Flexible Work Arrangements Availability and their Relationship with Work‐to‐Family Conflict,Job Satisfaction,and Turnover Intentions: A Comparison of Three Country Clusters

The present study explored the availability of flexible work arrangements (FWA) and their relationship with manager outcomes of job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and work‐to‐family conflict (WFC) across country clusters. We used individualism and collectivism to explain differences in FWA availability across Latin American, Anglo, and Asian clusters. Managers from the Anglo cluster were more likely to report working in organisations that offer FWA compared to managers from other clusters. For Anglo managers, flextime was the only FWA that had significant favorable relationships with the outcome variables. For Latin Americans, part‐time work negatively related with turnover intentions and strain‐based WFC. For Asians, flextime was unrelated to time‐based WFC, and telecommuting was positively associated with strain‐based WFC. The clusters did not moderate the compressed work week and outcome relationships. Implications for practitioners adopting FWA practices across cultures are discussed.     

Attributional Style and Engagement/Disengagement Responses in the Chinese Workforce

Internal attribution for bad events, along with stable and global attributions, has been regarded as a component of pessimism, a precursor of negative work outcomes. Most evidence in support of this conceptualisation has come from research conducted in individualist cultures. We questioned if internal attribution has the same pessimistic implication in a collectivist culture. Findings from two studies conducted on Chinese employees supported our expectations that the stability and globality dimensions (but not the internality dimension) would predict disengagement responses (such as quitting and being neglectful at work) and lack of engagement responses (such as voicing suggestions and being loyal to the organisation). A reconceptualisation of pessimism in the workplace is therefore necessary. A dimensional, rather than a composite, scoring method is proposed for maintaining the predictive and construct validities of attributional style as an indicator of pessimism.     

Reducing STD/HIV Stigmatizing Attitudes Through Community Popular Opinion Leaders in Chinese Markets

Reducing STDs and HIV/AIDS incidence requires campaigns designed to change knowledge, attitudes, and practices of risky sexual behavior. In China, a significant obstacle to such changes is the stigma associated with these diseases. Thus 1 campaign intervention strategy is to train credible community leaders to discuss these issues in everyday social venues. This study tested the effectiveness of such an approach on reducing HIV/AIDS stigma, across 2 years, from a sample of over 4,500 market vendors, in 3 conditions. Results showed an increasing growth in market communication about intervention messages, and concomitant declines in stigmatizing attitudes, across time, with the greatest changes in community popular opinion leaders, significant changes in intervention nonopinion leaders, and little change in the control markets.     

Emotional availability and psychosocial correlates among mothers in substance‐abuse treatment and their young infants

Emotional availability (EA) was investigated among low‐income mothers enrolled in substance‐abuse treatment and their young infants (n = 21) compared with a demographically matched group of mother–infant pairs who, by self‐report, were not at risk for substance abuse (n = 27). The mother–infant dyads in the treatment group generally demonstrated poorer EA functioning than those in the comparison group, but few differences between the groups on individual dimensions of EA were significant. This finding was notable considering that mothers in treatment reported significantly higher levels of depressive symptoms and psychological stress. Treatment effects may have buffered the negative impact of depression and psychological stress on mothers' EA scores. The clinical implications of the findings are discussed as they relate to substance‐abuse‐treatment services for pregnant and parenting women.     

Gratuity,Embodiment, and Reciprocity

Protestant Christian ethicist Timothy Jackson and secular feminist philosopher Eva Feder Kittay each explore the relationship between love or care and justice through the lens of human dependency. Jackson sharply prioritizes agape over justice, whereas Kittay articulates a more complex and integrated understanding of the relationship of care and distributive justice. An account of Christian love and its relation to justice must account for the gratuity, mutuality, and reciprocity that pervade human existence. Such an account must integrate provision for another's basic needs, a feature of agape, with a distributive justice that fairly allocates the material prerequisites of care and the burden of caring labor. Kittay's treatment of care and justice is more adequate to the realities of human embodiment and the social organization of care than Jackson's, but neither offers a fully adequate ground for the moral personhood of all human beings, including deeply dependent persons.