A Longitudinal Investigation of Cognitive Self-schemas across Adolescent Development

Research in developmental psychology highlights youth’s self-schemas as one possible pathway to improve adolescents’ functioning and promote positive developmental outcomes. Despite this, the trajectory of positive and negative self-schemas is relatively understudied. This study addresses this limitation by empirically examining the trajectory of self-schemas in a community sample of 623 youth (M?=?13.04 years; 54% female; 49% African American, 4% Biracial, 47% European American) who were followed over a seven-year period. Caregivers completed measures of parenting practices, maternal rumination and negative inferential style, and adolescents completed a computerized behavioral task assessing self-schemas (i.e., mental frameworks that guide attention, interpretation, and memory of one’s experiences). Multilevel growth curve modeling results demonstrated a quadratic slope for negative self-schemas and no mean-level change for positive self-schemas. These trajectories did not vary by gender or racial group. However, parenting factors differentially influenced the trajectories. Specifically, higher levels of parental involvement at baseline, or an active interest and engagement in a child’s experiences and activities, related to lower levels of negative self-schemas during adolescence. Additionally, higher levels of parental rumination and parental negative control at baseline related to lower levels of youth positive self-schemas at baseline. These findings contribute to models of youth cognitive development.

     

Comparing Affective Commitment in the Public and Private Sectors: A Comprehensive Test of Multiple Mediation Effects

Employees’ organizational commitment is associated with a number of positive outcomes, such as employee motivation, job satisfaction, productivity, and retention. But previous research has suggested that there may be important sector differences in both commitment and its explanations, yet results are very mixed. We study sector differences in affective organizational commitment among 1,043 public and private office workers who perform very similar tasks across sectors, testing the influence of factors thought to explain commitment and expected to vary between the sectors. We propose that the mixed results are due to different variables mediating the relationship between sector and organizational commitment. Conducting a multiple mediation analysis, we find that more hierarchy negatively mediates the relationship between public sector employment and organizational commitment. On the other hand, the relationship between public sector employment and organizational commitment is positively mediated by public service motivation and participatory management. This highlights the importance of not only studying simple sector differences, but also including relevant individual and organizational-level variables that can explain the mechanisms behind such differences.     

Housing Decisions Among Homeless Families Involved in the Child Welfare System

The present study embedded a qualitative substudy within a randomized controlled trial of housing services for child welfare-involved families to examine housing decisions made in the face of homelessness and child protection. Participants included a representative sample of caregivers (n = 19) randomized to receive the Family Unification Program—a permanent housing intervention for inadequately housed families under investigation for child abuse or neglect—or child welfare services as usual. Qualitative interviews 12 months after randomization assessed housing decision-making processes involved in keeping families safe and stable. Results indicated a push–pull dynamic that constrained housing choices regardless of whether permanent housing was made available. Caregiver housing decisions were constrained by time limitations, affordability, and access to services, whereas child and family safety was perceived as less important. Findings emphasize the need for housing-informed child welfare services to ensure the long-term safety of children in families experiencing homelessness.     

Low-Hanging Fruit: Leadership,Perceived Prosocial Impact,and Employee Motivation

Transformational leadership affects public service motivation, but little is known about the context dependency of this association. If citizen contact and, therefore, relative perceived impacts on others and society differ, the association between transformational leadership and motivation is also expected to differ. Analyzing public employees and their leaders from four organizational contexts, we find that employees have relatively higher perceived impact on others and are more user-oriented in contexts with high citizen contact. The association between transformational leadership and employee motivation also depends on employees’ perceived impact, implying that some fruit hangs lower than other when leaders try to increase employee motivation.     

The Two Pluralisms in Norway

In most countries of Western Europe including Norway, the last decades have transformed the population as a whole to become both more secular and more religiously plural. This has had consequences on many levels, and is still being processed. For state institutions and for the civil society including faith communities, it has clearly entailed legal, political, and social changes. The growing plurality has also challenged alleged mono-cultural perceptions of religions, and established many new discourses on religion, values, and diversity as such. In this essay I will first briefly discuss the present situation in Norway regarding religious pluralism and relate it to interpretations of secularity particularly relevant to the Norwegian context. Then I will go more thoroughly into the concept of interreligious dialogue and ways to understand this phenomenon as one of faith communities’ responses to religious plurality. As a social practice that may provide insight in how religious plurality is negotiated in a dialogue – it may be described as a practical exploration of religious plurality from the inside - but also how it may project positions towards various understandings of secularity. Peter Berger’s concept of “The two pluralisms” and his request for theorizing on plurality rather than secularity opens up further exploration of interreligious relations such as interreligious dialogue, and it may provide researchers working empirically in this field with new insights in their studies. This contribution will not contest Berger’s suggestion of “the two pluralisms” but rather explore it further through empirical studies and suggested models of interreligious dialogue.     

Learning to live with irregular migration: towards a more ambitious debate on the politics of ‘the problem’

What might be gained by learning to live with ‘the problem’ of irregular migration, rather than attempting to solve it? This article engages two senses of ‘the problem’ at stake: first, the ongoing nature of displacement and migration and second, the contested justice claims that sit behind different policy perspectives. The second sense of the problem (its political dimension) is rarely addressed explicitly in public debate. Yet direct engagement with the political dimension offers the potential to unlock debate from a polarised impasse. To make this argument, I first diagnose debate on irregular migration in terms of three archetypal positions and examine their implicit justice claims. I then argue for a more ambitious debate that pushes contending justice claims to their logical extensions. Debate of this kind requires a more coherent defence of justice claims, whether they are based in communitarian, cosmopolitan, anti-capitalist or hybrid values with respect to citizenship and political community. The article concludes with an illustration of how this approach can generate momentum for less circular, more sustainable and politically achievable policy responses. The argument is made with reference to illustrative examples from Australia and Europe but holds for a variety of contexts where ‘the problem’ is framed in similar ways.     

Do Partners in PPPs view Public and Private Management Differently?

Differences between public and private management have been studied extensively by comparing sectors, but not within cross‐sectoral collaborative arrangements. As participants in such arrangements have actually experienced both management styles, examining their perceptions of how these styles differ may contribute innovatively to existing literature. This paper compares such perceptions between public and private sector project members (N = 63) involved in four PPPs in the Netherlands. We assess (1) to what extent and under which conditions these project members view public and private management differently and (2) how they evaluate these differences. By triangulating quantitative and qualitative interview data, we examine Boyne's classical hypotheses and find that more than two‐thirds of the statements making reference to these hypotheses offer support for them; more so, the vast majority of such statements evaluate sectoral differences negatively. Intriguingly, type of PPP is a stronger determinant of perceived differences than the manager's sector of origin.     

Innovation and standardization as drivers of companies’ success in public procurement: an empirical analysis

The Journal of Technology Transfer - There is a significant potential to improve the benefits from public procurement through a better understanding of drivers in company success at the...     

Jean Batten and ‘the Accident of Sex’

Through the critical analysis of visual and verbal texts, this essay offers a sighting of New Zealand aviator Jean Batten—one of the greatest women solo flyers of the twentieth century to ‘disappear’. Unlike US flyer Amelia Earhart whose disappearance some miles off Howland Island in the South Pacific prompted endless search and research, Jean Batten’s disappearance from stage and page of flight history engendered no such interest until the late 1980s when a documentary film (1988) and the first book‐length biography (1990) were published by Ian Mackersey. Although important contributions to understanding Jean Batten’s place in aviation history of the twentieth century, Mackersey’s construction of Batten’s life relies heavily upon a psychological interpretation of character and action that is largely removed from and uninformed by gendered history. Hence, an important aim of this essay is to offer an analysis of the impact ‘the accident of sex’ (a phrase coined by Earhart) and the performance of gender had and continues to have upon ‘the life’ of Jean Batten.