The Effect of Negotiation Practices on the Relationship between Suppliers and Customers

This article examines the effects of negotiation practices, such as coercion and contract formality, on how suppliers and customers perceived the resulting business relationship. We conducted a purchasing negotiation simulation with students in a classroom setting in which participants competed for resources in a mock supply-chain context. The participants were surveyed at key stages of the ongoing negotiation in order to measure their behaviors as a customer–supplier relationship developed. The data were used to test several hypotheses developed from the marketing and purchasing literature. The hypotheses were analyzed using structural equation modeling.
Results demonstrated that the use of coercive techniques by negotiators during negotiation had a negative effect on satisfaction. In addition, the findings showed that, as expected, negotiators entering a negotiation with a cooperative orientation would tend to avoid the use of coercive practices during negotiation. The cooperative orientation also exhibited an unexpected positive effect on the formalization of the design of the contract between the parties. This study contributes to the current knowledge base focusing on the creation of agreements between companies and will, we hope, encourage the integration of suppliers and customers in an operating context within a supply-chain setting.     

A Qualitative Study of Young Women’s Abusive First Relationships: What Factors Shape their Process of Disclosure?

Journal of Family Violence - We qualitatively explored young women’s intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization within abusive first relationships (characterized by physical IPV, coercive...     

Recommendations for Maintaining a Dermestid Beetle Colony (Dermestes maculatus) for Processing Human Remains

Dermestid beetles (Dermestes maculatus De Geer 1774) are small carrion insects characterized by a rounded or oval-shaped body and white abdomen with black markings. Given their natural propensity to consume soft tissue throughout various stages of decomposition, biological anthropologists have sought to use dermestids as a forensic processing method in addition to traditional chemical tissue removal techniques. Although useful, most of the existing academic literature regarding the upkeep of dermestid colonies for skeletal remains processing either lack specificity or are outdated. Additionally, nonacademic sources that contain information regarding dermestid maintenance are often disjointed, resulting in a difficulty to replicate habitat construction and ideal environmental conditions. Therefore, this technical note presents recommendations for anthropologists interested in establishing and maintaining a D. maculatus population. These recommendations are based on our experiences using several dermestid colonies to process five unembalmed human heads, procured from an anatomical gift company for a larger study on gunshot trauma. Aspects of the dermestids’ environment that are crucial for the management of a healthy colony include the type of bedding, food, water, and containment method used, in addition to maintaining appropriate temperature ranges (24–27°C) and humidity levels (35–73%). Although habitat construction and dermestid maintenance involve materials that are relatively inexpensive and readily available, setting up and maintaining a D. maculatus colony can be laborious and time consuming and should only be undertaken when the volume of casework is such that this investment would be offset.     

Divergent Paths to Martyrdom and Significance Among Suicide Attackers

This research used open source information to investigate the motivational backgrounds of 219 suicide attackers from various regions of the world. We inquired as to whether the attackers exhibited evidence for significance quest as a motive for their actions, and whether the eradication of significance loss and/or the aspiration for significance gain systematically differed according to attackers’ demographics. It was found that the specific nature of the significance quest motive varied in accordance with attackers’ gender, age, and education. Whereas Arab-Palestinians, males, younger attackers, and more educated attackers seem to have been motivated primarily by the possibility of significance gain, women, older attackers, those with little education, and those hailing from other regions seem to have been motivated primarily by the eradication of significance loss. Analyses also suggested that the stronger an attacker’s significance quest motive, the greater the effectiveness of their attack, as measured by the number of casualties. Methodological limitations of the present study were discussed, and the possible directions for further research were indicated.     

Religion,Same-Sex Desire,and the Imagined Geographies of Empire: the case of Constance Maynard (1849–1935)

Although a devout Evangelical, living in an era that largely predated the dissemination of sexological discourses of female same-sex desire, Constance Maynard (1849–1935), the prominent Victorian educational reformer, pursued a series of same-sex relationships. This essay focuses on Maynard's relationship with the Anglo-Irish Marion Wakefield (1876–1956), exploring the role of Maynard's erotic imagination in the constitution, contestation, and consolidation of the imagined geographies of imperialist discourse. Maynard's erotic positioning of her lover in diverse imperial landscapes reveals the ostensibly ‘private’ discourses of the erotic imagination to be profoundly implicated in the ‘public’ discourses of empire. At the same time, the domestic settings in which these landscapes were imagined and in which the women's illicit desires were enacted, pose a challenge to the gendered spatial dichotomies—private/public, domestic/imperial, and home/away—of both imperialist discourse and the historiography of empire.