Simplistic Notion (simplistic + notion)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Conceptualizing Employee Silence and Employee Voice as Multidimensional Constructs*

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES, Issue 6 2003
Linn Van Dyne
ABSTRACT Employees often have ideas, information, and opinions for constructive ways to improve work and work organizations. Sometimes these employees exercise voice and express their ideas, information, and opinions; and other times they engage in silence and withhold their ideas, information, and opinions. On the surface, expressing and withholding behaviours might appear to be polar opposites because silence implies not speaking while voice implies speaking up on important issues and problems in organizations. Challenging this simplistic notion, this paper presents a conceptual framework suggesting that employee silence and voice are best conceptualized as separate, multidimensional constructs. Based on employee motives, we differentiate three types of silence (Acquiescent Silence, Defensive Silence, and ProSocial Silence) and three parallel types of voice (Acquiescent Voice, Defensive Voice, and ProSocial Voice) where withholding important information is not simply the absence of voice. Building on this conceptual framework, we further propose that silence and voice have differential consequences to employees in work organizations. Based on fundamental differences in the overt behavioural cues provided by silence and voice, we present a series of propositions predicting that silence is more ambiguous than voice, observers are more likely to misattribute employee motives for silence than for voice, and misattributions for motives behind silence will lead to more incongruent consequences (both positive and negative) for employees (than for voice). We conclude by discussing implications for future research and for managers. [source]


Strategy Use by Nonnative English-Speaking Students in an MBA Program: Not Business as Usual!

MODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 3 2004
Susan Parks
Despite the long-standing interest in strategy use and language learning, little attention has been given to how social context may constrain or facilitate this use or the development of new strategies. Drawing on data from a longitudinal qualitative study, we discuss this issue in relation to the experiences of Chinese students from the People's Republic of China, who, following study in English for Academic Purposes courses, registered in a Masters in Business Administration program in a Canadian university. Specifically, we focus on how the contact with the native-English-speaking Canadian students mediated the Chinese students' strategy use in 3 domains: reading, class lectures, and team work. In contrast to the rather simplistic notion evoked in certain portrayals of the good language learner, strategy use as reported herein emerges as a complex, socially situated phenomenon, bound up with issues related to personal identity (Leki, 2001; Norton, 1997, 2000; Spack, 1997). [source]


Threshold decisions: how social workers prioritize referrals of child concern

CHILD ABUSE REVIEW, Issue 1 2006
Dendy Platt
Abstract This paper examines local authority social workers' decision-making when considering referrals of children, where the concerns are on the margin of child protection procedures. In doing so, it describes the findings of a qualitative research study undertaken in the policy context of attempts to ,refocus' social work practice in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century. Data collection involved interviews with social workers and parents in 23 cases. Conclusions are that referrals were evaluated on the basis of five key factors, specificity, severity, risk, parental accountability and corroboration, the use of which determined whether an initial assessment or an investigation of alleged abuse took place. The analysis builds on previous work in the child protection field, but demonstrates how the application of these factors differs between cases of child concern and cases of child protection. Policy implications concern the complexity of decision-making in the uncertain context of limited referral information and it is proposed that the simplistic notion of a continuum of abuse is now outdated. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


A qualitative exploration of the perception of emotions in anorexia nervosa: A basic emotion and developmental perspective

CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY (AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THEORY & PRACTICE), Issue 4 2009
John R. E. Fox
Abstract Difficulties in emotional processing have long been regarded as a core difficulty within anorexia nervosa. Recent research and theory have started to highlight how eating disorder symptoms are often used to regulate painful emotions. However, there has been a lack of theoretical sophistication in how emotions have been considered within the eating disorders. This study was designed to use qualitative methodologies to address these inadequacies and provide a richer, more thorough account of emotions within anorexia nervosa. It used a grounded theory methodology to gather and analyse interview data from 11 participants who had a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, being seen at a regional eating disorder service (both inpatient and day patient). The results highlighted two main overarching themes regarding the perception and management of emotions within anorexia nervosa: (1) development of poor meta-emotional skills; and (2) perception and management of emotion in anorexia nervosa. These two categories comprised of a significant number of components from the qualitative analysis, including difficulties with anger, meta-emotional skills and poverty of emotional environments while growing up. Once the data had been collected and analysed, links were made between the findings of this research and the current literature base.,Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key Practitioner Message: Practitoners needs to consider the importance of poor meta-emotional skills within anorexia nervosa. These meta skills appears to be more complicated than the simplistic notion of alexithymia. The routes to these difficulties in emotion appear to be drawn from a complicated developmental picture. The role of anger needs to be considered more fully in the psychotherapeutic work with people with anorexia nervosa. This study's findings suggest that increasing levels of anger may play a role in increased eating disorder symptomatology, especially vomitting. [source]


Tricks of Festival: Children, Enculturation, and American Halloween

ETHOS, Issue 2 2005
CINDY DELL CLARK
The American children's ritual, Halloween, involves an emergent, active and complex process rather than unidirectional socialization of children by adults. Inversions of meaning are prominent in Halloween through: 1) adult support for inverted, anti-normative themes, and 2) a turnabout by which children gain ascendance through costumed trick-or-treating. Based on interviews with six and seven year old children and their parents, as well as participant observation at Halloween events, Halloween's inversions had different interpretations for adults compared to children. For example the degree and quality of fear associated with Halloween varied between elders and children. Following the traumatic events of September 11, 2001, adult-rendered meanings of Halloween were shown to be unfixed and subject to modification. These findings raise critical questions about simplistic notions of socialization and cultural reduplication. [source]


Contexts of Monumentalism: regional diversity at the Neolithic transition in north-west France

OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY, Issue 1 2002
Chris Scarre
The origins of funerary monumentalism in north-west France remain inextricably linked to questions surrounding the Neolithic transition in that region. Debate continues over the relative importance of influences from earlier Neolithic communities in north-east or southern France on the Mesolithic communities of western France. An alternative interpretation places these influences within the context of broad processes of change affecting indigenous communities throughout northern and western France during the fifth millennium BC. The evidence from several regions of northern and western France is reviewed in this perspective, with emphasis on the regional character of monument traditions. Though at one level these regional narratives must have been interrelated, the regional diversity of the process must also be underlined. The argument moves us away from simplistic notions of extraneous influences to a more nuanced understanding of change within the context of individual communities at the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition. [source]


From Shallow to Deep: Toward a Thorough Cultural Analysis of School Achievement Patterns

ANTHROPOLOGY & EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2008
Mica Pollock
What do anthropologists of education do? Many observers think that we provide quick glosses on what various "cultures",typically racialized, ethnic, and national-origin groups,"do" in schools. Hervé Varenne and I each name an alternative form of analysis that we think should be central to the subfield. Varenne argues that anthropologists of education should expand analysis of teaching and learning beyond (American) schools and classrooms and examine everyday life in various places as containing countless moments of teaching and learning that are worth understanding. Varenne reminds us that teaching and learning occur nonstop in everyday life, not just in classrooms. "Education" is about far more than what we typically call "achievement," which usually translates into grades, graduation, or test scores.1 This long-standing way of thinking anthropologically about "education" is essential to exploding simplistic notions of what, when, how, and from whom people "learn." In my essay, I contend that U.S. anthropologists of education also need to analyze thoroughly how U.S. school achievement patterns take shape in real time. I argue that it is our particular responsibility to counteract "shallow" analyses of "culture" in schools, which purport to explain "achievement gaps" by making quick claims about how parents and children from various racial, ethnic, national-origin, or class groups react to schools. Such shallow analyses dangerously oversimplify the social processes, interactions, and practices that create disparate outcomes for children. Shallow cultural analyses are common in both journalism and popular discourse,and in schools of education as well (see Ladson-Billings 2006 for a related critique). They are explanatory claims that name a group as having a "cultural" set of behaviors and then name that "cultural" behavior as the cause of the group's school achievement outcomes. (E.g., some argue that "group x"[e.g., "Asians"] employs a "group x behavior"[e.g., "push their children"] that causes "high" or "low" achievement.) Such claims allow people to explain achievement outcomes too simply as the production of parents and children without ever actually examining the real-life experiences of specific parents and children in specific opportunity contexts. Going deeper requires pressing for actual, accurate information about the everyday interactions among real-life parents, children, and other actors that add up to school achievement patterns (graduation rates, dropout rates, skill-test scores, suspension lists, and the like). When anthropologists of education say that we study culture, we mean that we are studying the organization of people's everyday interactions in concrete contexts. Shallow analyses of "culture" that purport to describe only how a "group's" parents train its children blame a reduced set of actors, behaviors, and processes for educational outcomes, and they include a reduced set of actors and actions in a reduced set of projects for educational improvement. Anthropologists of education should make clear that we examine children's experiences both in context and in appropriate detail; we study interactional processes that other observers might describe too quickly or with insufficient information.2 I think that if anthropologists of education explicitly, publicly, and colloquially name what counts as deep, thorough cultural analysis of American school achievement patterns, we will make ourselves far better prepared to respond to harmfully shallow claims made by journalists, colleagues, and educators alike. We will also support other stakeholders in children's lives (including teachers and teacher educators) to think more thoroughly about which actions, by whom, and in what situations produce children's achievement. This short essay suggests four key ways that anthropologists of education can, do, and should get "deep" in analyzing American achievement patterns. I invite colleagues to edit and extend this list in future editions of AEQ. [source]