Exploring how consumer cooperatives might strategically incorporate social media to distribute wine

This research advances our understanding of disruptions to marketing channels in the digital world by investigating the viability of consumer cooperative systems which are envisioned as multi-actor constructed networks using social media (SM) platforms. It introduces the concepts of “social media consumer wine cooperator” as a new distribution channel for wine and investigates the consumer's intention to participate in an SM and become a wine cooperator. Relying on the uses and gratifications theory (UGT), we adopted a quantitative research inquiry with data gathered using an online survey involving a sample of 486 French consumers. We empirically tested the relationships among four factors: attitude toward buying wine based on SM recommendations, perceived risks, intention to buy wine on SM, and consumer intention to become an SM wine cooperator. Findings indicate that the intention to be an SM wine cooperator is positively correlated with attitude toward buying wine based on SM recommendations and the intention to purchase wine on SM. To finish with, we link the concept of the consumer wine co-op to the current debate in the literature on centralized versus decentralized (built on top of blockchain networks) social media platforms, opening the door for future research avenues.     

On‐again/off‐again dating relationships: How are they different from other dating relationships?

This article explores the understudied yet prevalent phenomenon of on‐again/off‐again (on‐off) dating relationships. Study 1 (N= 445 U.S. college students) showed that almost two thirds of participants had experienced an on‐off relationship. Analyses of open‐ended responses about relationship experiences showed on‐off partners were less likely to report positives (e.g., love and understanding from partners) and more likely to report negatives (e.g., communication problems, uncertainty) than partners who had not broken up and renewed. Study 2 (N= 236), employing quantitative measures, substantiated these findings and further showed a greater number of renewals was associated with greater negatives and fewer positives. Results highlight the need for further investigation regarding on‐off relationships, and theories potentially useful in explaining these relationships are discussed.     

Jung's “Multicolored Arabesques”: Their Renderings and Intentions in the Pictorial Vocabulary of The Red Book

Paintings say more than what they seemingly show. Jung's pictorial vocabulary as a painter and illustrator is not gratuitous and deserves close study. At first Jung tried various styles, naïve or academic. Then he developed “multicolored arabesques” quite extensively, obviously enjoying drawing and painting virtuoso variations on the theme. These beautiful artistic forms can possibly be analyzed as pictorial representations of the unconscious, of the archetypes and their ever-flowing energies. For such vivid subjects that are impossible to describe or portray in either words or images, Jung, in his precious Red Book, has achieved a creation, by pencil and brush, of a superb array of “good-enough” renderings in images of their psychological reality.     

Typicality and Graded Membership in Dimensional Adjectives

This paper concerns an investigation of the manner in which typicality constrains graded membership in antonymous dimensional adjectives such as short/tall and cheap/expensive using the conceptual spaces framework. In this framework, items are organized in a space comprised of one or more dimensions along which they can be compared. The items’ graded membership is established by their relative proximity in this space to the prototypical instances of contrasting concepts. Because dimensional adjectives can be applied to an indefinite variety of things and grammatically have no upper bound to serve as cognitive reference point, they have been argued to lack prototypes. We present the results of an empirical study showing that the conceptual spaces framework can nevertheless be extended successfully to dimensional adjectives by complementing them with a comparison class argument (such as short/tall for an adult man and cheap/expensive for a smartphone), allowing participants to retrieve meaningful prototypical instances, which can be used to establish membership degree. Since dimensional adjectives are subjective, we investigate how the framework can accommodate interindividual variability in membership degree judgments. We find that the predictions of the framework significantly improve if prototypical instances themselves are assumed to come with a gradient instead of being considered equally typical, thereby providing a more fine‐grained account of typicality and furthering the development of the conceptual spaces framework.     

Aesthetics Makes Nothing Happen? The Role of Aesthetic Properties in the Constitution of Non‐aesthetic Value

The relationship between aesthetic value and other moral and cognitive values has been a key theme within contemporary aesthetic discussion. In this article, I explore once again the implications of this relationship, but from what I think might be a different angle. With few exceptions, notably Dominic Lopes, most of the contributions to this issue have dealt with the impact that moral or cognitive values could possibly have on the overall aesthetic value of a work of art. In this article, I explore instead how aesthetic properties or merits could play a role in explaining moral and cognitive properties. To do so, I first offer some examples that I think may reasonably exemplify the phenomenon we are considering. Second, I argue that a proper account of interactionism should meet at least two constraints: the relevance constraint and the autonomy constraint. Finally, I try to clarify how it is possible that aesthetic properties substantially contribute to other values by appealing to the notions of expression and the affective character of aesthetic properties.     

Free-Variable Tableaux for Propositional Modal Logics

Free-variable semantic tableaux are a well-established technique for first-order theorem proving where free variables act as a meta-linguistic device for tracking the eigenvariables used during proof search. We present the theoretical foundations to extend this technique to propositional modal logics, including non-trivial rigorous proofs of soundness and completeness, and also present various techniques that improve the efficiency of the basic naive method for such tableaux.     

INTRAORGANIZATIONAL EMPLOYEE NAVIGATION AND SOCIALLY DERIVED OUTCOMES: CONCEPTUALIZATION,VALIDATION, AND EFFECTS ON OVERALL PERFORMANCE

Intraorganizational employee navigation (IEN) is conceptualized as a means of better understanding how the organizational actor proactively works across their firm's internal environment in the execution of their jobs. Navigation is argued to be a precursor to the employee's overall performance through a class of mediating variables labeled “socially derived outcomes,” which are variables inside the organization that are bestowed upon the employee as a result of them first engaging in proactive behavior (e.g., IEN). Two studies are reported. Study I sees IEN psychometrically validated versus a range of existing proactive behaviors and individual traits (discriminant, nomological, and criterion‐related validity) with a heterogeneous sample of 704 employees. Study II then tests a model relating IEN to performance through six mediating “socially derived outcomes” by leveraging data from 2 Fortune 500 firms. The results of Study II show that IEN significantly impacts multiple measures of the employee's overall performance through mediating effects brought about by key socially derived outcomes, such as the employee's “manager alignment.” The contributions, broader implications, and limitations of the research are then put into context.     

When can categorical variables be treated as continuous? A comparison of robust continuous and categorical SEM estimation methods under suboptimal conditions

A simulation study compared the performance of robust normal theory maximum likelihood (ML) and robust categorical least squares (cat-LS) methodology for estimating confirmatory factor analysis models with ordinal variables. Data were generated from 2 models with 2-7 categories, 4 sample sizes, 2 latent distributions, and 5 patterns of category thresholds. Results revealed that factor loadings and robust standard errors were generally most accurately estimated using cat-LS, especially with fewer than 5 categories; however, factor correlations and model fit were assessed equally well with ML. Cat-LS was found to be more sensitive to sample size and to violations of the assumption of normality of the underlying continuous variables. Normal theory ML was found to be more sensitive to asymmetric category thresholds and was especially biased when estimating large factor loadings. Accordingly, we recommend cat-LS for data sets containing variables with fewer than 5 categories and ML when there are 5 or more categories, sample size is small, and category thresholds are approximately symmetric. With 6-7 categories, results were similar across methods for many conditions; in these cases, either method is acceptable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).