Distress rentals and the land rental market as a safety net: contract choice evidence from Tigray,Ethiopia

Rural households in the semiarid Northern Ethiopian highlands are net buyers of food. Crop failure due to erratic and unpredictable rainfall occurs frequently and leads to food shortages and income shocks. The renting out of land may be one of the coping responses of households exposed to shocks. We developed a theoretical household model for poor landlord households capturing their contract choice response to downside production shocks. We tested econometrically whether contract choice may depend on poverty, capital constraints, production risk and random shocks. The multinomial logit model estimates show that poor households experiencing random shocks are more likely to choose fixed‐rent contracts as a distress response to shocks, suggesting that fixed‐rent contracts may be used to meet immediate needs, but at the expense of future incomes. We also found that fixed‐rent contracts are preferred when ex ante production risk is low, while sharecropping is more likely where production risk is high. Finally, we found an indication that the choice of a fixed‐rent contract as a coping response to shocks comes as a last resort after all other means of coping are exhausted.     

‘I didn't feel like I was alone anymore’: evaluating self‐organised employee coping practices conducted via Facebook

The long‐term fracturing of the labour movement has led to increased attention to employee coping practices under new management practices and labour processes. However, the literature caters little for the recent rise of employees taking to social networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook, to find ways to cope with the pressures of contemporary employment. To explore the self‐organised coping qualities of SNSs, interviews were conducted with front line workers, employed by a large anti‐trade union US retailer, who contribute to a self‐organised Facebook group set up as a place for fellow employees to deal with collective employment‐related problems. The main findings suggest employee self‐organised Facebook groups represent an important development and extension to the coping practices available to individual and groups of employees. The main implication of the findings is that Facebook groups appear to strengthen and widen the options for employee resilience in an age of continuing trade union retreat.     

Coping with sales call anxiety: The role of sale perseverance and task concentration strategies

The authors study how salespeople cope with social anxiety during customer contacts and find that two tactics, sale perseverance and task concentration, ultimately reduce dysfunctional protective actions. Both coping tactics, however, are differentially moderated by strength of felt physiological sensations and strength of negative expectations and thoughts. Salespeople experiencing anxiety cognitions should distract themselves by concentrating on their task to free up their thinking in relation to the task at hand. Engaging in behaviors to modify the situation by persevering on the sale, on the other hand, occupies action space and should be the coping strategy of choice for those salespeople confronting physiological sensations in relation to felt anxiety. Hypotheses are tested on a sample of 171 salespersons. Frank Belschak (f.d.belschak@uva.nl) is an assistant professor of marketing and organizational behavior in the Business School at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He received his PhD from the University of Cologne in Germany. His current research interests include personal selling, emotions, and emotion regulation in organizations and across cultures. Willem Verbeke (verbeke@few.eur.nl) is a chaired professor of sales and account management at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. His area of research interests includes personal selling, sales management, emotions and emotion regulation, and knowledge management. Richard P. Bagozzi (bagozzi@umich.edu) is a professor of marketing in the Ross School of Business and a professor of social and administrative sciences in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD from Northwestern University. He conducts research on human emotions, the theory of action, goal setting and goal striving, and structural equation methods.     

防御性悲观与内隐——外显自尊的关系研究

本文从实证研究出发,运用IAT内隐测验法、问卷调查和访谈等方法,探讨防御性悲观与内隐自尊、外显自尊之间的关系,旨在拓展防御性悲观研究的文化性,加深对防御性悲观的理解,改变对＂悲观＂等消极思维模式的认识误区。研究结果发现,研究生的防御性悲观水平显著高于中位数,同时,其内隐自尊效应显著,外显自尊水平亦显著高于中位数。另外,外显自尊水平可以负性预测防御性悲观水平。     

Exploring tourists’ stress and coping strategies in leisure travel

Leisure travel can mediate daily stress, but also provoke stress. Tourists experience multiple stress during their vacations. The aim of this study was to identify what types of stress tourists encounter during their travel experiences and what strategies they use to cope with stress. Using semi-structured interviews and participant observation, the study findings reveal that tourists encounter four major types of stress (i.e., service-provider-related stress, traveler-related stress, travel-partner-related stress, and environment-related stress) during their vacations and use many strategies (i.e., problem-focused and emotion-focused coping) to cope with stress. These findings not only contribute to tourism research by documenting specific types of stress in the travel context and exploring new insights into ways of coping with stress, but also provide suggestions for how tourism and hospitality professionals should modify programs/experiences in response to tourists’ stress and the need to cope with stress during travel experiences.     

监狱警察应付方式与心理健康的关系

为了探索监狱警察应付方式与心理健康状况的关系,采用应付方式问卷和心理健康量表,对绵阳市某监狱150名警察进行问卷调查。结果表明:狱警的心理健康优于男狱警;监狱警察最常采用的应付方式是解决问题和求助。心理健康与解决问题、求助存在显著正相关,而与自责、幻想、退避和合理化之间存在显著负相关。     

Taking a positive approach to organizational downsizing

We drew from the literature on positive organizational behaviour (Luthans & Youssef, 2007) to test a process model relating generalized optimism (Carver & Scheier, 1999) to the cognitions, affect, and behaviour of 237 Canadian federal government managers during and following a major organizational downsizing. Our data supported a model in which generalized optimism measured 18 months prior to the downsizing (T1) associated positively with managers' cognitions, attitudes, job performance, and self‐reported coping effectiveness measured 12 months postdownsizing (T3). Analyses suggested that some of these associations were partially mediated by a positive thinking coping strategy and expectations for future career and job success reported during the downsizing (T2). We advocate for more research that draws from the positive organizational behaviour literature to study the effects of downsizing on survivors. Copyright © 2008 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

西方工作压力研究概况

关于工作压力的研究,西方已经进行了几十年并取得不少成果.我国该领域的研究起步较晚,但也逐渐成为社会焦点.本文从工作压力的定义、工作压力源、工作压力的测量、工作压力的理论、工作压力的后果和工作压力的应对几个方面,来介绍西方工作压力研究的已有成果,以资我们的研究工作借鉴.     

Realizing public values: enhancement or obstruction? Exploring value tensions and coping strategies in the co-production of social care

ABSTRACT

We examine the potential of co-production to enhance or obstruct the realization of public values by analysing what value tensions co-producers experience and what coping strategies they follow. In-depth study of a social care initiative in Flanders shows that co-production enhances the realization of values relating to services delivered, relationships between public servants and citizens, and the democratic quality of the service delivery process. However, public servants and citizen co-producers experience tensions between values, such as efficiency, individual freedom of co-producers, reciprocity, and inclusion. In trying to deal with these value tensions, public servants are found to follow a variety of coping strategies, whereas citizen co-producers tend to escalate tensions or avoid coping with them. The type of coping strategy followed, however, influences if and what values are ultimately represented in the service delivery process and its results.     

首都物流业发展的主要问题与对策研究

文章首先对当前首都物流业发展主要问题进行了分析，发现存在物流系统分散；管理人才缺乏，从业人员素质不高；企业规模小、设施落后；第三方物流落后等问题．因此，作者提出了建立统一的物流主管部门；普及物流知识，培训物流人才；抓好物流科技进步，加强基础设施建设，推进以信息化、标准化为重点的物流现代化建设；大力发展第三方物流业等针对性措施。