Documents human relations 88 results

"Profit sharing generates conflicting changes in the relationship between supervisors and workers. It may increase cooperation and helping effort. At the same time it can increase direct monitoring and pressure by the supervisor, and mutual monitoring and peer pressure from other workers that is transmitted through the supervisor. Using UK data on satisfaction with the boss, we show in both cross-section and panel estimates that workers under profit sharing tend to have lower satisfaction with their supervisor. This result persists even as profit sharing has no or a positive influence on other dimensions of job satisfaction. Additional estimates show that lower satisfaction with the supervisor is largely generated by women, who may be less able to respond to peer pressure, and by non-union workers, who may have more to lose by failing to respond to peer pressure."

"How do we reflect upon ourselves and our concerns in relation to society, and vice versa? Human reflexivity works through 'internal conversations' using language, but also emotions, sensations and images. Most people acknowledge this 'inner-dialogue' and can report upon it. However, little research has been conducted on 'internal conversations' and how they mediate between our ultimate concerns and the social contexts we confront. In this book, Margaret Archer argues that reflexivity is progressively replacing routine action in late modernity, shaping how ordinary people make their way through the world. Using interviewees' life and work histories, she shows how 'internal conversations' guide the occupations people seek, keep or quit; their stances towards structural constraints and enablements; and their resulting patterns of social mobility."

"Social media connected the world—and gave rise to fake news and increasing polarization. It is paramount, MIT professor Sinan Aral says, that we recognize the outsize effect social media has on us—on our politics, our economy, and even our personal health—in order to steer today's social technology toward its great promise while avoiding the ways it can pull us apart.
Drawing on decades of his own research and business experience, Aral goes under the hood of the most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse. He shows how the tech behind social media offers the same set of behavior influencing levers to everyone who hopes to change the way we think and act—from Russian hackers to brand marketers—which is why its consequences affect everything from elections to business, dating to health. Along the way, he covers a wide array of topics, including how network effects fuel Twitter's and Facebook's massive growth, the neuroscience of how social media affects our brains, the real consequences of fake news, the power of social ratings, and the impact of social media on our kids.
In mapping out strategies for being more thoughtful consumers of social media, The Hype Machine offers the definitive guide to understanding and harnessing for good the technology that has redefined our world overnight."

"Dans le langage ordinaire, ressentir de l'empathie signifie se mettre à la place de l'autre, et éventuellement partager ses émotions. Ce phénomène complexe, souvent considéré comme étant à l'origine du comportement moral et altruiste, s'est retrouvé au coeur du débat public, certains arguant qu'il serait la solution à l'intolérance et aux discriminations. Mais, dans une société traversée par les conflits et les rapports de domination, l'empathie permet-elle vraiment de comprendre l'autre ? A la lumière des dernières découvertes en neurosciences et en sciences sociales, Samah Karaki démontre que l'empathie se révèle foncièrement faillible et sélective, ne résistant pas à la déshumanisation de l'autre ou à sa prétendue infériorité construite par les discours médiatiques ou politiques. Dans un essai stimulant et puissant, elle invite à reconnaître que l'on est inévitablement exclu de l'expérience des autres, et à imaginer de nouvelles voies pour s'ouvrir à leurs réalités. Plutôt que d'apporter à la souffrance et à l'injustice une réponse individuelle et affective, elle plaide en faveur de mesures politiques et sociales."

"La tertiarisation de l'économie et le développement de modes d'organisation recherchant la transversalité des échanges s'accompagnent d'une redéfinition des espaces de travail. L'aménagement des bureaux en open space s'est imposé ces deux dernières décennies comme une norme d'organisation spatiale du travail. Dans cet article, nous rendons compte des modes d'investissement et de réalisation de l'activité au sein de plateformes téléphoniques ouvertes accueillant des téléconseillers regroupés sur des bureaux partagés. Il s'agit de dépasser l'approche dominante dans les sciences sociales, privilégiant le travail sur l'espace, aux fins de développer une analyse du travail (de service) dans et avec l'espace. Dans cette perspective, nous montrerons que la constitution de significations et de marges d'autonomie ne relève pas seulement du réinvestissement d'un espace fonctionnel, mais aussi d'une action de superposition d'espaces de natures différentes: pratique, symbolique et sociale."

"The idea of social relations shaping business and production relations between economic agents is not new. Production relations may become socially embedded and may exhibit homophily. We work towards understanding an embeddedness–homophily connection with the support of a case study of the decline of a formerly dominant handloom weavers' community in Kerala, the Saliyars. We demonstrate that there is a spectrum of cohesion along which network links can be categorised, and that it is homophilous-embeddedness that truly defines cohesion. We build the evidence that the Saliyars' networks were characterised by ‘homophilous-embeddedness', which, we show, has been relayed across generations. Due to this attribute, the Saliyars are placed as an example that counters the standard line in the literature that community cohesion has been historically congruent to technological progress and knowledge diffusion in handloom in India."

"This paper incorporates job search through personal contacts into an equilibrium matching model with a segregated labor market. Firms can post wage offers in the regular job market, alternatively they can save on advertising costs and rely on word-of-mouth communication. Wages are then negotiated ex-post between the firm and the applicant, so the model can generate wage premiums or penalties depending on the parameter of bargaining power. Moreover, this paper shows that the traditional Hosios (1990) condition continues to hold in an economy with family contacts but it fails to provide efficiency in the economy with weak ties. There are two reasons for the inefficiency. First, workers bargaining over wages do not internalize the positive external effect on their contacts, originating from a higher probability of finding a job. This network externality puts an upward pressure on wages so the market tightness in the referral market is distorted downwards. Second, weak ties do not act in full interest of the unemployed worker so their search intensity is inefficiently low. Finally, this paper shows that a combination of a hiring subsidy and a referral bonus can decentralize the efficient allocation in the economy with weak ties."

"What binds societies together and how can these social orders be structured in a fair way? Jeffrey C. Alexander's masterful work, The Civil Sphere, addresses this central paradox of modern life. Feelings for others--the solidarity that is ignored or underplayed by theories of power or self-interest--are at the heart of this novel inquiry into the meeting place between normative theories of what we think we should do and empirical studies of who we actually are. Solidarity, Alexander demonstrates, creates inclusive and exclusive social structures and shows how they can be repaired. It is not perfect, it is not absolute, and the horrors which occur in its lapses have been seen all too frequently in the forms of discrimination, genocide, and war. Despite its worldly flaws and contradictions, however, solidarity and the project of civil society remain our best hope: the antidote to every divisive institution, every unfair distribution, every abusive and dominating hierarchy. This grand, sweeping statement and rigorous empirical investigation is a major contribution to our thinking about the real but ideal world in which we all reside."