Discovering corporate consciousness

This paper attempts to first define the concept of corporate consciousness and to locate it within a nomological net of related concepts. It is found that corporate consciousness may be an identifiable concept, but its differentiation from such related constructs as corporate social responsibility is unclear. Second, some methodological issues related to the study of corporate consciousness are discussed such as level of analysis, measurement, and discriminant validity. Third, to help researchers decide if corporate consciousness should be studied, a general set of criteria for selecting research topics is presented, and corporate consciousness is evaluated briefly within that context.This paper is based on Michael A. Campion's keynote address delivered at the Fifteenth Annual Industrial/Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior (IOOB) Graduate Student Conference, Chicago IL, March 4 to March 6, 1994.The authors would like to extend special thanks for ideas and suggestions to the Executive Committee of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology at their Spring, 1994 meeting, and to the following doctoral students at the Krannert Graduate School of Management, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN: Lynda Aiman-Smith, Richard Davies, Ken Harding, Carl Maertz, Stan Malos, and Hwee Hoon Tan. The authors also wish to acknowledge the helpful and insightful comments of two anonymous reviewers regarding an earlier draft of this paper, as well as the editorial assistance and comment of Dale Rose.     

Discovering Jesus Anew

In light of the political and ritual abuse of religion in India today, this article underlines the importance of Christian women’s engagement with women of all faiths to resist discrimination and violence. The Indian Christian Women’s Movement draws on Jesus’ liberative practice and teaching as women find creative and subversive ways to strengthen Christian women’s solidarity with women of other faiths. While all faith traditions carry embedded patriarchal biases that have been used to legitimize the second-class status of women, they also have streams of liberation motifs. The article employs a feminist epistemology to reconstruct dominant theological motifs and assumptions based on an ethic of care, compassion, and mutuality in relationships.     

Discovering the Sequential Structure of Thought

Multi‐voxel pattern recognition techniques combined with Hidden Markov models can be used to discover the mental states that people go through in performing a task. The combined method identifies both the mental states and how their durations vary with experimental conditions. We apply this method to a task where participants solve novel mathematical problems. We identify four states in the solution of these problems: Encoding, Planning, Solving, and Respond. The method allows us to interpret what participants are doing on individual problem‐solving trials. The duration of the planning state varies on a trial‐to‐trial basis with novelty of the problem. The duration of solution stage similarly varies with the amount of computation needed to produce a solution once a plan is devised. The response stage similarly varies with the complexity of the answer produced. In addition, we identified a number of effects that ran counter to a prior model of the task. Thus, we were able to decompose the overall problem‐solving time into estimates of its components and in way that serves to guide theory.     

Discovering the Inner Life of a Child

Abstract

Using Winnicott's concept of transitional space, joint attention, theory of mind, and a case vignette, the author describes techniques in elucidating and elaborating a child's play space, hence, psychic life. Explicating the child's theory of mind uncovers the dynamics, motives, conflicts, and unconscious material used by the analyst to form interpretations and encourage the child's self-reflective function (Fonagy & Target, 1996). Finally, a case vignette illustrates the enhancement of play space by elucidating the child's theory of mind.     

TETRAD: Discovering Causal Structure

We describe multilevel modeling of cognitive function in subjects with schizophrenia, their healthy first degree relatives and controls. The purpose of the study was to compare mean cognitive performance between the three groups after adjusting for various covariates, as well as to investigate differences in the variances. Multilevel models were required because subjects were nested within families and some of the measures were repeated several times on the same subject. The following four methodological issues that arose during the analysis of the data are discussed. First, when the random effects distribution was not normal, non-parametric maximum likelihood (NPML) was employed, leading to a different conclusion than the conventional multilevel model regarding one of the main study hypotheses. Second, the between-subject (within-family) variance was allowed to differ between the three groups. This corresponded to the variance at level 1 or level 2 depending on whether repeated measures were analyzed. Third, a positively skewed response was analyzed using a number of different generalized linear mixed models. Finally, penalized quasilikelihood (PQL) estimates for a binomial response were compared with estimates obtained using Gaussian quadrature. A small simulation study was carried out to assess the accuracy of the latter.     

Discovering what it all means

This article deals with appropriate communication and interpersonal skills that nurses may use in order to support patients who are experiencing self-concept changes related to their health problems. Three areas of patient need related to self-concept are explored. The stages of adaptation to loss and the crucial task of grief work are reviewed, and nursing interventions designed to strengthen the self-concept and support patients as they adapt to loss are suggested. Sensitive communication, although a low-visibility nursing skill, is cited as critical in assisting the patient to achieve an optimum level of wellness.     

Revisiting Westphalia, Discovering Post-westphalia

This article explores the structure of world order fromthe perspective of the Treaty of Westphalia, which is treated asthe benchmark for the emergence of the modern system of sovereignstates. Emphasis is placed on Westphalia as historical event, ideaand ideal, and process of evolution, and also on developments thatsupersede this framing of world politics, especially, globalizationand the megaterrorist challenge of September 11, 2001. At issue is whether the state system is resilient enough to adapt to new globalconditions or is in the process of being supplanted, and whether thesequel to Westphalia is moving toward humane global governance orsome dysutopic variant, or both at once.     

Discovering knowability: a semantic analysis

In this paper, we provide a semantic analysis of the well-known knowability paradox stemming from the Church–Fitch observation that the meaningful knowability principle all truths are knowable, when expressed as a bi-modal principle ${\diamondsuit}$ , yields an unacceptable omniscience property all truths are known. We offer an alternative semantic proof of this fact independent of the Church–Fitch argument. This shows that the knowability paradox is not intrinsically related to the Church–Fitch proof, nor to the Moore sentence upon which it relies, but rather to the knowability principle itself. Further, we show that, from a verifiability perspective, the knowability principle fails in the classical logic setting because it is missing the explicit incorporation of a hidden assumption of stability: ‘the proposition in question does not change from true to false in the process of discovery.’ Once stability is taken into account, the resulting stable knowability principle and its nuanced versions more accurately represent verification-based knowability and do not yield omniscience.     

Discovering phonetic coherence in acoustic patterns

Despite spectral and temporal discontinuities in the speech signal, listeners normally report coherent phonetic patterns corresponding to the phonemes of a language that they know. What is the basis for the internal coherence of phonetic segments? According to one account, listeners achieve coherence by extracting and integrating discrete cues; according to another, coherence arises automatically from general principles of auditory form perception; according to a third, listeners perceive speech patterns as coherent because they are the acoustic consequences of coordinated articulatory gestures in a familiar language. We tested these accounts in three experiments by training listeners to hear a continuum of three-tone, modulated sine wave patterns, modeled after a minimal pair contrast between three-formant synthetic speech syllables, either as distorted speech signals carrying a phonetic contrast (speech listeners) or as distorted musical chords carrying a nonspeech auditory contrast (music listeners). The music listeners could neither integrate the sine wave patterns nor perceive their auditory coherence to arrive at consistent, categorical percepts, whereas the speech listeners judged the patterns as speech almost as reliably as the synthetic syllables on which they were modeled. The outcome is consistent with the hypothesis that listeners perceive the phonetic coherence of a speech signal by recognizing acoustic patterns that reflect the coordinated articulatory gestures from which they arose.     

Discovering the Family History of Huntington Disease (HD)

A considerable body of research has explored both predictive genetic test decisions for Huntington disease (HD) and the impact of receiving a test result. Extant research reveals little, however, about how and when at risk persons first discover their family history of HD. Drawing upon 24 semi-structured interviews with at risk persons and their family members, this study explored initial discovery of HD in the family. Qualitative data analysis revealed four different, though sometimes related, trajectories of discovery: (1) something is wrong, (2) out of the blue, (3) knowing, but dismissing, and 4) growing up with HD. These pathways highlighted the importance of the temporal and historical contexts in which genetic risk for HD was discovered. Notably, ignorance about HD was the most salient feature shaping participants' narratives of discovery. Implications for research and clinical practice are discussed.     

Discovering syntactic deep structure via Bayesian statistics

In the Bayesian framework, a language learner should seek a grammar that explains observed data well and is also a priori probable. This paper proposes such a measure of prior probability. Indeed it develops a full statistical framework for lexicalized syntax. The learner's job is to discover the system of probabilistic transformations (often called lexical redundancy rules) that underlies the patterns of regular and irregular syntactic constructions listed in the lexicon. Specifically, the learner discovers what transformations apply in the language, how often they apply, and in what contexts. It considers simpler systems of transformations to be more probable a priori. Experiments show that the learned transformations are more effective than previous statistical models at predicting the probabilities of lexical entries, especially those for which the learner had no direct evidence.