Imposing Order to See the Disorder: Student Depression and T.S. Eliot’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Waste Land:</Emphasis> A (Mis)reading/Diagnosis

Sometime ago, I found myself using the diagnosis of a student’s depression as a critical tool of interpretation, searching for signs of mental illness in her essay that explored order and disorder in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I realised that my reading had become a creative act, combining poem, poet, student essay and author to create, in a sense, one (un)readable text. The present paper is a reflection upon the processes of order and disorder located in a diagnosis of “madness” and the readings of writer and text this diagnosis initiated. I look to deconstruct acts of reading and diagnosis.     

Helping others or helping oneself? An episodic examination of the behavioral consequences of helping at work

Scholars have paid an increasing amount of attention to organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), with a particular emphasis on helping others at work. In addition, recent empirical work has focused on how OCB is an intraindividual phenomenon, such that employees vary daily in the extent to which they help others. However, one limitation of this research has been an overemphasis on well‐being consequences associated with daily helping (e.g., changes in affect and mental depletion) and far less attention on behavioral outcomes. In this study, we develop a self‐regulatory framework that articulates how helping others at work is a depleting experience that can lead to a reduction in subsequent acts of helping others, and an increase in behaviors aimed at helping oneself (i.e., engaging in political acts). We further theorize how two individual differences—prevention focus and political skill—serve as cross‐level moderators of these relations. In an experience sampling study of 91 full‐time employees across 10 consecutive workdays, our results illustrate that helping is a depleting act that makes individuals more likely to engage in self‐serving acts and less likely to help others. Moreover, the relation of helping acts with depletion is strengthened for employees who have higher levels of prevention focus.     

The Impact of Analogies on Creative Concept Generation: Lessons From an In Vivo Study in Engineering Design

Research on innovation often highlights analogies from sources outside the current problem domain as a major source of novel concepts; however, the mechanisms underlying this relationship are not well understood. We analyzed the temporal interplay between far analogy use and creative concept generation in a professional design team's brainstorming conversations, investigating the hypothesis that far analogies lead directly to very novel concepts via large steps in conceptual spaces (jumps). Surprisingly, we found that concepts were more similar to their preceding concepts after far analogy use compared to baseline situations (i.e., without far analogy use). Yet far analogies increased the team's concept generation rate compared to baseline conditions. Overall, these results challenge the view that far analogies primarily lead to novel concepts via jumps in conceptual spaces and suggest alternative pathways from far analogies to novel concepts (e.g., iterative, deep exploration within a functional space).