Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

"At The Very Beginning, There's This Dream." The Role Of Utopia In The Workings Of Local And Cryptocurrencies, Diane-Laure Arjalies

Business Publications

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the number of alternative currencies aiming at transforming global financial institutions, such as local and complementary currencies (LCC) and cryptocurrencies, has exploded. Yet the motivations and workings of such monies are relatively unknown. This chapter aims to fill this gap by providing a framework that uncovers the ideals pursued by alternative currencies, and the effects of those ideals on the production of money. To do so, I present a comparative analysis of the valuation infrastructure – the processes through which value(s) is produced – of one LCC, Sol Violette, and three cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ğ1 …

What Trees Taught Me About Covid-19: On Relational Accounting And Other Magic, Diane-Laure Arjalies

Business Publications

While the world was on lock down, human beings started craving for green spaces. As they walked amidst the trees, trees began to talk to them. The surprising truth then emerged: There were actually secrets to be shared by the forest. This essay reflects on the teachings offered by nature(s) during the pandemic. Based on a personal encounter with a river, it caresses the relationships that have connected humans to non-humans over time and that have led to make this confinement both a unique and universal experience. It suggests embracing relational accounting, the expression of our relationships with each other …

The Experiential Learning Connections Between University And Community: Recent Ontario Experience, Emmanuel Asafo-Adjei

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Experiential Learning (EL), including a range of pedagogical approaches such as co-ops and community service learning, connect the university and its external community. Universities are considering such approaches to meet a number of needs and priorities both on and off-campus. As it unfolds rapidly at the present time, EL becomes the connection between the university and the community beyond its gates, both locally and more extensively. However, university-community or so-called town-gown (TG) connections traditionally focus on research and/or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This thesis focuses on the teaching and learning connections, especially in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences …

A Framework For Considering Dissociative Identity Effects In Consumption, Bonnie Simpson, Lea Dunn, Katherine White

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This chapter examines the mirror image of the identity association principle: dissociation. While the association principle posits that stimuli associated with a positively regarded identity receive more positive evaluations, the dissociation principle suggests that stimuli associated with negatively regarded identities will receive negative evaluations and be abandoned. The authors focus on the nature of dissociative reference groups or groups that the consumer is motivated to avoid association with, and present a framework outlining how dissociative influence can impact consumer behavior. They review the literature on dissociative influence and note that although dissociative reference groups often spur avoidance behaviors, they can …

Essays On The Economics Of Digital Piracy, Zhuang Liu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My thesis consists of three chapters relating to the economics of digital piracy. Digital piracy is a debated topic catching tremendous academic and public attention. My studies contribute to the understanding of the impact of digital piracy on legitimate sales revenue with a focus on the motion picture industry.

In my first chapter, I examine the effects of screener piracy on the movie box office. Screeners are movie copies sent to critics and industry professionals for evaluation purposes. Sometimes, screeners are leaked and made available to download on the Internet. This chapter exploits the plausibly exogenous variation of file sharing/piracy …

Stress And Well-Being At The Consumer-Employee Interface, Bonnie Simpson, Madelynn Stackhouse, Katherine White

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Although stress has become a prominent research theme in consumer behavior and occupational health, to the authors knowledge there is only one review on the relationship between consumer behavior and stress (i.e., when internal and external factors exceed an individual’s resources and endangering the individual’s well-being) and this was published 10 years ago. Further, research on occupational stress has yet to be fully integrated into the consumer stress literature. In this chapter, the authors attempt to advance research on consumer stress by a drawing on a satisfaction mirror framework which outlines that consumers and employees influence each other through a …

Product Categories As Judgment Devices: The Moral Awakening Of The Investment Industry, Diane-Laure Arjaliès, Rodolphe Durand

Business Publications

Product categories are more than classification devices that organize markets; when reflecting market actors' purposes, they are also judgment devices. Taking stock of the literature on product categories and drawing on the distinction between the faculties of knowing and judging, we elaborate a framework that accounts for how and why market actors include or exclude normative attributes in a product category definition. Based on a field study of the development of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) funds in France, we describe the phases and conditions of a judgment framework for category definition, for both established and nascent categories. We discuss implications …

Peering Inside The ‘Black Box’: The Impact Of Management-Side Representatives On The Industrial Relations Climate Of Organizations, Shelagh Campbell, Johanna Weststar

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

The labor climate of an organization can have a great impact on productivity and efficiency. Managing this climate is often left to union stewards and management-side labor relations representatives. While there is a large literature on the role of union stewards, little is written about the role that management-side labor relations representatives play in establishing or maintaining positive labor-management relations. Building from a series of interviews with labor relations representatives in Canada and a nationwide pilot study of frontline industrial relations workers, we model the role of the labor relations representatives and their specific job actions in the established model …

Building Momentum For Collectivity In The Digital Games Community, Johanna Weststar, Marie-Josee Legault

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Studies of digital game labor have tended to document problems in the working lives of developers while devoting relatively limited attention to solutions, or to collective representation as a step toward solutions. An increasing number of game developers are dissatisfied with their working conditions, and dissatisfaction is a necessary condition for workers to engage in collective action to gain the representational power needed to achieve change in the workplace. Noting that the landscape of collective mobilization in the game industry has not yet been systematically mapped, this article documents collective actions over the past five decades, and asks, “Are the …

Valuation And Risk Management Of Some Longevity And P&C Insurance Products, Yixing Zhao

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Numerous insurance products linked to risky assets have emerged rapidly in the last couple of decades. These products have option-embedded features and typically involve at least two risk factors, namely interest and mortality risks. The need for models to capture risk factors' behaviours accurately is enormous and critical for insurance companies. The primary objective of this thesis is to develop pricing and hedging frameworks for option-embedded longevity products addressing correlated risk factors. Various methods are employed to facilitate the computation of prices and risk measures of longevity products including those with maturity benefits. Furthermore, in order to be prepared for …

Towards Transparency : A Report On Piloting The Invest-Ed Tool On Private Sector Investment In Education With Philanthropic And Impact Investing Actors In Asia, Prachi Srivastava, Robyn Read

Education Publications

The market size of global education is estimated to reach USD 10 trillion by 2030. Concurrently, there has been a growth in private-sector engagement in education generally, the sector occupying the top priority for many private investors operating in Asia. However, there is a paucity of concrete data and little transparency in reporting, inhibiting knowledge-sharing. The central concern of this pilot project was to develop an openly accessible tool to begin to fill these gaps.

This report provides a detailed overview of the process of developing and piloting Invest-ED with philanthropic and impact investing actors supporting education in Asia. Invest-ED …

How Co-Creation Increases Employee Corporate Social Responsibility And Organizational Engagement: The Moderating Role Of Self-Construal, Bonnie Simpson, Jennifer Robertson, Katherine White

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This research merges literature from organizational behavior and marketing to garner insight into how organizations can maximize the benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) for enhanced CSR and organizational engagement of employees. Across two field experiments, the authors demonstrate that the effectiveness of employee co-creation activities in increasing employees’ positive CSR perceptions is moderated by self-construal (i.e., whether an individual views the self as relatively independent from or interdependent with others). In particular, the positive effect of co-creation on CSR perceptions emerges only for employees with a salient interdependent self-construal (either measured as an individual difference or experimentally manipulated). Moreover, …

"At The Very Beginning, There's This Dream." The Role Of Utopia In The Workings Of Local And Cryptocurrencies, Diane-Laure Arjaliès

Business Publications

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the number of alternative currencies aiming at transforming global financial institutions, such as local and complementary currencies (LCC) and cryptocurrencies, has exploded. Yet the motivations and workings of such monies are relatively unknown. This chapter aims to fill this gap by providing a framework that uncovers the ideals pursued by alternative currencies, and the effects of those ideals on the production of money. To do so, I present a comparative analysis of the valuation infrastructure – the processes through which value(s) is produced – of one LCC, Sol Violette, and three cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ğ1 …

Product Categories As Judgment Devices: The Moral Awakening Of The Investment Industry, Diane-Laure Arjalies

Business Publications

Product categories are more than classification devices that organize markets; when reflecting market actors' purposes, they are also judgment devices. Taking stock of the literature on product categories and drawing on the distinction between the faculties of knowing and judging, we elaborate a framework that accounts for how and why market actors include or exclude normative attributes in a product category definition. Based on a field study of the development of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) funds in France, we describe the phases and conditions of a judgment framework for category definition, for both established and nascent categories. We discuss implications …

Women's Experiences On The Path To A Career In Game Development, Johanna Weststar, Marie-Josee Legault

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This chapter seeks to identify whether there is a dominant, presupposed career pipeline to a career in game development and then looks for women and women’s experiences at each stage of that pipeline. It concludes that a dominant pipeline does exist and that this pathway both disadvantages women who attempt it and marginalizes other pathways. Along the way women deal with obstacles that can delegitimize their choices and experiences and/or make the assumed pathway inhospitable. This chapter relies on published literature as well as data from the 2014 and 2015 Developer Satisfaction Surveys (DSS) conducted by the International Game Developers …

Examining Rating Source Differences In Narrative Performance Feedback, Kevin Doyle

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of the present study was to examine the narrative feedback quality and content of comments from supervisors, peers, and subordinates in a multisource performance feedback context. Research on performance management interventions tends to focus on issues such as rater training, scale development, scale formats, and reducing test and rater bias. However, other components in performance management interventions have received little attention, including narrative feedback. Narrative feedback takes the form of written comments describing the ratee’s performance on different dimensions. The narrative feedback quality variables included favorability, specificity, goal content, and feedback length. Predictor variables of narrative feedback quality …

Invisible Labour: Support-Service Workers In India’S Information Technology Industry, Indranil Chakraborty

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The dissertation investigates the life, working conditions and urban experience of support-service workers in the Information Technology (IT) sector of India: the janitors, security guards, fast food delivery service professionals and car pool drivers who work in and around technology parks that develop software applications for a world-market. The common experiences of these employees are migration from rural contexts to a radically modern employment setting, where they work long hours with minimal benefits in informal conditions that often violate basic labour laws. The thesis draws on quantitative and qualitative research, and in particular on analysis and interpretation of hundred and …

When Public Recognition For Charitable Giving Backfires: The Role Of Independent Self-Construal, Bonnie Simpson, Katherine White, Juliano Laran

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This research examines the effectiveness of public recognition in encouraging charitable giving, demonstrating that public recognition can sometimes decrease donations. While previous work has largely shown that making donations visible to others can motivate donors, the present research shows that the effectiveness of public recognition depends on whether potential donors are under an independent (i.e., separate from others) or interdependent (i.e., connected with others) self-construal. Across seven experimental studies, an independent self-construal decreases donation intentions and amounts when the donor will receive public recognition compared to when the donation will remain private. This effect is driven by the activation of …

Organizational Behaviour During Instability: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Shared Mental Model Through Various Forms Of Acute Care Learning Using Mixed Methods, Adam Morse, Ryan Chan

Western Research Forum

Background: The purpose of this study is to better understand nurses' performance based on training processes. This will determine if group training will increase performance compared to independent training through a shared mental model in a contextual setting of unpredictability mediated by the effects of nurses’ perceptions of patient safety climate. A mixed methods study is conducted using critical discourse analysis of organizational documentation and semi-structured interviews to determine measures of contextual setting when identifying and treating sex trade workers.

Methods: Pragmatic study will analyze two groups of 125 nurses each determining the impact of group and individual …

Revisiting M&M With Taxes: An Alternative Equilibrating Process, Zhichuan Li, Kenneth J. Kopecky, Timothy F. Sugrue, Alan Tucker

Business Publications

Modigliani and Miller present an equity-quantity shifting equilibrating process to achieve an optimal firm value in the presence of corporate taxes. However, in the era in which they derived their various propositions regarding the relation between a firm’s value and its capital structure, well-capitalized takeover specialists including private equity firms and sovereign funds did not exist, at least by today’s standards. In this paper we develop a simple arbitrage strategy, made viable by the presence of takeover firms, which presents an alternative equilibrating process to achieve the same optimal firm value. This alternative process is markedly different from that of …

Why Might A Video Game Developer Join A Union?, Johanna Weststar, Marie-Josee Legault

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This paper contributes to the union renewal literature by examining the union voting propensity of workers in the high-tech tertiary sector of videogame development toward different forms of unionization. We used exclusive data from a survey of videogame developers (VGD) working primarily in Anglo-Saxon countries. When looking at the factors related to voting propensity, our data indicated that the type of unionism matters and that industry/sectoral unionism is an increasingly salient model for project-based knowledge workers. This is an important policy dimension given that the legal structures and norms in Anglo-Saxon countries still tend to support decentralized enterprise-based unionism. It …

Mindfulness And Individual Error Orientation In High Reliability Organizations, Ellen Choi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Mindfulness is a concept drawn from the contemplative traditions that refers to present-moment, non-judgmental awareness. Exactly how applicable mindfulness is in the workplace requires further empirical validation, particularly on outcomes immediately relevant to organizations. This study contributes to literature examining the effects of mindfulness in organizational settings by considering the effects of an 8-week workplace mindfulness training program in a high-reliability organization (hospital) on individual error orientation, an individual’s propensity to learn from error, worry about error, or hide error. This study adds to the current state of knowledge by providing further insight into why one holds a particular error …

Videogame Developers Among 'Extreme Workers': Are Death Marches Over?, Marie-Josee Legault, Johanna Weststar

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Purpose: The videogame industry is a work environment that is emblematic of O’Carroll’s (2015) encompassing model of a 24/7/365 working time model of flexibility. We use O’Carroll’s model to challenge two myths about videogame developers (VGDs): the long hours of work are in fact unpredictable hours, and flextime HR programs do not allow for real control over working hours.

Design/methodology/approach: We use a mixed methods approach (international online survey and 100 Canadian interviews) to analyse the case of VGDs - a different, but similar type of worker to the IT workers analysed by O’Carroll.

Findings: We can generalize O’Carroll’s model …

Building An Ecology Of Routines: The Central Role Of The Broker, Jeannette A. Eberhard

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Making progress on stubborn social problems, such as street level prostitution, requires local actors to work together in new ways across organizational boundaries. Organizational routines – defined as repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions carried out by multiple actors – are considered one of the primary means through which organizations accomplish the work they do. In my thesis, I argue that an important way to tackle stubborn social problems is through brokering, across organizational boundaries, to build and coordinate an ecology of routines. To better understand this process, I explore the following questions: How is the role of broker established? …

Extreme Risk And Small Investor Behavior In Developed Markets, Lorne N. Switzer, Jun Wang, Seungho Lee

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This paper examines the responses of small investors of ten developed markets as they are exposed to extreme risk. We focus on mutual fund flows that are induced by extreme market episodes (measured daily, weekly, and monthly) versus volatile periods captured by the traditional standard deviation metric. The extreme-day measure captures the behavior of small retail investors in the US and Canada better than the traditional standard deviation measure, based on funds flows to equity mutual funds. The evidence for the other countries of the study is mixed. Small investors in countries in the G-7 with more collective (as opposed …

An Event Based Approach For Quantifying The Effects Of Securities Fraud In The It Industry, Lorne N. Switzer, Jun Wang

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Detecting the incidence and impact of illegal insider trading is a difficult process since access to the actual trading records of insiders that overlap precisely with fraudulent events is difficult. This paper provides a case study of a specific IT stock in Canada that was successfully prosecuted in the Canadian court system for market manipulation and illegal insider trading violations. The study provides a quantification of the impact of insider trading activities by the President directly through his own account or through accounts under his control, and illustrates the impact of some off-exchange transactions by the impugned parties. Overall, the …

P14. Estimating The Effects Of File-Sharing On Movie Box-Office, Zhuang Liu

Western Research Forum

Background:

File-sharing and on-line piracy have caught great public attention. There is a public debate on whether or not we should close torrenting sites like Piratedbay.com. Copyright holders argue yes and claim substantial loss due to filesharing while Pirates claim that file-sharing is welfare-improving and the effects on sale are negligible. Right now no consensus has been reached on how file-sharing affects industry revenue in economics literature.

Methods:

Using a novel dataset of downloads from Bit-Torrent network, this paper quantifies the effects of file-sharing on movie box-office revenue. I estimate a random coefficient demand model of movies to …

The Passion Of Luc Boltanski: The Destiny Of Love, Violence And Institution, Roger Friedland, Diane-Laure Arjaliès

Business Publications

On Justification: Economies of Worth (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991/2006) was a synthetic and comprehensive parsing of common goods, goods that could and had to be justified in public. In response to Bourdieu’s critical sociology, they rather provided a robust and disciplined sociology of critique, the situated requirements of justification. They refused power and violence as integral to the operability of justification. They emphasized the ways in which conventions of worth afforded coordination, not their constitution of or by domination. They refused to make either capitalism, or the state, into primary motors of social order. Indeed, they refused social sphere, structure …

"My Friends, They Are People To Rely On": The Social Foundation Of Business In Ghana, Patrick D. Shulist

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The management and entrepreneurship literatures increasingly engage in poverty alleviation research in the developing world. However, there is a marked tendency to overlook how the Western World, from where most theory comes, differs from the developing world. Such a fallacy has potential deleterious effects on the research itself, but more importantly on the practical applications of that research.

With this in mind, my dissertation uses an inductive qualitative methodology to explore the nature of self-employment in the developing world as it is; that is, not coloured by theoretical priors. In doing this, I lay the groundwork for understanding the …

Nurses' Workplace Social Capital: Development And Validation Of A Self-Report Questionnaire, Emily A. Read

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Background: Social capital refers to resources created by and embedded in social relationships and has been identified as an important aspect of nurses’ work life. There is limited empirical evidence regarding its role and currently no valid and reliable self-report instruments to measure workplace social capital comprehensively.

Purpose: This study aimed to develop and test a self-report questionnaire to measure nurses’ workplace social capital and examine the nomologicial network of the concept including authentic leadership and structural empowerment as precursors of social capital and team effectiveness and patient care quality as outcomes.

Methods: A cross-sectional survey of 1,000 Registered Nurses …