conditions that are conducive to creativity, namely dynamism and freedom. The study specifies attributes of the physical work environment perceived to be positively and negatively associated with both of these conditions.