Repositioning Organizational Failure Through Active Acceptance

This paper considers the way organizations respond to failure by actively repositioning the failed outcome as success. When an organization fails to meet planned goals, they do not necessarily learn from the experience, automatically terminate the plan, or persist with the failing course of action. Instead, another response is to shift original aspirations by recasting what was achieved, acting as if the ensuing failure is positive, despite indicators suggesting otherwise. As a mode of organizational interpretation, this repositioning reformats the criteria for what is success in order to move forward, enabling organizations to continue failed outcomes and their tasks that are well past their use-by date. After detailing this adjustment, we model an active-acceptance protocol on failure, discussing whether organizational effectiveness is predictable from how firms respond to failure in this way. The paper fills a gap in dialogue specific to failing by opening an alternative path to understand how organizations frame failure differently.

A Study of Factors Influencing on Passive and Active Acceptance of Home Energy Management Services with Internet of Things

Since awareness of the influence of home energy management services (HEMS) with Internet of things (IoT) has grown, the study on the acceptance of IoT services has been expanded. Previous studies, however, have not paid attention to the acceptance itself, focusing only on factors affecting the acceptance. This study attempts to draw meaningful implications by exploring the relationships between the acceptance and the factors affecting it with distinctions between passive acceptance and active acceptance. This study analyzed the ordinal logistic regression models based on a survey of 909 adults 19 years of age and older in Korea on HEMS with IoT. In addition, we attempt the ordinal forest to increase the reliability of the research results. As a result, this study showed that consumers’ perception of usefulness was noticeably important to enhance active acceptance and that those who had high sensitivity to new technology acceptance showed high active acceptance, and older women had higher active acceptance. This study might contribute to the research on IoT acceptance in the energy management sector by classifying the acceptance into active acceptance and passive acceptance beyond the framework of setting the acceptance as a single variable.

Hero and Fate in the Nibelungenlied

Based on the material of the epic poem “Das Nibelungenlied” (The Lay of the Nibelungs) the article discusses the concepts of hero, heroism and fate which existed in the minds of medieval Europeans. This paper explores the relationship between these concepts. The authors postulate and prove the hypothesis that, in the framework of mentality under study, the measure of higher heroism was foresight and active acceptance of one’s fate. Fate, in turn, was revealed only to those heroes who were able to doom both themselves and the maximum number of other people to death. The authors show that Fate in the “Lay of the Nibelungs” is a constant, albeit secret, participant of the events; it interacts in complex ways with other participants. Fate directs the actions of the characters and is itself directed by them, revealing itself only to selected brave ones, to those who will be able to become its co-author, who, in accordance with its plans, will boldly go to death and lead others there too. Only such people can be considered heroes.

Acceptance as a Coping Reaction: Adaptive or not?

Acceptance as a coping reaction to unchangeable negative events has been discussed controversially. While some studies suggest it is adaptive, others report negative effects on mental health. We propose a distinction between two forms of acceptance reactions: active acceptance, which is associated with positive psychological outcomes, and resigning acceptance, which is associated with negative psychological outcomes. In this study, 534 individuals were surveyed with respect to several hypothetical situations. We tested the proposed acceptance model by confirmatory factor analysis, and examined the convergent and discriminant validity using personality and coping measures (Trier Personality Questionnaire, Bernese Bitterness Questionnaire, COPE). The results support the distinction between the two forms of acceptance reactions, and, in particular, that active acceptance is an adaptive reaction to unchangeable situations.