Article
Middle Managers, Personnel Turnover, and Performance : A Long‐Term Field Experiment in a Retail Chain
In a randomized controlled trial, a large retail chain’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) sets new goals for the managers of the treated stores by asking them to “do what they can” to reduce the employee quit rate. The treatment decreases the quit rate by a fifth to a quarter, lasting nine months before petering out, but reappearing after a reminder. There is no treatment effect on sales. Further analysis reveals that treated store managers spend more time on human resources (HR) and less on customer service. Our findings show that middle managers are instrumental in reducing personnel turnover, but they face a trade-off between investing in different activities in a multitasking environment with limited resources. The treatment does produce efficiency gains. However, these occur only at the firm level.
Gastronomic consumption practices are one of the main ways of forming the corporeal human identity, a marker of his/her cultural and social status. Specificity of food as a material medium of symbols and signs, which are assimilate d at the level of the most direct corporeal experience, determines its consumption as a complex system of communication links. Today, the practice of food consumption in the form of fast food is especially relevant and registers new forms and ways of communication, not only gastronomic, but also reflecting power and new gender relations. It can be argued that it is in the form of fast food (Mac-food) the symbolic content of food overcame and absorbed its physical and technical aspects.
This paper investigates the language situation in Moscow schools with an ethnocultural component – a new form of national schools. The analysis is based on interviews which were recorded in 2007, in two Moscow schools, one of them with Armenian ethno-cultural component, and the other, with Azeri. The sample included ten students from each school (five boys and five girls).
In the paper the process of linguistic integration of Azeri and Armenian children into modern Russian society is analyzed. The comparison between these two groups is particularly appealing, because the effects of Soviet Russification, and the language situations in general, were different in Armenia and in Azerbaijan. I show that this difference influences the use of language by Azeri and Armenian children.
Author shows how and why the method of radical interpretation proposed by D. Davidson can solve the problems that are ormulated in a variety of skeptical scenarios. In particular, the method of radical interpretation renders the Cartesian skeptical scenario (both in its traditional and recent versions) obscure and even deprives it of its status of a philosophical problem as such. Appealing to the diberence between intended and unintended lies, one can see how the global skeptical scenario gets solved in both cases. This paper also extends Willard Van Orman Quine’s argument for an expanded version of a naturalized epistemology by introducing social factors to this approach. In addition, there are always at least two necessary limitations imposed by communication on our hypotheses about knowledge and delusion.
This article addresses the questions, What do children in urban areas do on Saturdays? What type of organizational resources do they have access to? Does this vary by social class? Using diary data on children’s activities on Saturdays in the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale metropolitan area, the authors describe the different types of venues (households, businesses, public space, associations, charities, congregations, and government/tribal agencies) that served different types of children. They find that the likelihood of using a charity or business rather than a government or tribal provider increased with family income. Also, the likelihood of using a congregation or a government facility rather than business, charity, or household increased with being Hispanic. The authors discuss implications for the urban division of labor on Saturdays and offer research questions that need further investigation.
The book’s stated objective is to uncover context, “how social capital interacts with social institutions.” It is part of a new wave of research on social capital that, dissatisfied with both macro analyses limited to societal patterns and micro analyses limited to actors’ conditions, seeks to understand the operation of networks at the meso-level: how institutions and organizations structure the transfer of resources across networks. It purports to make both theoretical and methodological contributions, the first by developing the concept of “institutional logics,” the latter by “casting diverse contextual settings as ‘generators’ of social relations”, and studying these contexts from multiple methodological perspectives. (from a review by M. Small)
The article touches upon two innovative approaches to corporate communication. One example deals with the development of information technologies, and the other tells about the elaboration of a principally new, both internal and external, communication system in a company.