Stripped of Agency: The Paradoxical Effect of Employee Monitoring on Deviance

Organizations have long sought to mitigate risks associated with unsupervised employee conduct (e.g., employee deviance) through employee monitoring, an approach consistent with traditional theorizing. Yet the effectiveness of employee monitoring as a deviance deterrent has been called into question by emerging evidence suggesting that monitored employees may actually engage in higher levels of deviance. To address this critical tension and shed light on why and when monitoring leads to deviance, we draw upon social cognitive theory to examine the self-regulatory consequences of employee monitoring. We theorize that monitoring paradoxically creates conditions for more (not less) deviance by diminishing employees’ sense of agency, thereby facilitating moral disengagement via displacement of responsibility. Integrating fairness heuristic theory, we further argue that overall justice provides a powerful heuristic that mitigates the potential loss of sense of agency associated with monitoring. Accordingly, we suggest that employee perceptions of high justice will attenuate displacement of responsibility and, in turn, deviance. Across a field study and an experimental study, we find converging support for our predictions and rule out alternative explanations. This research provides important theoretical and practical insights into how monitoring can be used effectively without also promoting unintended consequences.

A ‘world of method and intrigue’: Muriel Spark's Literary Intelligence

In 1944, Muriel Spark was recruited by the Foreign Office to work as a Duty Secretary in the Political Warfare Executive at Milton Bryan. ‘I played a very small part,’ Spark wrote in her autobiography, ‘but as a fly on the wall I took in a whole world of method and intrigue in the dark field of Black Propaganda or Psychological Warfare, and the successful and purposeful deceit of the enemy.’ Drawing on research in Spark's personal and literary archives at the McFarlin Library, Tulsa, and the National Library of Scotland, this essay explores the ways in which this ‘world of method and intrigue’ is taken in and reformulated in Spark's writing. Political espionage takes centre-stage in several of Spark's fictions, and a preoccupation with secrecy and spying runs through her work. But the methods of black propaganda can also be read as a secret sharer of some of Spark's most characteristic aesthetic strategies. Focusing in particular on Spark's most direct treatment of her secret war work – The Hothouse by the East River – critical tension centres on reading Spark's literary intelligence less as a re-enactment than as a subversion of the logics of disinformation.

How Much Is Financial Advice Worth? The Transparency-Revenue Tension in Social Trading

In social trading, less experienced investors (followers) are allowed to copy the trades of experts (traders) in real time after paying a fee. Such a copy-trading mechanism often runs into a transparency-revenue tension. On the one hand, social trading platforms need to release traders’ trades as transparently as possible to allow followers to evaluate traders accurately. On the other hand, complete transparency may undercut the platform’s revenue because followers can free ride. That is, followers can manually copy the trades of a trader to avoid paying the following fees. This study addresses this critical tension by optimizing the level of transparency through delaying the release of trading information pertaining to the trades executed by traders. We capture the economic impact of the delay using the notions of profit-gap and delayed-profit. We propose a mechanism that elucidates the economic effects of the profit-gap and delayed-profit on followers and, consequently, the amount of money following a trader: protection effect and evaluation effect. Empirical investigations find support for these two effects. We then develop a stochastic control formulation that optimizes platform revenue, where the control is the optimal delay customized at the trader level and calculated as a function of the current amount of money following a trader and the number of views on the trader’s profile page. The optimized revenue can be incorporated into an algorithm to provide a systematic way to infuse the platform’s goals into the ranking of the traders. A counterfactual study is conducted to demonstrate the performance of the optimal delay policy (versus a constant-delay policy) using data from a leading social trading platform operating in the foreign exchange market. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems.

Genesis and evolution of establishment of a law-based state: the anthropological approach

Introduction. At the end of the twentieth century, globalization of the economy took place: mass migration, introduction of innovations in transport and communication technologies, growth of international finance, etc. This led to critical tension in a variety of spheres: social, economic, political. The purpose of the paper is to study the features of the theories of the right state. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study are modern theories, concepts, hypotheses. Comparative and anthropological analysis is used. The methodological and information basis of the work are scientific works, materials of periodicals, information resources. Results. It is proved that it was the globalization of the world economy significantly influenced the change of theoretical approaches to the definition of a rule of law. The development of legal pluralism in the system of Anglo-American law school is analyzed. The world trends in the complexity of realization of legal pluralism are determined: re-nationalization of the noosphere, changing domains of the right registration of migration and global trade. The peculiarities of the introduction of legal documents-donors and recipient states are considered. Globalization processes require a creative search of asymmetric bonds, which lead to the creation of a social phenomenon – the law. The policy of global legal pluralism shows the deep involvement of neo-liberal legal projects of all actors. Conclusion. The epistemological understanding of the analytical concept of legal pluralism is that any form of legal configuration affects or confuses statehood, regardless of whether this manifestation of cooperation, neglect, merger. The perception of global legal pluralism restored the meaning of the state in the present fragmented and dependent form in complex multiple social systems.

GUI Based Prediction of Diabetes Stages by Finding the Accuracy using Machine Learning Approach

In 2050, the world's diabetic patients will arrive at 642 million, which implies that one of the ten grown-ups later on is experiencing diabetes. Diabetes mellitus (DM) is characterized as a gathering of metabolic issues applying critical tension on human wellbeing around the world. DM is a persistent sickness portrayed by hyperglycemia and it might cause numerous inconveniences. To forestall this issue, to break down the given medical clinic dataset by directed AI technique(SMLT) with catch a few data resembles, variable ID, uni-variate examination, bi-variate and multi-variate investigation, missing worth therapies and dissect the information approval, information cleaning/getting ready and information perception will be done on the whole given dataset. Our analysis provides a comprehensive guide to sensitivity analysis of model parameters with regard to performance in prediction of diabetic patients by given attributes of dataset with evaluation of GUI based user interface diabetes attribute prediction. Additionally, it observes to lead an increase the highest accuracy in diabetic prediction of attributes by a significantly better classification report, identify the confusion matrix and to categorizing data from priority and the result shows that the effectiveness of the proposed machine learning algorithm technique can be compared with best accuracy with precision, Recall and F1 Score.

An (Un)Marked Foreigner

This essay negotiates the critical tension between race as an analytic and social construct by examining how race becomes socialized in and through the production and presentation of Arab culture in two ethnographic case studies: how Syrian musicians negotiate musical multiculturalism as they integrate into German society and how independent musicians in Egypt navigate the racialized entanglements of national and international security logics that privilege Western foreigners. Both these case studies center the “foreigner” subject as one who embodies proximity to white power and delimits the boundaries of such power. We argue that the category of foreigner is thus a racialized construct that not only complicates the Black–white binary of race relations but strategically evades explicit discourses and practices of racecraft that are violent, discriminatory, and exclusionary. By provincializing critical race theory through the particularities of Arab lived experience, we illustrate how local social categories are entangled with historic legacies of empire and contemporary global logics of racialized difference while remaining sensitive to how conceptions of difference exceed Euro-American categories of race. Our work therefore directs attention towards alternative enactments of racialization within the Global South.

The place of transversal LGBTQ+ urban activisms

This special issue on placing LGBTQ+ urban activisms seeks to affirm the plurality of LGBTQ+ activisms and expand the geographic lens to consider places that have been side-lined as sites of LGBTQ+ political ferment. In this article I reflect on the ways that the collection also gestures towards the importance of ‘connective’ LGBTQ+ urban activisms, complicating existing theorisation that has primarily focused on transnational relations. Approaching it through the particular space and time of London during the Covid-19 pandemic, I interpret the collection as a call to explore the knowledge that becomes available – and the praxis that is foregrounded – when we examine the connective dimensions of LGBTQ+ urban activisms. Bridging feminist, queer and urban studies, I conclude by arguing for the particular analytic lens that emerges when ‘place’ is brought into critical tension with ‘transversal politics’ as a way to think about both those connective LGBTQ+ urban activisms that already exist and those which are urgently needed.

Sverre Fehn’s Brussels and Venice pavilions: the process of becoming different

The early career of Sverre Fehn, the influential Norwegian architect, is marked by the designs of pavilions which were constructed shortly after each other for two major competitions: The Norwegian Pavilion for the World Exposition in Brussels (1956–1958) and The Nordic Pavilion at the Giardini site of the Venice Biennale (1958–1962). This paper studies the process which led from design to construction for both pavilions, identifies structural changes during that process, and investigates the causes and effects of such changes. A study of Fehn’s hand-drawn sketches and photos of models, made throughout the design and construction stages, reveals that despite functional and formal similarities the two pavilions’ development process and the changes which they underwent are noticeably different. The pursuit of ‘abstract space’ during the competition stage for the Brussels Pavilion was tested by considerations of construction only later on, creating a critical tension in the project. Not only did the organisation of structural components change significantly during the design process but the logic of construction underwent a complete transformation. Nevertheless, this transition between different iterations of the Brussels Pavilion suggested an alternative approach for the Venice Pavilion in which the initial thought of construction became a projection, rather than an abstract imitation of built reality. The spatial intention and construction-related considerations of the Venice Pavilion were addressed by a ‘synergetic’ structural principle, implicit in the competition scheme. This unprecedented feature significantly enlarged the ‘space of possibility’ of the roof structure, which provided for adaptation to indeterminacies without compromising the initial design intentions. Changes in the design of the Brussels and Venice Pavilions, therefore, differ in the ways in which they evolved from design to completion: sequential and abrupt, vs. gradual and continuous. This sheds light on a critical shift in the work of an influential architect and the way he approached design indeterminacies, rather than forcing them into submission.