Questionnaire d’efficacité de la consultation : élaboration et validation préliminaire d’une échelle de mesure de l’efficacité de la consultation en gestion

Despite sustained interest of both researchers and practitioners in favor of a reliable measure of management consulting effectiveness, the existing assessment instruments remain scarce, poorly validated and often inadequate. This study proposes a new instrument for assessing management consulting effectiveness from the consultant's point of view: The Consulting Effectiveness Questionnaire (Questionnaire d’efficacité de la consultation). The preliminary empirical validation of the questionnaire was conducted using two samples of 116 and 207 consultants. Exploratory and Confirmatory factor analyses suggests a second-order two-factor solution, namely the Quality of the process and Value-added results. The results offer preliminary support for the psychometric properties (validity and reliability) of this promising tool for both research and practice purposes.     

The Determinants of a Quality of Life Indicator for Farm Operator Households: Application of Zero-Inflated Count-Data Models

The assessment of the determinants of quality of life in the USA has long been a focus of many researchers. This paper contributes towards that effort by focusing on the quality of life attributes of a segment of the population; namely, farm operator households. To assist in this effort, a quality of life indicator is constructed based on data from the 2004 Agricultural Resource Management Survey along with some auxiliary databases. The determinants of this indicator have been assessed by means of count-data models with special emphasis being given to the role of the preponderance of zeros in the constructed index. Based on the findings, some policy recommendations on how to improve the quality of life in the rural communities are provided.

Les transformations du marché du travail et des organisations : enjeux de maintien au travail et de mobilité professionnelle

This article examines the impacts of the changes in the labor market and organizations as well as their effects on women executives’ job retention and professional mobility. This research is rooted in a qualitative approach based on 51 individual interviews with female executives. The results reveal that the work of women executives is organized around financial goals and could entail risks such as loss of meaning. In these contexts, women developpe resistance or collaboration strategies to integrate and stay at work. These strategies have consequences on their professional mobility.     

A Review of the Nurtured Heart Approach to Parenting: Evaluation of its Theoretical and Empirical Foundations

The Nurtured Heart Approach to parenting (NHA; Glasser & Easley, 2008) is summarized and evaluated in terms of its alignment with current theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence in family studies and developmental science. Originally conceived and promoted as a behavior management approach for parents of difficult children (i.e., with behavior disorders), NHA is increasingly offered as a valuable strategy for parents of any children, despite a lack of published empirical support. Parents using NHA are trained to minimize attention to undesired behaviors, provide positive attention and praise for compliance with rules, help children be successful by scaffolding and shaping desired behavior, and establish a set of clear rules and consequences. Many elements of the approach have strong support in the theoretical and empirical literature; however, some of the assumptions are more questionable, such as that negative child behavior can always be attributed to unintentional positive reinforcement by parents responding with negative attention. On balance, NHA appears to promote effective and validated parenting practices, but its effectiveness now needs to be tested empirically.     

« Te dire comment je me suis sentie insultée ! » – Instruments, émotions et transformation de l’activité

This article examines the place of emotions in mediated activity. The literature has shown that management tools produce emotions for users. However, this literature mainly analyses users in isolation and without taking into account their work context. Building on the work of Rabardel and 15 interviews with managers, this article shows how the emotions produced by the use of management tools transform the relationship to the activity, the relationship to oneself and the relationship to others and contribute to the transformation of the mediated activity. These results allow to underline the place of emotions in the mediated activity but also to discuss the relevance of the usual distinction between positive and negative emotions.     

Le « dispositif de gestion » : un cadre méthodologique pour l’analyse psychosociale du « Patient-centered care » dans un hôpital parisien

This article explores the implementation of Patient-Centered Care approaches that have been spreading since the 2000s in French hospitals. Questioning their acceptance, the authors mobilize the framework of analysis of the management dispositive, applied to the orthopedic department of a Parisian hospital (3 weeks of observations and 43 interviews). They identify the socio-material resources mobilized (spaces, instruments and language) and their arrangement under the influence of an ideology. The article underlines the hybrid and situated nature of the arrangements as well as the reciprocal influences between the resources of the arrangement. The article thus extends the reflection on situated acceptance, showing that the dispositive studied is not fixed, but is the result of a collective activity, both mediated and subject to retroactions.     

Social power tactics and subordinates’ compliance at work: The role of need for cognitive closure

IntroductionThe present research highlights the importance of subordinates’ motivation for compliance-related phenomena.ObjectivesThe aim of this research was to examine subordinates’ willingness to comply with their supervisors’ harsh and soft power tactics as a function of subordinates’ need for cognitive closure.MethodTwo cross-sectional studies were conducted in five different Italian organizations, namely, a bank, a federation of small businesses, a security company, an oil company, and a hospital.ResultsIt was found that subordinates high (vs. low) on need for closure reported greater willingness to comply with harsh social power tactics, but lower willingness to comply with soft power tactics.ConclusionOur findings nuance prior research by showing that soft (vs. harsh) power tactics are not always the most effective power tactics in organizational setting (e.g., Pierro et al., 2004; Raven et al., 1998).     

Sales scholarship: honoring the past and defining the future (Key takeaways from the 2018 American Marketing Association Faculty Consortium: New Horizons in Selling and Sales Management)

The American Marketing Association (AMA) Faculty Consortium: New Horizons in Selling and Sales Management (“New Horizons”) emphasized the historical foundation and evolution of the field and fulfilled the event’s traditional role of defining a future research agenda. Selling and sales management has witnessed dramatic changes since the last New Horizons event at Texas Christian University (TCU) in 2013. Going forward, the sales academic community aspires to better understand and explain the impact of changing technologies, machine learning, artificial intelligence, social media, big data, and 24/7 connectivity broadly on selling and sales management. This article provides the key takeaways from New Horizons 2018, briefly highlighting the history of the sales academy and identifying directions for future research that address the technological and other key changes and challenges impacting the field. Dating back to 1984, faculty consortia in selling and sales management have a long tradition of stimulating new insights leading to a cutting-edge research agenda and strong collaboration in executing that research. The New Horizons event in Boston in conjunction with the 2018 AMA Summer Academic Conference continued that tradition.     

Modern civilization: Its demise Rubin Gotesky

This paper presented during the Physis: Inhabiting the Earth conference, Florence, Italy, October 28–31,1986 examines how new brain research, by radically expanding our knowledge of the physiological foundation for empirical social science, makes possible a new understanding of the nature of higher mind and the place of the human being in evolution. It reports research supporting a model of right, left and frontal brain interaction in forecasting. It also describes development of measures and methods indicating a primarily frontal brain guidance system for higher mind consisting of futures, systems, social, moral, and managerial sensitivities. Driving and shaping this guidance system, and thereby human cultural evolution, appears to be the function of our dialectical construction of the Image of the Future.     

Territories of schooling and schooling territories in contexts of extreme urban poverty in Argentina: Between management and abjection

We are living in a time when large masses of workers have become large masses of the unemployed and, to borrow Butler’s term, their bodies constitute an army of bodies that don’t matter. This is probably one of the greatest dilemmas in our society, in the globalized world and in regions like Latin America in particular. In the framework of governmentality studies, this paper presents advances in research geared towards characterizing schooling practices in contexts of extreme urban poverty, specifically in an area on the outskirts of Buenos Aires (Argentina) with one of the highest concentrations of shantytowns. Starting in the late 1960s with the crisis in Fordism and the closing of factories, a dense population has come to inhabit these urban spaces in the midst of a process of extreme decay. I will focus, in this work, on the characteristics that I understand to distinguish the pedagogical devices and processes of subjectivation bound to the configuration of these abject territories.