Selling with technology: understanding the resistance to mobile sales assistant use in retailing

The rise of online competitors and increasingly well-informed customers have spurred stationary retailers to take measures to increase the quality of face-to-face selling as a key differentiator. Mobile sales assistants (MSAs) represent an intensively discussed technological approach to address these challenges in the salesperson–customer dyad. However, in many cases, salespeople do not or only sporadically use MSAs. Prior research provides inadequate answers as to why this is the case, as extant technology acceptance and resistance theories have limited applicability to MSAs. To address these research gaps, the authors conduct a qualitative, theory-building approach and identify 21 factors associated with resistance. In a subsequent quantitative survey study, they validate these factors and refine their conceptual structure. The results show that several largely unknown factors are associated with salespeople’s resistance to MSA use: The three higher-order constructs, ‘incongruence’, ‘relationship deterioration’, and ‘operational imperfection’, are newly introduced to the literature on technology resistance. The findings extend prior technology acceptance and resistance theories and provide comprehensive insights for retail managers.     

Translating Dispositional Resistance to Change to the Culture Level: Developing a Cultural Framework of Change Orientations

A fundamental societal challenge is to balance the desire for growth, development, and progress on the one hand and the need for stability and maintenance of the status quo on the other. To better understand how societies deal with this challenge we employ the personality trait of dispositional resistance to change to conceptualize and empirically establish the concept of cultural change orientation. With data from individuals in 27 countries (N = 6487), we identify three culture‐level change orientation dimensions (routine seeking, affective reactance, and cultural rigidity) and interpret their meaning through their relationships with established cultural frameworks (e.g. GLOBE, Hofstede, Inglehart, and Schwartz). We thus propose a new culture‐level framework and test hypotheses about relationships between change orientation dimensions and national indexes of economic, technological, social, and environmental change. Our findings demonstrate meaningful differential relationships between the three change orientation dimensions and these societal outcomes. Copyright © 2018 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Exploring a patient's shift from relative silence to verbal expressiveness: Observations on an element of the analyst's participation

By tracing a portion of close process of a patient's shifts from a relatively silent and inhibited stance to one in which he is beginning to verbalize more about his experience and fantasy, I will illustrate some tensions between the analyst's role as facilitating expressiveness and as occupying a place in the patient's internalized world. Since the analyst's functions as facilitator and as internal object (often an obstacle to the patient's expressiveness) are sometimes in conflict with one another, it is important for the analyst to be able to work internally with this conflict as he works with his patient. Splitting processes between these two functions may provide the analyst with cues related to the patient's and the analyst's resistance to understanding the patient's communication of unconscious conflict and the patient's recruitment of the analyst into the patient's internalized world.     

Legal Innovation for Social Change: Exploring Change and Resistance to Different Types of Sustainability Laws

In this article I argue that a desirable future direction for political psychology would be to pay more attention to social‐psychological processes involved in the response to innovative laws, in particular those devised with sustainability and environmental protection aims. This involves taking into account the following premises: (1) innovation and change are not unitary phenomena; instead there are different types of innovation; (2) legal and policy innovation is a specific type and is highly central in an era when global challenges are increasingly dealt with by global treaties which are then translated into national laws with a call to transform local practices; (3) offering attention to the reception of such innovation involves developing specific conceptual tools; (4) devising a typology of legal innovation is one step in this direction; (5) furthering our comprehension of how people, groups, and institutions receive—i.e., accept, contest—legal innovation for sustainability is important for helping to push forward sustainability goals, which are legislated but far from attained. The present article outlines theoretical tools for addressing psychosocial processes involved in the reception of legal innovation, drawing mostly on the approach of social representations and the literature of environmental psychology, and offers three criteria for a typology of laws. Finally I present some examples of responses to subtypes of legal innovation from the sustainability domain, taken as an illustrative case, and discuss differences and commonalities in the processes of acceptance and resistance that each mobilizes.     

Computer-aided analysis of grain-boundary connectivity of B10 copper-nickel alloys

A numerical calculation method based on the angle in a triple junction composed of a random grain boundary is proposed to predict the connectivity and stability of a grain boundary in a B10 copper-nickel alloy. The grain-boundary connectivity and its effect on corrosion resistance are studied combining computer-aided analysis with electrochemical impedance testing. The results show that the prediction of corrosion resistance using a grain-boundary connectivity numerical method is consistent with immersion experimental results. The B10 alloy exhibited the best corrosion resistance after cold rolling with a 9% reduction rate. The relationship between the grain-boundary characteristics and corrosion resistance is well established using the numerical method to quantify the grain-boundary connectivity. A higher connective frequency and a low proportion of grain-boundary angles between 60° and 180° in the triple junction is detrimental to corrosion resistance of the B10 alloy.     

On the synthesis and characterisation of novel composite-structured high-entropy alloys

A study of novel composite-structured CoCrFeNi₃Si, CoCrFe₂Ni₂Si and Co₂CrFeNi₂Si high-entropy alloys, synthesised by vacuum arc melting, is presented. The designing criteria for the formation of such alloys were based on the enthalpy of mixing and the valence electron concentration. X-ray diffraction analysis revealed that all the alloys were composed of face-centered cubic and intermetallic phases. Scanning electron microscopy, along with elemental analysis, indicated that the face-centered cubic phase mainly contains Co, Cr, Fe and Ni, whereas, the intermetallic compound is Ni-Si rich. All the synthesised high-entropy alloys in the present investigation possess excellent compressive strength along with ductility at room temperature, suggesting significant potential application in the engineering field. Furthermore, enhanced hardness, wear resistance and corrosion resistance were achieved in all the designed high-entropy alloys. The previously given design parameters for the composite-structured high-entropy alloys are in good accord with the current research work.     

Enhancement of hardening and thermal resistance of Mg–Sn-based alloys by addition of Cu and Al

Mg–Sn-based alloys are considered as a promising precipitation-hardening system for applications at elevated temperatures, but the hardening effect is not satisfactory owing to sluggish nucleation and rapid coarsening of the major Mg₂Sn lath precipitates. In this study, Cu and Al are added to a Mg–6Sn–1Mn base alloy. The age-hardening response and the microstructures of these modified alloys have been investigated and are compared to that of the base alloy. The additional elements are found to bring several beneficial effects to the alloys for applications at elevated temperatures. Firstly, a eutectic structure consisting of strong intermetallic phases, i.e. Mg₂Cu in the Mg–6Sn–1Mn–2Cu alloy and Al_0.93Cu_1.07Mg in the Mg–6Sn–1Mn–2Cu–2Al alloy, remains stable along the grain boundaries after solution and ageing heat treatments. Secondly, the precipitate density has been increased significantly and the precipitate size has been refined remarkably during ageing at 200?°C. Moreover, the growth of the precipitates is inhibited remarkably during the over-ageing period. Therefore, the age-hardening response and over-ageing resistance are notably improved.     

Home-School Communication in the Treatment of Childhood Behavior Problems

There is a shortage of intervention strategies for children with behavior disorders which incorporate both home and school influences. To address this need, a service delivery model was evaluated for public school children (Pre-K through G2) who were at risk for educational failure on account of behavior problems, family dysfunction, and poverty and social disadvantage. Interventions based on eco-behavioral principles were delivered by home-visitors in consultation with clinical child psychologists. A primary goal of all treatment plans was to enhance parent-teacher communication. Children in the experimental group (N = 34) showed overall improvement (as judged by parents) and decreases in targeted problems (as reported by teachers and parents), relative to control students (N = 15). The program decreased the number of children placed in special education. There was indication that better communication between home and school related to academic improvement. The protocol provides a possible behavioral consultation model of early intervention for behavior disorders and demonstrates how clinical services can be integrated with systems-wide dropout prevention efforts.     

Non-Violent Survival Strategies in the Face of Intimate Partner Violence and Economic Discrimination

Intimate partner violence (IPV) theory often locates violence equitably between women and men. Women, however, sustain greater degrees of injury than men and often use violence as a measure of protection rather than as an act of aggression. Yet measures of protection must be viewed in multiple contexts. In this case, the context is poverty, which reveals that violence by women in response to IPV is not the only way that women deal with the violence in their lives. This article explicates four strategies that battered women in poverty deploy in their protective trajectory and highlight alternative resistance strategies women use to overcome multiple structural barriers.