PurposeTo explore the mindfulness practice, its long-term effects, facilitators and barriers, in clinical clerkship students 2 years after participation in an 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction training.MethodA qualitative study was performed by semi-structured in-depth interviews with 16 clinical clerkship students selected by purposive sampling. Students had participated in a MBSR training 2 years before and were asked about their current mindfulness practice, and the long-term effects of the MBSR training. Thematic analysis was conducted using the constant comparison method. Data saturation was (...) reached after 16 interviews.ResultsMost interviewees were still engaged in regular, predominantly informal, mindfulness practice, although some discontinued mindfulness practice and reported an “unchanged lifestyle.” Three main themes came forward; “focused attention and open awareness” during daily activities as core elements of long-term mindfulness practice; “changes in behavior and coping” that resulted from taking a pause, reflecting, recognizing automatic behavioral patterns and making space for a conscious response; “integration in personal and professional life” by enhanced enjoyment of daily activities, improved work-life-balance and making different career choices. Barriers and facilitators in starting and maintaining mindfulness practice were understanding and intention as “pre-conditions”; practical, personal, and professional factors of students in maintaining practice.ConclusionTwo years after participation in a MBSR training, many interviewees were still engaged in mindfulness practice contributing to both personal and professional changes. In light of the high clerkship demands, MBSR training could be a valuable addition to medical curricula, supporting medical students in developing necessary competencies to become well-balanced professionals. (shrink)

An important challenge for actors in economic exchange relations concerns dealing with the aftermath of unethical behavior and the violation of trust that such transgressions entail. As transgressions in these relations often result in financial harm for one party, a common restorative approach consists of the transgressor paying a financial compensation to the victim; either voluntarily, or following coercion by a third party (cf. litigation). In the present article, we studied the impact of financial compensations on victims' trust towards the (...) transgressor and examined whether the size of the compensation is relevant to this process. In contrast to out-come-based models in game theory, we predicted that whether larger compensations foster more trust, depends on whether the compensation is provided voluntarily or not. Experimental data from a trust game supported our hypothesis by showing that larger compensations only lead to more trust when the transgressor provided the compensation voluntarily, whereas compensation size had no effect when the transgressor was forced by a third party. (shrink)

As Van Dijk proposed in the first issue of Discourse and Communication, the main purpose of this journal is to bridge the two cross-disciplines of communication and discourse studies. Given this goal, this article sought to help clear the ground for such interdisciplinary development by investigating how organizational researchers use the terms `discourse' and `communication' and cast discourse—communication relationships. By reviewing 112 organizational discourse studies from major journals in communication, organizational studies, and interdisciplinary journals published between 1981 and 2006, (...) this study identified diverse conceptualizations of these basic concepts. The findings help dispel some of the misunderstandings that scholars from one research field may possess toward the other and sort through some, if not all, the confusions regarding the terms `discourse', `communication', and their relationships. (shrink)

The history of ideology and its definition continues to occupy scholars across a range of disciplines. Contrary to the vast volume of earlier work on ideology however, this books provides a challenging new theory of ideology, one that is capable of explaining not only the internal structures of ideologies, but also how ideologies function in society. In formulating theory that is capable of providing the first insights into the internal structures of ideologies while simultaneously explaining how discourse structures may be (...) used in the production and reproduction of ideologies, van Dijk offers a highly important theoretical bridge between the micro and macro structures of society. This book will be essential for all students of discourse studies, communication, social psychology, sociology, and political science. (shrink)

This study examines the effects of publication of financial statements, the risk of a takeover of the auditee and the auditee's financial position on auditors' willingness to allow material errors in financial statements in case of management pressure. The results show that all factors significantly influence auditors' willingness to allow errors in financial statements.

The impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 was the result of a coup of the economically dominant conservative oligarchy against the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores, in power since 2003. The right wing Brazilian media played a crucial role in this coup by manipulating public opinion as well as the politicians who voted against Dilma. In particular, the media of the powerful Globo Corporation, such as O Globo newspaper, and especially Globo’s Jornal Nacional, the pervasive TV news program, systematically (...) demonized and delegitimized Dilma, as well as ex-President Lula and the PT, in their news reports and editorials by selectively associating them with pervasive corruption and attributing the serious economic recession to them. After a summary of this sociopolitical context, and a brief theoretical definition of manipulation, this article examines some of the manipulative strategies of O Globo’s editorials during March and April 2016. (shrink)

European elites are racist, and have been racist for a long time. Their racism is not limited to « words » and « ideas », but constitutes an pervasive and influent social practice which generates, towards the minorities, concrete forms of ethnic inequality and subordination in everyday life.

Imagination is often considered the pinnacle of representational cognition. Looking at the concrete details of imagining in context, this paper aims to contribute to the emerging literature that is challenging this representational view by offering a relational and radically situated alternative. On the basis of observing architects in the process of making an architectural art installation, we show how to consider imagination not as de-contextualized achievement by an individual but as an opening up to larger-scale “affordances,” i.e. the unfolding possibilities (...) for action. We show how the architects coordinate the enactment of multiple affordances across different timescales, from small-scale affordances of picking up a mobile phone to the large-scale affordance of making the installation that takes months to unfold. These affordances get co-determined as they are jointly enacted. It is within this determining process that imagination too finds its place. On our view it is the indeterminacy of multiple affordances unfolding in action simultaneously that can be experienced as imaginative. The indeterminate character of this coordinative process allows activities to widen and open up, letting new possibilities for action enter into them. (shrink)

The smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured for the animal. Koffka made a sharp distinction between the “behavioural environment” and the “geographical (...) environment”. We show how this distinction picks out the difference between the environment as perceived by an individual organism, and the shared publicly available environment. The ecological psychologist James Gibson was later critical of Koffka for inserting a private phenomenal reality in between animals and the shared environment. Gibson tried to make do with just the concept of affordances in his explanation of molar behaviour. We argue however that psychology as a science of molar behaviour will need to make appeal both to the concepts of shared publicly available affordances, and of the multiplicity of relevant affordances that invite an individual to act. A version of Koffka’s distinction between the two environments remains alive today in a distinction we have made between the field and landscape of affordances. Having distinguished the two environments, we go on to provide an account of how the two environments are related. Koffka suggested that the behavioural environment forms out of the causal interaction of the individual with a pre-existing, ready-made geographical environment. We argue that such an account of the relation between the two environments fails to do justice to the complex entanglement of the social with the material aspects of the geographical environment. To better account for this sociomaterial reality of the geographical environment, we propose a process-perspective on our distinction between the landscape and field of affordances. While the two environments can be conceptually distinguished, we argue they should also be viewed as standing in a relation of reciprocal and mutual dependence. (shrink)

In cognitive science, long-term anticipation, such as when planning to do something next year, is typically seen as a form of ‘higher’ cognition, requiring a different account than the more basic activities that can be understood in terms of responsiveness to ‘affordances,’ i.e. to possibilities for action. Starting from architects that anticipate the possibility to make an architectural installation over the course of many months, in this paper we develop a process-based account of affordances that includes long-term anticipation within its (...) scope. We present a framework in which situations and their affordances unfold, and can be thought of as continuing a history of practices into a current situational activity. In this activity affordances invite skilled participants to act further. Via these invitations one situation develops into the other; an unfolding process that sets up the conditions for its own continuation. Central to our process account of affordances is the idea that engaged individuals can be responsive to the direction of the process to which their actions contribute. Anticipation, at any temporal scale, is then part and parcel of keeping attuned to the movement of the unfolding situations to which an individual contributes. We concretize our account by returning to the example of anticipation observed in architectural practice. This account of anticipation opens the door to considering a wide array of human activities traditionally characterized as ‘higher’ cognition in terms of engaging with affordances. (shrink)

In this article the relevance of a sociocognitive approach to discourse is shown by presenting a new theory of context, defined as subjective participants’ constructs of communicative situations, and made explicit in terms of mental models - context models - in Episodic Memory. Through a ‘contextual analysis’ of a fragment of one of the ‘Iraq’ speeches by Tony Blair in the British House of Commons, it is shown how such context models control and explain many political aspects of interaction that (...) cannot be accounted for in autonomous approaches to text and talk. Context models thus provide an explicit theory of relevance and the situational appropriateness of discourse, and hence also a basis for theories of style. (shrink)

Radical empiricists at the turn of the twentieth century described organisms as experiencing the relations they maintain with their surroundings prior to any analytic separation from their environment. They notably avoided separating perception of the material environment from social life. This perspective on perceptual experience was to prove the inspiration for Gibson’s ecological approach to perceptual psychology. Gibson provided a theory of how the direct perception of the organism-environment relation is possible. Central to his account was the notion of a (...) medium for direct perception. However Gibson provided two mutually inconsistent accounts of the medium leading to problems for his radical empiricism. We develop an account of the medium that does justice to ecological psychology’s radical empiricist roots. To complement this account of the medium we detail a usage-based account of information. Together they allow us to propose a novel radical empiricist view of direct perception. We then return to the notion of medium and expand it to include sociomaterial practices. We show how direct perception happens in the midst of social life, and is made possible by an active achieving and maintaining of a pragmatic relation with the environment. (shrink)

We explore why people feel the socially improper emotions of schadenfreude and gluckschmerz. One explanation follows from sentiment relations. Prior dislike leads to both schadenfreude and gluckschmerz. A second explanation relates to concerns over justice. Deserved misfortune is pleasing and undeserved good fortune is displeasing. A third explanation concerns appraisal of the good or bad fortunes of others as creating either benefit or harm for the self or in-group. Especially in competitive situations and when envy is present, gain is pleasing (...) and loss is displeasing. Both emotions have important implications for understanding human relations at the individual and group levels. (shrink)

One can be reproached for not remembering. Remembering and forgetting shows who and what one values. Indeed, memory is constitutively normative. Theoretical approaches to memory should be sensitive to this normative character. We will argue that traditional views that consider memory as the storing and retrieval of mental content, fail to consider the practices we need for telling the truth about our past. We introduce the Radically Enactive view of Cognition, or REC, as well-placed to recognize the central role of (...) norms in remembering. Crucially, REC construes all remembering as “something we do”, and the most sophisticated forms of remembering as things we collectively do, answerable to socioculturally established practices. On this view our mnemonic performances cannot avoid re-shaping our collective ways of doing and seeing going forward. By REC’s lights therefore, the “is” of memory is “oughty” through and through. (shrink)

Theorizing about perception is often motivated by a belief that without a way of ensuring that our perceptual experience correctly reflects the external world we cannot be sure that we perceive the world at all. Historically, coming up with a way of securing such epistemic contact has been a foundational issue in psychology. Recent ecological and enactive approaches challenge the requirement for perception to attain epistemic contact. This article aims to explicate this pragmatic starting point and the new direction of (...) inquiry that this opens up for psychology. It does so by detailing the development of James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology. Securing epistemic contact has been a leitmotiv in Gibson’s early work, but subsequent developments in Gibson’s works can teach us what it takes to adopt a pragmatic approach to psychology. We propose a reading of the developments in Gibson’s original works that shows that, since perception is a mode of acting, perception aims for pragmatic contact before allowing for epistemic contact. Amplifying these pragmatist lines of thought in Gibson’s works we end by considering situations where an individual is adapted to the intricacies of specific social practices. These situations show how pragmatic contact can also afford attaining epistemic contact. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a starting point for a non-representational approach to language. It will do so by undoing some of the reifying tendencies that are at the heart of the ontology of scientific psychology. Although non-representational theories are beginning to emerge, they remain committed to giving explanations in terms of ontological structures that are independent of human activity. If they maintain this commitment it is unlikely that they will displace representationalism in domains such as language. By following some (...) of Wittgenstein’s remarks on language, I explain the phenomenon of reification by carefully considering the formative, situational flow of language—thus without invoking representations. In this way, the paper sketches a direction of approach for a non-representational theory of language, undercutting the most important assumptions that justify an explanatory ontology devoid of human activity. (shrink)

In this article some of the problems which arise when analytically approaching discourse in a study of ideology are discussed. Given that people generally acquire, express and reproduce their ideologies by written or spoken methods, an analytical study of ideological discourse is pertinent. Even w..

We provide an ethical evaluation of the debate on managing diversity within teams and organizations between equality and business case scholars. Our core assertion is that equality and business case perspectives on diversity from an ethical reading appear stuck as they are based on two different moral perspectives that are difficult to reconcile with each other. More specifically, we point out how the arguments of equality scholars correspond with moral reasoning grounded in deontology, whereas the foundations of the business case (...) perspective are crafted by utilitarian arguments. We show that the problems associated with each diversity perspective correspond with the traditional concerns with the two moral perspectives. To resolve this stalemate position, we argue that the equality versus business case debate needs to be approached from a third, less well-known moral perspective (i.e. virtue ethics). We posit that a focus on virtues can enhance equality by reducing prejudice and illustrate this by applying it to the HRM domains of recruitment and selection and of performance management. Subsequently, we argue that values are key to aligning virtues with each other and with corporate strategy, delineate our values and virtues perspective on diversity, and argue why and how it can enhance organizational performance. (shrink)

Theorizing about perception is often motivated by a belief that without a way of ensuring that our perceptual experience correctly reflects the external world we cannot be sure that we perceive the world at all. Historically, coming up with a way of securing such epistemic contact has been a foundational issue in psychology. Recent ecological and enactive approaches challenge the requirement for perception to attain epistemic contact. This article aims to explicate this pragmatic starting point and the new direction of (...) inquiry that this opens up for psychology. It does so by detailing the development of James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology. Securing epistemic contact has been a leitmotiv in Gibson’s early work, but subsequent developments in Gibson’s works can teach us what it takes to adopt a pragmatic approach to psychology. We propose a reading of the developments in Gibson’s original works that shows that, since perception is a mode of acting, perception aims for pragmatic contact before allowing for epistemic contact. Amplifying these pragmatist lines of thought in Gibson’s works we end by considering situations where an individual is adapted to the intricacies of specific social practices. These situations show how pragmatic contact can also afford attaining epistemic contact. (shrink)

In the present article, we argue that the constant pressure that leaders face may limit the willpower required to behave according to ethical norms and standards and may therefore lead to unethical behavior. Drawing upon the ego depletion and moral self-regulation literatures, we examined whether self-regulatory depletion that is contingent upon the moral identity of leaders may promote unethical leadership behavior. A laboratory experiment and a multisource field study revealed that regulatory resource depletion promotes unethical leader behaviors among leaders who (...) are low in moral identity. No such effect was found among leaders with a high moral identity. This study extends our knowledge on why organizational leaders do not always conform to organizational goals. Specifically, we argue that the hectic and fragmented workdays of leaders may increase the likelihood that they violate ethical norms. This highlights the necessity to carefully schedule tasks that may have ethical implications. Similarly, organizations should be aware that overloading their managers with work may increase the likelihood of their leaders transgressing ethical norms. (shrink)

Throughout the years, care ethicists have raised concerns that prevalent definitions of empathy fail to adequately address the problem of otherness. They have proposed alternative conceptualizations of empathy that aim to acknowledge individual differences, help to extend care beyond one’s inner circle, and develop a critical awareness of biases and prejudices. We explore three such alternatives: Noddings’ concept of engrossment, Meyers’ account of broad empathy, and Baart’s concept of perspective-shifting. Based on these accounts, we explain that care ethics promotes a (...) conceptualization of empathy that is radical in its commitment to engage otherness and that is characterized by being: (1) receptive and open, (2) broad and deep in scope, (3) relational and interactive, (4) mature and multifaceted, (5) critical and reflective, (6) disruptive and transformative. This type of empathy is both demanding and rewarding, as it may inspire health professionals to rethink empathy, its challenges, and its contribution to good care and as it may enrich empathy education and professional empathy practices in health care. (shrink)

Abstract:This article explores the role of constitutional thought in Latour's work on cosmopolitics. It will study his non-modern proposal in the Politics of Nature (2004) and argue for a constitutional rather than political understanding. To address criticisms of being too metaphysical or unpractical, we will work out the notion of a "constitutional ecology of practices" to highlight how different practices such as politics, science, organization, but also law, all contribute to the design of the stage and processes for composing a (...) common world. Special focus will here be placed on the role of "epigrams": practical models for ordering contributions of different practices or modes in hierarchical relationships. This renders them identifiable, mobilizable, and contestable as cross-cutting models for shaping mutual relations in concrete collaborative settings. The case of the legal regulation of robots will be presented as an example of a cosmopolitical attempt to introduce non-human entities in the common collective. We will here observe the role that epigrams play in framing, ordering and contesting the epistemic contributions of the various practices involved in this innovation ecology. This case will be used to discuss Latour's proposals and to study non-modern constitutionalism in action. (shrink)