Differentiation is key: should employers offer something unique or the same yet better?

ABSTRACT

Researchers agree that employers should differentiate themselves from their competitors to become the employer of choice. However, from the recruitment literature, it is not clear how employers should differentiate their employment offers. Building upon the structural alignment theory, we investigated in two experimental studies whether offering something unique (i.e., non-alignable attributes; e.g., offer a benefit package when competitors do not) or offering the same yet better (i.e., alignable attributes; e.g., offer a bigger benefit package than competitors) is the most effective differentiation strategy for employment offers and whether this depends on job seekers’ work experience. Offering the same yet better affected job seekers’ preferences more positively than offering something unique in lowly complex judgement and decision-making situations (Study 1) as well as in highly complex judgement and decision-making situations if job seekers had more work experience (Study 2). Hence, our findings suggest that differentiation strategies matter: employers should differentiate by offering the same yet better, particularly when they look for highly experienced job seekers in highly complex judgement and decision-making situations.     

Warriors,authors and baseball coaches: the meaning of metaphor in theories of family therapy

This article examines the metaphors family therapists use in their theories to reveal aspects of the theories which are not explicitly stated, using Whitaker's symbolic experiential therapy, Minuchin's structural therapy and White's narrative therapy as examples. Such examination, drawing on social constructivist understandings of metaphor and meaning making, reveals that Minuchin's metaphors of family as organism and therapist as artist and warrior emphasize the family as relatively holistic and the therapist as relatively interventionist. In contrast, Whitaker's metaphor of family as ecological system or team and therapist as coach emphasizes the interdependence and context sensitivity of the family and relative powerlessness of the therapist to impose change. Finally, White, reflecting his explicitly post‐structural commitment, uses the metaphor of therapy as a journey undertaken with a map and as therapy as an act of re‐narrating a story.     

"易卦"的序结构数学模型在对策理论中的应用

通过分析人类的基本行为元素,并借助于"卦象"序结构数学模型的建立,从而初步讨论了一般谋略方法的产生和起源,以及谋略对策的系统核心元素结构;最后讨论了它们在应用中的初步分类.     

Participatory action research: towards (non-ideal) epistemic justice in a university in South Africa

ABSTRACT

The paper explores the possibilities for promoting epistemic justice in a South African university setting through a participatory action-based photovoice research project in which university researchers worked alongside undergraduate students with no prior experience of doing research. The student voices are employed to understand how learning as capability development and agency expansion can advance epistemic justice in a university setting of hierarchical relationships that make participatory action research challenging. The paper considers how, in this project, spaces of epistemic democracy intersected with the expansion of multidimensional functionings, resulting in more epistemic justice for the student-researchers. The paper considers the possibilities for change through a participatory project toward promoting epistemic justice at the individual level. It also explores some criticisms of the limits of such individual development in the face of structural challenges.     

‘Grandpa,Do You Like Roller Coasters?’: Identifying Age‐Appropriate Personality Indicators

Personality development research heavily relies on the comparison of scale means across age. This approach implicitly assumes that the scales are strictly measurement invariant across age. We questioned this assumption by examining whether appropriate personality indicators change over the lifespan. Moreover, we identified which types of items (e.g. dispositions, behaviours, and interests) are particularly prone to age effects. We reanalyzed the German Revised NEO Personality Inventory normative sample (N = 11,724) and applied a genetic algorithm to select short scales that yield acceptable model fit and reliability across locally weighted samples ranging from 16 to 66 years of age. We then examined how the item selection changes across age points and item types. Emotion‐type items seemed to be interchangeable and generally applicable to people of all ages. Specific interests, attitudes, and social effect items—most prevalent within the domains of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Openness—seemed to be more prone to measurement variations over age. A large proportion of items were systematically discarded by the item‐selection procedure, indicating that, independent of age, many items are problematic measures of the underlying traits. The implications for personality assessment and personality development research are discussed. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Modeling the emergence of informational content by adaptive networks for temporal factorisation and criterial causation

Propagated activation of neurons through their network is an important process in the brain. Another crucial part of neural processing concerns adaptation over time of characteristics of this network such as connection strengths or excitability thresholds. This adaptation can be slow, as in learning from a multiple experiences, or it can be fast, as in memory formation. These adaptive network characteristics can be considered informational criteria for activation of a neuron. This then is viewed as a form of emergent information formation. Activation of neurons is determined by such information via a process termed criterial causation. In the current paper, the relationship of criterial causation with the principle of temporal factorisation for the dynamics of the world in general is explored. Temporal factorisation describes how the world represents information about its past in its present state, which then in turn determines the world’s future. In the paper, it is shown how these processes are analysed in more detail and modeled by (adaptive) network models.