Conceptualizing Cuvée Organizations: Characteristics Leading towards Sustainable Decision-Making Practices

This paper discusses the role and responsibility of business organizations in a sustainability transition with a thought-provoking hypothetical construct, the cuvée organization. The aim of the paper is to introduce and conceptualize this normative concept on what sustainable and responsible business would look like in an ideal world—more specifically, which meta features should characterize a business organization that is designed for sustainability? It also tests the concept’s applicability to a micro-process, an everyday challenge any organization aiming for sustainability would face, namely discounting. The concept of the cuvée organization emerged from participatory backcasting, a normative scenario-building exercise conducted with a sustainability expert panel. In this co-creative process, the panel capitalized on the metaphor of cuvée wine and winemaking, which provided the cognitive means to chart the unknown. The emerged concept of the cuvée organization stands for a business archetype which is designed to serve a prosocial cause, subordinating activities and structural features accordingly. When applying this construct to discounting, our approach lies with ecological rationality in behavioral decision making as well as the practice-based approach of corporate strategy research. In this theoretically rigorous effort, we aim to show which meta-characteristics could support an organizational structure leading to better decision making, aiming to avoid various forms of temporal and spatial discounting. The originality of the research is filling the normative vision with details through the conceptualization of the cuvée organization. On the level of methodologies, our research contributes to understanding the novelty and applicability of backcasting processes and provides an astounding example for the use of metaphors in future studies.

COASTRO: @N ASTRONOMY CONDO – TEACHERS’ ATTITUDES AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL BELIEFS TOWARDS SCIENCE IN A CITIZEN SCIENCE PROJECT

An attitude is seen as a hypothetical construct related to a tendency expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favour or disfavour. In the case of attitudes toward science, these cannot be isolated from understanding science’s processes: the path to produce, refute, and change knowledge. Thus, it is critical to promote public engagement with science-astronomy and technology with the goal of understanding content, but also of understanding what science is and how it is built. In this context, CoAstro: @n Astronomy Condo emerged –a citizen science project starts with the engagement of primaryschool teachers with the Research Group on the “Origin and Evolution of Stars and Planets”at the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA). A semi-structured interview was conducted to study teachers' attitudes and epistemological beliefs towards science and the changes promoted by CoAstro. The interview was performed before and after the development of the CoAstro. It involved nine primary school teachers with no degree in science and who volunteered to participate in CoAstro. The results show that there has been an increase of interest in astronomy and the reinforcement of epistemological beliefs.

Dance’s Resource-fullness

Chapter 1 introduces a hypothetical construct called “dance’s resource-fullness”—a set of conjectured but unverifiable capacities dance might have that could be tapped for exchange either as commodity or as gift. These capacities consist of the ability to bring people into relation, to generate as well as expend energy, and to adapt to a wide range of contexts and needs. In support of these conjectures about dance, the chapter utilizes a methodology of list-making and draws upon diverse studies of dance including philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and neurophysiological inquiries. Dance’s capacity to bring people into relation is assessed in terms of the ways it summons participants, how it develops the space in which it occurs, and the types of subjecthood it constructs. Dance’s facility at generating energy is explained through recourse to theories of dance as play, as synchrony, as bodily becoming, as virtual power, and as mobilization. Dance’s facility at adapting to an array of contexts is demonstrated through the vast number of typologies of dance that have been proposed concerning its structure and function.

Constructing a sophistication index as a method of market segmentation of commercial farming businesses in South Africa

This study investigates the process of index construction as a means of measuring a hypothetical construct that can typically not be measured by a single question or item and applying it as a method of market segmentation. The availability of incidental secondary data provided a relevant quantitative basis to illustrate this process by constructing a commercial farming sophistication index for South Africa. It was evident that this approach offers an appropriate and useful means of segmenting a market. Several factors contribute to the appeal of this approach. Among others, it addresses important priorities in the area of future segmentation research. By offering classification rules based on characteristics that can easily be observed or elicited through asking a few key questions, new or potential buyers can be grouped by buying behaviour segment. Furthermore, the multi-step process that was employed provides a systematic and structured multivariate approach to segmentation. It also facilitates replication of the process when conducting future studies. Lastly, the outcome of this type of segmentation method offers researchers and marketing practitioners a procedure, in the form of an equation, to calculate index scores and provide rules to segment the market based on predefined intervals. Hence, the challenge to replicate segment formation across independent future studies is addressed.

Stochastic Process Models of Preference Change

This chapter gives an informal summary of a research program aiming to develop and test stochastic process models of preference change. What does it take to develop a formally precise and descriptively valid model of persuasion? Any such model should specify formally concise definitions of hypothetical constructs such as preferences or attitudes. The chapter reviews weak order and semiorder models of preferences that are grounded in decision theory. Such a model should also spell out how hypothetical constructs relate to observable behavior, such as feeling thermometer ratings. The chapter reviews response processes that, in some cases, accommodate within and across respondent heterogeneity in overt behavior. The model should furthermore specify formally what it means to change one’s preference over time and how that change relates to the persuasive environment. The chapter treats preference change as a continuous time stochastic process on a graph of preference states. The most innovative feature of the approach is to model the (perceived) persuasive environment itself also as a hypothetical construct that is not directly/objectively observable by the researcher. Last but not least, the chapter discusses how to accommodate partisan differences, how to incorporate respondents with immutable preferences, and the possibility that respondents may tune in and out of a persuasive campaign. The emphasis of the chapter lies in explaining key conceptual ideas grounded in decision theory and mathematical psychology.

Comparative Psychopathology: Connecting Comparative and Clinical Psychology

The animal welfare movement was empowered by decades of animal studies focused on the ontogeny of psychopathology in non-human primates and other species. When H.F. Harlow induced aberrant behaviors in rhesus macaques, collaborators began the search for effective behavioral and psychopharmacological interventions. Years later, working with human subjects in his clinical practice, Harlow’s first graduate student, A.H. Maslow developed a “Hierarchy of Needs” and the hypothetical construct of self-actualization. Following Harlow’s practice of using human models to design monkey studies, present day psychologists apply what is known about maladaptive behavior and the factors that facilitate positive human behavior to improve the quality of life for non-human taxa living in captive settings. We know how to prevent psychopathology in monkeys and apes but nonhuman primates are still confined in restricted, substandard facilities that introduce trauma and suffering. Felids, ursids, elephants and cetaceans have also suffered this fate. As a result, there is good reason for clinical and comparative psychologists to collaborate to ameliorate aberrant behaviors while creating conditions that enable all captive animals to thrive.

Rationalizing the Attitude-Acquisition Conundrum in Cameroon Pidgin English

This paper seeks to rationalize the attitude-acquisition conundrum which is witnessed with Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), an English-based pidgin spoken in Cameroon. According to Baker (1992: 10), ‘attitude’ refers to a hypothetical construct used to explain the direction and persistence of human behavior. In second-language acquisition literature, the use of the term ‘attitude’ has very often conjured up associated notions such as behavior, motivation, prestige and importance, which are seen to be important determinants of levels of success in L2 learning/acquisition. A positive attitude is said to fortify the motivation to learn a language; to be a successful learner, a positive attitude towards the target language is necessary. However, as McKenzie (2008: 4) notes, the relationship between attitude and L2 learning/acquisition is a rather complex one, which varies according to social context. Among other things, a positive attitude towards an L2 is also driven by factors such as (1) the socioeconomic value of the L2, (2) the L2's status-raising potential and (3) its perceived instrumental value.