Human Relations

The present study proposed a decision process that people follow in incidents of work-family conflict and offered an initial test of factors that may influence their decisions. It distinguished between decisions regarding the mobilization of social support to avoid conflict and decisions regarding participation in a work and/or family activity if the conflict was not avoided. According to analyses of critical incidents provided by managers and professionals employed in full-time jobs, decisions were influenced by internal cues reflecting the individual’s priorities in the conflict situation, role sender cues reflecting the priorities of involved parties in the individual’s work and family roles, and role activity cues reflecting characteristics of the specific activities in conflict. Moreover, our findings suggest that the utilization of these cues often represents an attempt to preserve positive relationships with important role senders in the work and family domains.

Social factors, particularly age norms, are cited as a major influence on retirement and late career decisions; yet research has focused primarily on one feature of norms: shared beliefs. A sample of finance and accounting professionals between the ages of 22 and 70 is used to examine whether support for career development differs as a function of age. The levels of support for professional development, retirement preparation, and personal growth from five sources (family, co-workers, colleagues in other organizations, supervisor, and friends) are examined. Age is not a major factor in the amount of support reported. Support is associated with career-related intentions and beliefs (maintaining professional contacts, hours spent in training, career insight, expected development, and perceived organization support). Family support influences career development. These effects hold regardless of age. The results suggest emphasizing the informational role of social networks rather than the normative role with respect to age.

We studied 284 volunteers, loosely coupled in groups (i.e. low task interdependence, high outcome interdependence), selling memberships in a non-profit organization. Consistent with economic models of altruism, we found individual perceptions of group potency to be negatively related to individual selling behavior (i.e. making telephone calls and customer visits). Furthermore, individual members’ perceptions of group potency were found to interact with two personality traits (conscientiousness and extraversion) to influence individual selling behavior.

Participants from two samples (n = 31 human resources staff, n = 36 teachers) rated the extent to which they believed varying levels of a pre-defined stressor influenced positive affect, negative affect, and work performance. Participants then carried personal digital assistants for five working days, and provided data on levels of the pre-defined stressor and on momentary negative and positive affect. For both samples, momentary negative affect was more strongly associated with stressors for those participants who believed stressors caused them to feel greater negative affect. For both samples too, the association between participants’ momentary negative affect and average levels of stressors across the working week was moderated by beliefs concerning stressors’ impact on work performance.

This article argues that although gender is no longer widely considered to be a property of individuals, the alternative of viewing it in terms of performativity, where it is the outcome of linguistic and social performances, unnecessarily limits the possibilities of thinking of gender as a form of multiplicity that is both internally and externally differentiated. Any attempt to move beyond binary thinking in gender relations initiates a consideration of multiplicity, and the way in which multiplicity is conceptualized exerts a critical influence on the possibilities that are opened up. This article interrogates existing understandings of multiplicity and finds three actual or possible types - multiplicities of the same, characteristic of feminist approaches which we critique through a reconceptualization of desire; multiplicities of the third, characterized by anthropological, transgender and queer theory approaches; and multiplicities of difference and dispersion, typified by the rhizomatics and fluid theorizing of Deleuze and Guattari, Grosz and Olkowski. We propose an ontology of gender as a creative and productive form of desire, realized as proliferation in Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the rhizome. Gender identity is accordingly rethought as immanence, intensity and consistency.