Interactive effects of environmental experience and innovative cognitive style on student creativity in product design

Environmental experience can enhance the ideas of design students. Thus, this type of experience may interfere with the influence of design students’ cognitive style on creativity. The aim of this study was to examine the influence of environmental experience on the relationship between innovative cognitive style and industrial design students’ creative outcomes. The environmental experience was measured according to the total scores of the five components of sense, feel, think, act, and relate on the basis of Schmitt’s strategic experience modules. The cognitive styles were measured using Kirton’s adaption–innovation inventory, and creative works were assessed through the consensus assessment technique, which was employed by three experts. Through a field experiment and survey investigation, the analysis indicated that innovative cognitive style significantly and positively influenced creativity, but this only occurred when student was accompanied with a low degree of environmental experience (i.e., a student had a low score for environmental experience); as the student attained a high degree of environmental experience, the influence of innovative cognitive style on creativity became weakened. The experiential media suggested that the natural elements, cultural history, group travel, and narrator effectively diversified the experiences of the students and enhanced creative thinking. This paper suggests providing increased stimulation of environmental experience prior to instructing design students to engage in creative activity. Environmental experience can benefit students by enhancing their creativity.     

The role of other customers during self-service technology failure

Service recovery through inter-customer helping is especially meaningful in the self-service technology (SST) failure context because SSTs are associated with a high risk of failure due to the lack of face-to-face contacts with employees. In understanding the phenomenon of inter-customer helping, two fundamental questions are investigated in the current research: (1) does social influence play a role in customers’ helping decisions? and (2) what are the motives for helping? Through two experimental studies, we provide evidence that two different forms of social influence play a role in helping others during SST failures, and customers have self-centered (vs. other-centered) motives. Results from Study 1 showed that individuals in the private environment indicated more willingness to help than individuals in the public environment did due to heightened perceived responsibility. Study 2 revealed that tie strength influenced willingness to help via a dual pathway: perceived responsibility and social approach motives. Finally, we discuss and highlight the positive influence that self-centered motives can exert in the SST failure scene.     

Corruption in agricultural processing firms: A comparison of cooperatives and investor-owned firms

This paper examines managerial corruption in cooperatives (co-ops) and investor-owned firms (IOFs), including its impact on prices and farmer welfare. Even when co-op managers have greater incentives to engage in corruption because of the co-op's larger production, the resulting corruption is not sufficient to offset the competitive effect that co-ops exert vis-à-vis IOFs. This conclusion holds regardless of the functional form of the production function, the farm input supply curve, and the demand curve for the processed product. In addition to showing the robustness of the competition effect, the paper provides a highly flexible modeling framework that can be used to examine other co-op behavior questions.     

Integration of and Deliveries among the World Zionist Organization,Israel, and Diaspora Countries: System Articulation with the Social Fabric Matrix

Abstract:

The religious economics (not economics of religion) concern here is the relationship between the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and Israel, which is known as a geopolitical power in its region and which is also known as an economic success story. Joseph Schumpeter and Karl Polanyi explained how the political economy of medieval Europe was influenced and guided by Christian morality. This paper extends the analysis of religious economics by using the social fabric matrix of original institutional economics to define and structure the integration of the WZO, Israel, and the Diaspora countries. This allows us to observe how to conduct such work and to learn how Israel is guided and influenced by the WZO. It also helps to explain Israel’s “risk of tearing itself apart” as noted in a recent article in the New York Times.     

Modeling the time varying volatility of housing returns: Further evidence from the U.S. metropolitan condominium markets

This study extends the literature on modeling the volatility of housing returns to the case of condominium returns for five major U.S. metropolitan areas (Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco). Through the estimation of ARMA models for the respective condominium returns, we find volatility clustering of the residuals. The results from an ARMA‐TGARCH‐M model reveal the absence of asymmetry in the conditional variance. Dummy variables associated with the housing market collapse unique to each metropolitan area were statistically insignificant in the conditional variance equation, but negative and statistically significant in the mean equation. Condominium markets in Los Angeles and San Francisco exhibit the greatest persistence to volatility shocks.     

When the going gets tough: the influence of expatriate resilience and perceived organizational inclusion climate on work adjustment and turnover intentions

Abstract

Despite the strong evidence for the beneficial influence of resilience for employee stress resistance in domestic settings, the construct has not received much attention in the expatriation literature, where stress is considered a major factor for expatriates’ poor cross-cultural adjustment and turnover. Drawing upon conservation of resources theory, the present study examines resilience as an antecedent of expatriate work adjustment and turnover intentions. Furthermore, this study investigates the moderating role of perceived organizational inclusion climate as a resource-protecting organizational factor. Results from a survey of 175 expatriates in South Korea indicate that resilience is positively related to expatriate work adjustment and that these positive effects are more pronounced when expatriates perceive their organizational climate to be highly inclusive. Furthermore, findings suggest that work adjustment mediates the effects of resilience on turnover intentions and that this mediation is moderated by a perceived organizational inclusion climate. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Fame and the fortune of academic economists: How the market rewards influential research in economics

We analyze the pay and position of 1009 faculty members who teach in doctoral‐granting economics departments at 53 large public universities in the United States. Using the Web of Science, we have identified the journal articles published by these scholars and the number of times each of these articles has been subsequently cited in published research articles. We find that research influence, as measured by various measures of total citations, is a remarkably strong predictor of the salary and the prestige of the department in which professors are employed. We also examine the effect of coauthorship. Surprisingly, we find no salary penalty for sharing authorship; however, in terms of prestige of employing department, coauthorship is fully discounted.     

Corporate social responsibility in emerging economies: Investigating firm behavior in the Indian context

Scholars have questioned the appropriateness of using a western‐centric framework to investigate corporate social responsibility (CSR) in emerging economies. This study assesses the appropriateness of using such a framework in one emerging economy—India. More specifically, the drivers of CSR and their impact on firm‐level CSR activity in the Indian context are investigated and compared with those in developed economies. Content analysis of 369 CSR policy statements of publicly traded Indian firms revealed the factors that drive CSR activities of Indian firms are similar to those found in developed economies. However, the ways firms respond to the drivers of CSR are surprisingly different in the Indian context, and these differences can be traced to attributes of the Indian socio‐cultural context. Implications and recommendations for future research conducted in India, and in other emerging economies, are offered.     

Reliable Inference in Categorical Regression Analysis for Non‐randomly Coarsened Observations

In most surveys, one is confronted with missing or, more generally, coarse data. Traditional methods dealing with these data require strong, untestable and often doubtful assumptions, for example, coarsening at random. But due to the resulting, potentially severe bias, there is a growing interest in approaches that only include tenable knowledge about the coarsening process, leading to imprecise but reliable results. In this spirit, we study regression analysis with a coarse categorical‐dependent variable and precisely observed categorical covariates. Our (profile) likelihood‐based approach can incorporate weak knowledge about the coarsening process and thus offers a synthesis of traditional methods and cautious strategies refraining from any coarsening assumptions. This also allows a discussion of the uncertainty about the coarsening process, besides sampling uncertainty and model uncertainty. Our procedure is illustrated with data of the panel study ‘Labour market and social security' conducted by the Institute for Employment Research, whose questionnaire design produces coarse data.