“Socialism of the soul:” Holocaust in Saul Bellow’s The Victim

Saul Bellow wrote his second novel The Victim at the Partisan Review group’s instance. In the aftermath of the Holocaust the PR group advocated the assimilation of the American Jews into mainstream American life for their future safety and prosperity. Keeping in view Bellow’s creative potentials and belief in Marxism/Trotskyism, the PR members asked him to educate the Jews in this matter through his fiction. Bellow treated the subject of Jewish assimilation in an allegorical vein, projecting the idea of universal brotherhood based on common human grounds. Here, a Jew, Asa Leventhal, behaves like a Gentile and a Gentile, Kirby Allbee, like a Jew as victim and victimizer of each other. Their repeated encounters mitigate their racial apprehensions and bring the two closer to each other. Both discover one into the other as his inescapable self, bound by a common human connection. Finally they make peace with each other, projecting Bellow’s allegory of inexorable cosmic kinship—“socialism of the soul”—despite their differences of blood, race and religion.     

Mazhabi Sikhs of Shillong and Guwahati (India)

This paper is a sequel to Himadri Banerjee's earlier study of 2010. It tends to describe the socio-economic profile of the Mazhabi Sikhs settled at Shillong and Guwahati for the last more than a century. These safai karamcharis (sweepers) had been keeping the two cities clean but themselves lived in worst slums. An attempt is made to understand issues of their social networks and survival strategies in a milieu hostile to ‘outsiders’. It is seen what makes them stick together, maintain their ethnic and religious identity and stay connected with Punjab as well.     

Guru Nanak is not at the White House: An essay on the idea of Sikh-American redemption

This article examines the rights-based discourse deployed by Sikh advocacy organizations, the Sikh Coalition and Sikh American Legal Defense & Education Fund, in order to carve an inclusive space within the United States. We interrogate the deep violence of forgetting embedded within this politics that not only sanctions American values and their regulatory might globally, but also integrates the foundational anti-blackness of Western subjectivity into the conceptual structure of Sikhism. Reconsidering these attachments to the American political project and the white-settler state, we argue Sikh organizations fasten Sikhs to ways of life that are inimical to their own flourishing.     

Analyzing Big-Five Personality Traits of Indian Celebrities Using Online Social Media

Personality traits analysis has been an active area of research in information systems and its cognate disciplines. However, there are multiple challenges faced by questionnaire-based measurement of personality traits including low response rate and limited access to the individuals. This research paper presents a social media-based approach to determine the Big-Five personality traits of different groups of celebrities. First, authors collected the Twitter posts of celebrities in different professions and used IBM’s Watson Personality Insights tool to determine the personalities of these celebrities. Next, with the help of statistical analysis and visualization techniques, authors determined the personality pattern within and across the group of celebrities. The results demonstrate that there is significant difference across groups of celebrities on three of the Big-Five personality traits—Openness, Agreeableness, and Extraversion. However, there is no significant difference among the celebrity groups on the Conscientiousness and Neuroticism trait.     

Negotiating Ethical Paradoxes in Conducting a Randomized Controlled Trial: Aligning Intervention Science with Participatory Values

In this article, we describe ethical tensions we have faced in the context of our work as intervention scientists, where we aim to promote social justice and change systems that impact girls involved in the juvenile legal system. These ethical tensions are, at their core, about resisting collusion with systems of control while simultaneously collaborating with them. Over the course of designing and implementing a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of an ecological advocacy intervention for girls, called ROSES, ethical paradoxes crystalized and prompted us to engage in critical reflection and action toward the aim of moving away from conducting research on legal‐system‐involved girls and moving toward a more democratic, participatory process of inquiry with girls. Our experience revealed two intertwined paradoxes that ultimately served generative purposes. First, in collaborating with legal system stakeholders, we observed a single story of girls’ pathology narrated for girls, without girls, and ultimately internalized by girls. Second, in reflecting critically on the ethical implications of our study design, it became clear that the design was grounded in a medical model of inquiry although the intervention we sought to evaluate was based, in part, on resistance to the medical model. We describe emergent ethical tensions and the solutions we sought, which center on creating counternarratives and counterspaces that leverage, extend, and disrupt our existing RCT. We detail these solutions, focusing on how we restructured our research team to enhance structural competence, shifted the subject of inquiry to include the systems in which youth are embedded, and created new opportunities for former research participants to become co‐researchers through formal roles on an advisory board.     

Age and outcome allocation: A new test of the subtractive model

The no, moderate, and large differences between shares of outcome allocated to the high and low performers are interpreted as the respective rules of equality, ordinal equity, and proportional equity. The ability to employ the proportional rule is also believed to develop around the age of 13 years. The authors hypothesized that: (i) the rule of outcome allocation is subtraction; and (ii) age differences in outcome allocation are mediated by age differences in perceived inputs. In an experiment on Chinese aged 8–20 years, measures of perceived inputs were taken after or before outcome allocation. Results from the input-allocation order supported the hypotheses. Obviously, age effects in outcome allocations by Asians can sometimes be mediated by age differences in the ability to perceive the inputs accurately.     

Workplace Branding: Leveraging Human Resources Management Practices for Competitive Advantage Through “Best Employer” Surveys

Workplace branding has generated more attention in the practitioner community than academia. A contributing factor for the sparse academic research is the fact that the theoretical foundation of workplace branding has not been fully developed. In addressing this need, this article outlines how workplace branding uses a similar approach used in marketing a product or service to build an effective workplace brand. An increasing potent form of workplace branding lies in the new popular annual “best employer” surveys. In reviewing various “best employer” surveys, we identify eight common themes in terms of human resources best practices associated with outcomes ranging from high levels of retention to increased rates of growth in sales and profit. Finally, this article presents several research issues and questions that should be addressed in the future.     

The serotonin transporter promoter polymorphism and childhood positive and negative emotionality

Association studies of the serotonin transporter promoter polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) and negative emotionality (NE) are inconclusive. However, emerging evidence suggests that the association between this polymorphism and NE may be influenced by levels of another temperament trait, positive emotionality (PE). Therefore, this study examined whether the association between the 5-HTTLPR and NE was moderated by PE. A community sample of 413 three-year-old children completed a standardized battery of laboratory tasks designed to tap temperamental emotionality. Children were also genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR. No direct association between 5-HTTLPR genotype and NE was found. However, the interaction of child PE and NE predicted 5-HTTLPR genotype. Furthermore, children with a short allele who were also low in PE had significantly greater NE than children without a short allele or children with high PE. Our findings suggest that the short allele of the 5-HTTLPR is associated with NE only in the context of low PE. Inconsistent links between NE and this gene in previous research may stem from the failure to consider other temperament traits that moderate associations.