Book Review

In most industries, sales force turnover is high and very costly to an organization. This paper argues that sales force turnover refects the quality of sales management performance and that a systematic analysis of sales force turnover can provide clear guidance to increased sales management’s practices and effectiveness. For that purpose, a simple and fexible fve-step procedure relying on the concept of a salesperson’s “replacement value” is proposed. It requires only some systematic data collection from leavers at the exit interview time. A case study illustrates the procedure.     

The halo model of origin images: Conceptualisation and initial empirical test

National origin has gained importance as a marketing tool for practitioners to sell their goods and services. However, because origin‐image research has been troubled by several fundamental limitations, academia has become sceptical of the current status and strategic implications of the concept. The aim of this paper was threefold, namely, to provide a state‐of‐the‐art review of origin‐image research in marketing, develop and empirically test a new origin‐image model and, present the implications of the study. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What Matters in the Mirror of Time: Why Lucretius’ Symmetry Argument Fails

By appealing to the similarity between pre-vital and post-mortem nonexistence, Lucretius famously tried to show that our anxiety about death was irrational. His so-called Symmetry Argument has been attacked in various ways, but all of these strategies are themselves problematic. In this paper, I propose a new approach to undermining the argument: when Parfit’s distinction between identity and what matters is applied, not diachronically (as he uses it) but across possible worlds, the alleged symmetry can be broken. Although the pre-vital and posthumous time spans that we could have experienced are indeed analogous with respect to our identity, they are not analogous with respect to psychological continuity, which forms the basis of prudential concern. Lucretius even anticipated the Parfitian distinction. He did not, however, notice the significance that it has for his Symmetry Argument.     

Crossmodal attention switching: Auditory dominance in temporal discrimination tasks

Visual stimuli are often processed more efficiently than accompanying stimuli in another modality. In line with this “visual dominance”, earlier studies on attentional switching showed a clear benefit for visual stimuli in a bimodal visual–auditory modality-switch paradigm that required spatial stimulus localization in the relevant modality. The present study aimed to examine the generality of this visual dominance effect. The modality appropriateness hypothesis proposes that stimuli in different modalities are differentially effectively processed depending on the task dimension, so that processing of visual stimuli is favored in the dimension of space, whereas processing auditory stimuli is favored in the dimension of time. In the present study, we examined this proposition by using a temporal duration judgment in a bimodal visual–auditory switching paradigm. Two experiments demonstrated that crossmodal interference (i.e., temporal stimulus congruence) was larger for visual stimuli than for auditory stimuli, suggesting auditory dominance when performing temporal judgment tasks. However, attention switch costs were larger for the auditory modality than for visual modality, indicating a dissociation of the mechanisms underlying crossmodal competition in stimulus processing and modality-specific biasing of attentional set.     

Dealing with laughter and ridicule in adolescence: relations with bullying and emotional responses

We investigated the fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia), the joy in being laughed at (gelotophilia), and the joy in laughing at others (katagelasticism) in adolescent students (N = 324, 13–15 years). Gelotophobia was associated primarily with the victim and katagelasticism with the bully-role (self- and peer reports). Gelotophobia correlated with laughing at oneself if experiencing an embarrassing situation. Gelotophilia increased with the propensity to laugh if observing or experiencing embarrassment; katagelasticism increased with laughing if observing something embarrassing in another person. Imagining potentially embarrassing situations was associated with greater feelings of anxiety, shame, sadness, and embarrassment; gelotophilia with joy and cheerfulness. The study breaks the ground for a better understanding on how adolescent students deal with laughter and ridicule.     

Me,myself and the other. Interreligious and intrareligious relations in neo-conservative online forums

ABSTRACT

The Internet can be a place for exchange, but also foster echo chambers of closed world views. This poses interesting questions for the possibility of interreligious dialogue online. The article examines the cases of German Evangelical and Salafist Internet forums which mainly target a specific religious denomination, but nevertheless provide spaces for contact between different religions and denominations. For the study, a combination of quantitative and qualitative text analysis is applied. Quantitative analysis makes it possible to gain an overview of the discussed themes from a large body of text and serves as a basis for sampling smaller textual units for close examination using qualitative content analysis. The analysis yields two primary results: First, intrareligious dialogue plays a particular role for the negotiation of religious identity. Second, interreligious relations reflect the societal positions of both religious groups.