Does Having a Dysfunctional Personality Hurt Your Career? Axis II Personality Disorders and Labor Market Outcomes

Despite recent interest in how psychiatric disorders affect work outcomes, little is known about the role of personality disorders (PDs), which are poorly understood yet prevalent (15%) and impairing. We used nationally representative data for 12,457 men and 16,061 women to examine associations of PDs with any employment, full-time employment, chronic unemployment, being fired or laid off, and having trouble with a boss or co-worker. Antisocial, paranoid, and obsessive-compulsive PDs demonstrated the broadest patterns of associations with adverse outcomes. Findings suggest that PDs may have implications for the productivity of co-workers as well as that of the disordered employees themselves.     

Meanings of Food among Polish and American Young Women

Food carries different meanings across cultures and times. This study aimed to explore the meanings of food among young women in Poland and the United States using a qualitative approach. The findings show that, in both countries, women associate food with health, pleasure, and socializing, but overall Polish women are less emotional about food. More specifically, in the United States, women associate food with love, their identities, and have more conflictual feelings about food, whereas in Poland women associate food with creativity. The study discusses marketing implications of the results.     

LGBT Neighbourhoods and ‘New Mobilities’: Towards Understanding Transformations in Sexual and Gendered Urban Landscapes

In this article we apply insights from ‘new mobilities’ approaches to understand the shifting sexual and gendered landscapes of major cities in the global North. The empirical context is the purported ‘demise’ of traditional gay villages in Toronto, Canada and Sydney, Australia, and the emergence of ‘LGBT neighbourhoods’ elsewhere in the inner city. We reinterpret the historical geography of twentieth century LGBT lives and the associated ‘rise and fall’ of gay enclaves through the lens of the ‘politics of mobility’. In this reading, it is apparent that multifaceted movements — migration, physical and social mobility, and motility — underpin the formation of gay enclaves and recent transformations in sexual and gendered landscapes. After the second world war, LGBT communities in the global North were embedded in specific historical geographies of mobility and we trace these in the Canadian and Australian contexts. The ‘great gay migration’ from the 1960s to the 1980s has been joined by new LGBT constellations of mobility in the 2000s, and these have imprinted upon the sexual and gendered landscapes of Toronto and Sydney.     

Economies of Desire: Sexuality and the Sex Industry in the 21st Century

New data from sex surveys confirm that demand for commercial sex is based on permanent disparities between male and female desire, and is therefore ineradicable. Demand and supply are growing, facilitated by economic growth, the Internet, globalisation and changing sexual attitudes. A key objection to the sex industry is that pornography, lap dancing and prostitution promote rape and other kinds of violence against women. However, the evidence contradicts this contention. The commercial sex industry is impervious to prohibitions and cannot be eliminated. Laws which constrain sellers of sexual services or criminalise purchasers are not evidence‐based, and are bound to fail, wasting public resources.     

Fluctuating levels of personal role engagement within the working day: A multilevel study

In this diary study, we examined a theoretical model in which the psychological conditions of meaningfulness, availability, and safety serve as mechanisms through which the work context during discrete situations within the workday influences “state” engagement. We further theorised that a person's “trait” level of engagement would exert cross‐level effects on the state level relationships. Multilevel analyses based on a sample of 124 individuals in six organisations and 1,446 situational observations revealed that meaningfulness and availability (but not safety) mediated the relationships between perceptions of the work context and state engagement. High levels of trait engagement strengthened the within‐person relation between availability and state engagement, yet weakened the within‐person relation between meaningfulness and state engagement, suggesting two different processes may be at play. Overall, the findings advance our understanding of engagement as a multilevel and temporally dynamic psychological phenomenon and promote a contextually based HRM approach to facilitating engagement.     

Green Demarketing in Advertisements: Comparing “Buy Green” and “Buy Less” Appeals in Product and Institutional Advertising Contexts

This research compares consumer response to traditional green advertising appeals to that of less conventional, “green demarketing” (GD) appeals—messages by for-profit companies encouraging reduced category consumption for the sake of the environment. Rather than encouraging greener consumption, modern environmentalism calls for decreased consumption overall, a trend reflected in recent advertising campaigns (e.g., Patagonia's “Don't Buy This Jacket”). Despite its potential impact and unconventionality, research on GD in general is sparse, and no empirical research has examined consumer response to GD appeals relative to traditional green appeals. In three experiments, we find that, in the context of product advertising, consumers' attitudes for green ads are more favorable than those for GD ads, mediated by greater inferences of genuine environmental concern. However, we find the reverse pattern in the context of institutional ads. Further, an “anti-consumption amplifier” message embedded in the ad—espousing the potential harm of overconsumption—further boosts favorable consumer attitudes for the GD institutional ad relative to its traditional green counterpart. Importantly, we assess all effects while controlling for consumers' individual levels of green consumerism, such that implications may be applied more generally rather than to a specific segment of green consumers.