Career Stage Effects on Job Characteristic–Job Satisfaction Relationships Among Guest Worker Salespersons

In this study, we propose and test the moderator roles of career stages on the job characteristics–job satisfaction relationships among guest worker salespersons in Saudi Arabia. Due to the severe shortage of indigenous labor, Saudi Arabia brings in foreign workers as guest workers from various countries of the world. These foreign workers meet the human resource needs of both local and foreign companies. As expected, findings suggest that job autonomy, job identity, and job feedback have a stronger influence on guest workers’ job satisfaction during the later stages of their career than during the early career stages. Of all the variables we tested, only the influence of job variety on job satisfaction does not vary across career stages. In general, the results indicate that managers are well advised to take into account guest worker salespersons’ career stages when managing job characteristics.     

Time/History,Self-disclosure and Anticipation: Pannenberg,Heidegger and the Question of Metaphysics

This essay examines Wolfhart Pannenberg’s defense of metaphysics’ foundational importance for philosophy and theology. Among all the modern philosophers whose claims Pannenberg challenges, Martin Heidegger’s discourse against Western metaphysics receives the major portion of criticism. The first thing one concludes from this criticism is an affirmation of a wide intellectual gap that separates Pannenberg’s thought from Heidegger’s, as if each stands at the very opposite corner of the other’s school of thought. The questions this essay tackles are: is this seemingly irreconcilable difference between Pannenberg and Heidegger fully justifiable? What if there is a reading of Panneberg’s and Heidegger’s view of metaphysics that can reveal deeper similarities between the two thinkers than the first reading of Pannenberg’s criticism of Heidegger allows us to see? It then answers these questions by showing that both thinkers actually share a common emphasis on the concepts of ‘time/history’, ‘self-disclosure’ and ‘anticipation’, and their reliance on these notions reveals that Heidegger’s and Pannenberg’s approaches to the phenomenon of understanding and to metaphysical ontology are not fully contradictory but rather hold noticeable hermeneutical similarities.