Intrateam competition is an inherently social and interactional process, yet it is not often studied as such. Research on competition is mostly limited to studying it as an individual state and assumes that the resulting team outcomes are equivalent across different competition types. Often overlooked in competition research are the means through which competition can lead to constructive outcomes for the team. Constructive competition occurs when the primary motivation is not to win at the expense of others, but rather (...) to make social comparisons and gain knowledge of relative competence. This study furthers insight into constructive competition by studying its interpersonal characteristics as it develops within a team, and its impact on task conflict, perceived performance, and team satisfaction. The conversations of 24 student project teams were recorded over 4 weeks and analyzed, operationalizing competition as an attempt to exert control and influence on the team. Each individual then provided sociometric ratings of perceived performance of each team member, and rated the level of task conflict and satisfaction of the team. The effects of competition on perceived performance and team satisfaction, both directly and indirectly through task conflict, were examined. Findings demonstrated a negative direct effect of competition on the range of perceived performance ratings, and a positive indirect effect of competition on team satisfaction as mediated through task conflict. The study broadens understanding on the construct of competition and underscores the positive implications competition can bring to the teams. (shrink)

In the context of health care system complexity, nurses need responsive leadership and organizational support to maintain intrinsic motivation, moral sensitivity and a caring stance in the delivery of patient care. The current complexity of nurses’ work environment promotes decreases in work motivation and moral satisfaction, thus creating motivational and ethical dissonance in practice. These and other work-related factors increase emotional stress and burnout for nurses, prompting both new and seasoned nurse professionals to leave their current position, or even the (...) profession. This article presents a theoretical conceptual model for professional nurses to review and make sense of the ethical reasoning skills needed to maintain a caring stance in relation to the competing values that must coexist among nurses, health care administrators, patients and families in the context of the complex health care work environments in which nurses are expected to practice. A model, Nurses’ Ethical Reasoning Skills, is presented as a framework for nurses’ thinking through and problem solving ethical issues in clinical practice in the context of complexity in health care. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Kathryn Kein 671 Kathryn Kein Recovering Our Sense of Humor: New Directions in Feminist Humor Studies At the 2014 annual meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA), the Humor Studies Caucus held a panel titled “Female Comedians and the Critical Power of Laughter.” After listening to presentations on Gilda Radner, Lily Tomlin, and Black women comedians’ 1960s comedy albums, one audience (...) member asked the panel if the classic theories of humor—Freud’s theory of the joke, Bergson’s thoughts on laughter (all conceived of in relation to the work of men)—applied when analyzing female comedic performers. One panelist immediately responded that she found none of those theories useful to her work on female comedians, and that instead she used queer theory to aid her analysis. This exchange at ASA points to many of the questions that scholars of humor and feminism are currently facing as they work to address a dearth of scholarship dealing with women, feminism, and comedy. The nods in agreement around the room spoke to the notion that scholarship on the topic of women in comedy is not merely filling in gaps, but breaking new ground. With a few notable exceptions, scholars have been relatively silent on topics involving women and/in comedy.1 The meager 1. See Susanne Lavin, Women and Comedy in Solo Performance: Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin, and Roseanne (New York: Routledge, 2004); June Sochen, ed., Women’s Comic Visions (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991); John Limon, “Skirting, Kidding: Ellen Degeneres and Paula Poundstone,” in 672 Kathryn Kein scholarly space devoted to feminism and humor is likely shaped by the fraught relationship women and feminism have had with humor in our cultural imagination. Women have long battled a perception that they, as a sex, are biologically not funny. Men have always vastly outnumbered women on stand-up stages and in comedy writers’ rooms. Former Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts recalled that star John Belushi, being of the “chicks-aren’t-funny” school, often requested that the women writers be fired.2 In her bestselling Bossypants, Tina Fey recalls that the gender imbalance of the sketch comedy teams at Chicago’s Second City were due to the fact that directors believed “the audience doesn’t want to see a scene between two women.”3 In his 2007 piece in Vanity Fair brashly titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Christopher Hitchens went so far as to call women and humor “antithetical.”4 In particular, feminist women have been painted as humorless and unable to take a joke. In The Promise of Happiness, Sarah Ahmed, defining her figure of the feminist killjoy, observes that “feminists are typically represented as grumpy his Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 2. For further accounts of women comedy writers’ and performers’ experiences, see Yael Kohen, We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy: A Very Oral History (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2012). 3. Tina Fey, Bossypants (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2011), 87. 4. Christopher Hitchens, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Vanity Fair 557 (2007): 54 Books Discussed in This Essay All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents. By Rebecca Krefting. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics. By Linda Mizejewski. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. The Queer Cultural Work of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner. By Jennifer Reed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kathryn Kein 673 and humorless.”5 In a variation of the age-old joke, when a jokester asks, “How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?” the respondent doesn’t say “How many?” but instead deadpans, “That’s not funny.” In different ways, the three books reviewed in this essay take up the conversation at ASA and tackle these same questions: How do we analyze humor produced by (and for?) women when our understanding of humor is decidedly male? What omissions have the gendered assumptions about humor caused in scholarship on feminism? How does humor work to address these assumptions? And how does the backdrop of these assumptions influence the comedy... (shrink)

Swiss and Japanese villagers have learned the relative benefi ts and costs of privateproperty and communal-property institutions related to various types of land and uses of land. The villagers in both settings have chosen to retain the institution of communal property as the foundation for land use and similar important aspects of village economies.1..

In the past ten years, work by K€olbel, MacFarlane, Richard and others has rekindled old debates on relativism. In this important contribution to those debates, the authors defend a ‘mainstream’ view about the contents of thought and talk that they call Simplicity against the assaults from such ‘analytic relativists’.

Dieser Buchtitel ist Teil des Digitalisierungsprojekts Springer Book Archives mit Publikationen, die seit den Anfängen des Verlags von 1842 erschienen sind. Der Verlag stellt mit diesem Archiv Quellen für die historische wie auch die disziplingeschichtliche Forschung zur Verfügung, die jeweils im historischen Kontext betrachtet werden müssen. Dieser Titel erschien in der Zeit vor 1945 und wird daher in seiner zeittypischen politisch-ideologischen Ausrichtung vom Verlag nicht beworben.

This book contains programmatic essays that focus on broad-ranging proposals for re-envisioning a discipline of comparative philosophy of religions. It also contains a number of case studies focussing on the interpretation of particular religio-historical data from comparatively oriented philosophical perspectives.

Biology is seen not merely as a privileged oppressor of women but as a co-victim of masculinist social assumptions. We see feminist critique as one of the normative controls that any scientist must perform whenever analyzing data, and we seek to demonstrate what has happened when this control has not been utilized. Narratives of fertilization and sex determination traditionally have been modeled on the cultural patterns of male/female interaction, leading to gender associations being placed on cells and their components. We (...) also find that when gender biases are controlled, new perceptions of these intracellular and extracellular relationships emerge. (shrink)

We would like to open some questions here about the institutional and cultural conditions of anything that might be called cultural studies or multiculturalism. By introducing cultural studies and multiculturalism many intellectuals aim at a more democratic culture. We share this aim. In this essay, however, we would like to argue that the projects of cultural studies and multiculturalism require: a more international model of cultural studies than the dominant Anglo-American versions; renewed attention to the institutional environments of cultural studies; (...) and a questioning of the relations between multiculturalism and identity politics. We seek less to “fix” these problems than to provide a critical analysis of the languages, the methods of criticism, and the assumptions about identity, culture, and politics that present the problems to us. Because the thickets entangling what our group calls cultural studies are so deeply rooted in Western academia, which to a large degree constitutes our own group, the counterexample of cultural criticism in other contexts can be more than usually instructive. We begin by considering the position of cultural studies in China, since our group includes a number of Chinese intellectuals, on whose experience the following section is largely based. The Chicago Cultural Studies Group began meeting in June 1990. It includes Lauren Berlant, David Bunn, Vinay Dharwadker, Norma Field, Dilip Gaonkar, Marilyn Ivy, Benjamin Lee, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Xinmin Liu, Mathew Roberts, Sharon Stephens, Katie Trumpener, Greg Urban, Michael Warner, Jianyang Zha, and Jueliang Zhou. (shrink)

“Poland 2050” Report is a publication of a distinctive sort. While the idea of producingthis report has a long history, it began to take shape about two years ago. It isbased on the two tenets. The first, raised at numerous conferences held in the past underthe auspices of the “Poland 2000 Plus” Committee, is the conviction that economicgrowth does not transpose automatically into societal (or more broadly “civilizational”)advancement. Indeed, the preliminary analysis has indicated that the two processes are,in fact, divergent. (...) While there have been convergent processes evident in Poland’s andthe EU’s economic domains, no such convergence is significantly evident in the case ofsocietal progress. This gave rise to the vision set forth in this Report, formulated as“minimizing Poland’s developmental gap with respect to the more advanced EU states.”The second tenet upon which this Report is based is even more important. Numerousanalyses carried out by the Committee indicate that quantitative changes cannot bepredicted four decades in advance with great likelihood. And so, we did not base ourReport on existing quantitative trends, but rather on analysis of the pathways that willmake it possible to minimize Poland’s developmental gap with respect to the advancedEU states. The Report also strives to highlight threats that exist in the social and “civilizational”sphere.The Report was based on the materials published in the three volumes of the publicationWizja przyszłości Polski – Studia i Analizy [A Vision of Poland’s Future—Studies and Analyses], vol. 1: Społeczeństwo i państwo [Society and State], vol. 2: Gospodarkai środowisko [Economy and Environment], and vol. 3: Ekspertyzy [ExpertStudies]. (shrink)

“Poland 2050” Report is a publication of a distinctive sort. While the idea of producingthis report has a long history, it began to take shape about two years ago. It isbased on the two tenets. The first, raised at numerous conferences held in the past underthe auspices of the “Poland 2000 Plus” Committee, is the conviction that economicgrowth does not transpose automatically into societal (or more broadly “civilizational”)advancement. Indeed, the preliminary analysis has indicated that the two processes are,in fact, divergent. (...) While there have been convergent processes evident in Poland’s andthe EU’s economic domains, no such convergence is significantly evident in the case ofsocietal progress. This gave rise to the vision set forth in this Report, formulated as“minimizing Poland’s developmental gap with respect to the more advanced EU states.”The second tenet upon which this Report is based is even more important. Numerousanalyses carried out by the Committee indicate that quantitative changes cannot bepredicted four decades in advance with great likelihood. And so, we did not base ourReport on existing quantitative trends, but rather on analysis of the pathways that willmake it possible to minimize Poland’s developmental gap with respect to the advancedEU states. The Report also strives to highlight threats that exist in the social and “civilizational”sphere.The Report was based on the materials published in the three volumes of the publicationWizja przyszłości Polski – Studia i Analizy [A Vision of Poland’s Future—Studies and Analyses], vol. 1: Społeczeństwo i państwo [Society and State], vol. 2: Gospodarkai środowisko [Economy and Environment], and vol. 3: Ekspertyzy [ExpertStudies]. (shrink)