Pragmatism is a philosophical school of American origin, generally and internationally acknowledged as a genuine American contribution to the world philosophical heritage (the word “pragmatism” has its origin in the Greek “pragma”—”action,” “affair”). It reflects the broader American social experience and cultural context with its roots in Puritan theology, with Calvinistic ethics of hard work
The potlatch is a winter festival, with ceremonial feasts, where gifts and property are distributed to obtain or reassert a status, where prominent high caste families display crests, where names are given, where solidarity for war was made (in the past), and peace declared, where memorials are given and ancestors are honored. It was a
Pottery is clay that has been manipulated into a particular form and heated to harden and maintain its shape and durability. Clay is found on much of the Earth’s surface. Depending on the area in which it is found, clay may have many characteristics. Clay may be found finer in texture, smoother and purer in
The earliest period of world human history, which is often regarded also as constituent part of cultural and/or social anthropology, prehistory is aimed at reconstruction of world diversity of forms, and ways of human being’s and human society’s development since their origin until the formation of early political structures. The perspective purpose of prehistoric studies
Taxonomy Primates belong to the order Primates. Members of this order include prosimians, monkeys, apes, and humans. The primates are divided into two suborders: Prosimii and Anthropoidea. Prosimians are the more primitive members of our order, i.e., they more closely resemble the earliest primates, whereas members of Anthropoidea (i.e., monkeys, apes, and humans) are more
Primate locomotor habits can be divided into several major categories, each characterized by different patterns of limb use and body positions. These categories are quadrupedal running and climbing, vertical clinging and leaping, arm suspension, and bipedal walking. A primate chiefly uses one of the four types, but may use other types at least some of
Taxonomy Primates belong to the order primates. Members of this order include prosimians, monkeys, apes, and humans. The primates are divided into two suborders, Prosimii and Anthropoidea. Prosimians are the more primitive members of our order (i.e., they more closely resemble the earliest primates), whereas members of Anthropoidea (i.e., monkeys [New and Old World], apes
Several causative factors contribute to the drastic reduction of primate populations in the world. The major contributors are the destruction of habitat due to deforestation, the illegal pet trade, and the bush-meat trade: all due to the expansion of humans into primate habitat. The overpopulation of the Earth by Homo sapiens is the dominant force
The Animal Kingdom is divided into 25 to 30 major groups called phyla (singular, phylum): the Arthropoda (insects and spiders), Mollusca, Coelenterata (sea “anemones and jellyfish”), Echinodermata (starfish and sea urchins), and many other phyla that most people would recognize only as “worms.” The phyla are divided into subordinate groups called Classes, the classes again
The study of locomotor adaptations is fundamental to the study of primate evolution and ecology. The primates are particularly interesting because they manifest a remarkable diversity of locomotor styles. While workers have often focused on masticatory morphology, data on patterns of locomotion also provide information on the niches occupied by recent and fossil species. While
Political economy is the study of the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, including communication resources. This formulation has a certain practical value because it calls attention to how the communication business operates, for example, how communications products move through a chain of producers such
The term “privatization” refers to the transfer of property and/or operations from state or public ownership and control into private hands. Among the principal reasons given to justify privatization is that private ownership and operation make a company perform more efficiently because its managers will be financially obligated to make the company accountable to shareholders.
Just as there are numerous kinds of media – from electronic to print, local to worldwide – so too are there many different forms of media corporations. There are corporations that are vast multinational conglomerates operating in unrelated industries and spanning the globe, and those that focus on a single medium in a solitary market.
The idea of public goods has been subject to considerable debate and contestation. The term is generally used to classify products or services that are not diminished through usage and for which charges cannot be levied on individual consumption (e.g., street lighting). The concept of public goods is significant for media and communication scholars because
One of the most oft-cited approaches to studying media effects that emerged in the early 1970s is known as the agenda-setting effect (or function) of mass media. First tested empirically in the 1968 US presidential election by University of North Carolina journalism professors Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw (McCombs & Shaw 1972), this approach originally
The evening news on TV presents extensive coverage of an oil spill just off the Spanish coast. The audience sees the sinking of an oil tanker in a severe storm, learns that it has leaked tens of thousands of tons of heavy fuel oil, and watches pictures of birds fighting a hopeless fight for survival
Because of the extensive penetration of media into society, and the different purposes and types of information conveyed, there are a number of possible media effects. For the sake of simplicity, these possible media purposes are categorized as those intended to persuade (e.g., advertising, propaganda), inform (e.g., news), or entertain (e.g., narrative television, film). In
The term “availability heuristic” refers to a judgmental rule of thumb for estimating frequencies and probabilities. It states that individuals determine frequencies and probabilities “by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind” (Tversky & Kahneman 1973, 207). The logic underlying the availability heuristic holds that frequent and probable events are well represented in
Albert Bandura is a pioneering researcher of social modeling in the media (Zimmerman & Schunk 2002). He was born on December 4, 1925 in a rural hamlet in northern Alberta, Canada. He first achieved prominence as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia by winning the Bolocan Award in Psychology. After completing his doctorate
Catharsis theory has played an important role in the discussion about the effects of violence in the mass media for many years. The term “catharsis” is derived from the Greek katharsis which means cleansing, purging, or purification. In the form the theory is used in communication research, it implies that the execution of an aggressive
The term business simulations refers to exercises that represent processes involved in the production and delivery of goods and services. These exercises may be used to study the processes themselves, to enhance their teaching, or to assess proficiency in their management. When the exercises are scored, they often are called “business games.” Business simulations may
The assessment and investigation of vocational processes represents some of the most active and sustained contributions that have derived from George Kelly’s 1955 personal construct theory. Kelly’s theory is often interpreted as an early forerunner of contemporary cognitive theories, although his emphasis on personal agency, meaning, choice, and growth have variously aligned him with humanistic
FIRO-B is an acronym for Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-Behavior, a psychological instrument developed by William C. Schutz and fully described in 1958. The FIRO-B was originally developed to support the use of interpersonal compatibility as the basis for work group design in military settings. Since its original development, the FIRO-B has been widely used in
Career-development theorists tend to ignore one of the most basic facts of life—that while people are busy making a living, they are living a life. The result is that many theorists describe career development as if it occurred in isolation from human development. Isolating life roles creates a false scenario that does not reflect life
Career assessment involves an ongoing process of gathering information to assist clients to make career-related decisions. Useful information to gather in career assessment includes but is not limited to understanding a person’s personality, values, skills, interests, life roles, and career history. Assessment information is typically gathered via intake interviews, standardized tests and inventories, and non-standardized
Multicultural Career Counseling Checklist As societies, especially in the United States, have become more diverse, counselors are expected to be able to deliver competent services to a wide variety of clients. Such competency concerns call for measures that facilitate professionals collecting and managing the data needed for meaningful and successful interventions in cross-cultural career counseling.
The occupational card sort is a technique used by career counselors to assist persons who are unclear about their present or future vocational choice. It accomplishes this by (1) increasing the range and quality of information about self and about specific occupations, (2) expanding or narrowing the range of occupations being considered, and (3) encouraging
Performance modeling refers to the complex process of describing and defining job performance and facilitating the consequent goal of accurate prediction of job performance. It is a concept of particular significance in the area of industrial-organizational psychology as a measure of evaluation for the individual worker and the organization as a whole. Performance modeling also
The prescreening, in-depth exploration, and choice (PIC) model, proposed by Gati and Asher in 2001, provides a practical systematic framework for making career decisions based on decision theory. The PIC model consists of three stages: (1) prescreening the potential set of career alternatives to locate a small and thus manageable set of promising alternatives; (2)
Process and outcome research are two interconnected research methodologies that identify the processes that go on in counseling sessions and the effectiveness of these processes in outcomes for clients. Specifically, process research identifies the counseling variables involved in client change, while outcome research identifies the actual changes that occur. Moreover, following the definition of psychotherapy
Polygyny is defined as marriage between one man and two or more wives concurrently. It is one form of polygamy, the marriage of a male or female to two or more spouses concurrently. It contrasts with polyandry, the marriage of a woman to two or more husbands at the same time, which is rare, and
Polygamy allows marriage to more than one person at the same time. The practice of polygamy, or plural marriage, includes polygyny and polyandry. Polygyny allows men to marry more than one woman simultaneously. It is much more common than polyandry, which allows women to take multiple husbands. Polyandry is practiced in only a few cultural
Polytheism (from the Greek polutheos, “many gods”) denotes a theological system involving a belief in, and worship of, multiple divinities. The term was first popularized in the writings of 18th century European ethnographers as they sought to identify and label the religious beliefs of “primitive” peoples they studied and contrast them to Judeo-Christian monotheism, or
The pongids are the four great apes: orangutan, gorilla, chimpanzee, and bonobo. Rigorous primate-behavior field research during the last fifty years has clearly demonstrated that these apes are closer to the human species than Thomas Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, or even Charles Darwin had anticipated in the nineteenth century. Today, scientific evidence, ranging from biochemistry and
Karl Popper was one of the greatest political philosophers and philosophers of science of the mid-20th century. Born in Vienna in 1902, he was educated there and allied himself with the political left. Intellectually, he positioned himself in opposition to the “Vienna Circle,” who advocated logical positivism. During the triumph of fascism in the late
The term population is commonly used in the realm of statistics. For a statistician, the term refers to a collection of items. Demographers use the term similarly to refer to the collections of persons alive at specified points in time that meet certain criteria. This definition of the term population connotes the specification of various
Positivism is a philosophical movement and a system of ideas that includes a broad methodological approach and a theory of knowledge, in particular of a scientific knowledge, based on radical empiricism that confines knowledge to observable and verifiable data. It has emerged as a fundamentally new, non-metaphysical (“positive,” in a sense of a quality or
One of the basic principles of postcolonial thinking is that you really should not say, “one of the basic principles of ‘X’ is ‘Y.’ ” Postcolonialism, in its epistemological orientation, stands against what it labels “essentialism,” the identification of central or core characteristics, particularly of peoples, societies, and cultures. However, adhering to this prohibition makes
In few areas is it more problematic to arrive at a clean definition than it is for postmodernism. Not the least of the problem is the resistance among postmodernists themselves to be defined, or, in many cases, to admit the authority or even the possibility of definition as an activity. Before attempting a definition, a
Potassium argon [K/AR] dating is a radiometric technique that can be applied throughout the time span of the Earth from 4.5 billion years ago down to a few tens of thousands of years ago. Thus, K/Ar is the method that has been most useful in unraveling the history of the earth, the development of life
Like many other spheres of contemporary life, the mass media have been profoundly affected by the processes of globalization. During the 1990s, the global media landscape was transformed as a result of the deregulation and privatization of broadcasting and telecommunication, enabling a quantum leap in the production and distribution of media products across continents and
When labor is in the news media, it reveals – perhaps more than any other subject – the economic, political, and professional conflicts between the practice of journalism and the business of media. The problem of the news media’s coverage of organized labor is that the news media are both the social institutions designated to
Labor unions have been a feature on the world’s media landscape for close to two centuries. Depending on the era and the locale, they have certified the skills of content providers and production workers, bargained collectively for wages and benefits, trained and disciplined members of the craft, and fought with employers and the state over
Markets are where media function. They also provide the foundation of economic analyses, providing the context and mechanisms for explaining and predicting media and audience behaviors. Economists define markets broadly as any context in which goods and services are offered and purchased. Markets are thus defined by a set of goods or services, the set
The issue of media conglomeration, or the phenomenon of a vast amount of cultural (media) production being controlled by a relatively small number of corporations, has generated heated debates among communication scholars, policymakers, and industry practitioners. In these debates, the concept of media conglomeration primarily refers to ownership structures within media and communications industries, as
The core task of media management is to build a bridge between the general theoretical disciplines of management and the specificities of the media industry. Media management is, however, neither a clearly defined nor a cohesive field but rather a loose agglomeration of work by researchers from various scientific fields. The syllabi from the rash
In an age of rapid technological innovation it would seem counterintuitive to assume that marketing and advertising techniques would remain stagnant; to survive and prosper, as in all aspects of business, marketers need to adapt their strategies and activities and advertisers need to evolve in terms of style, content, and media application. Media, both as
In the late 1970s and early 1980s two books were published that tracked the growing concentration of ownership in the media industries. The first, published in 1979 by Benjamin M. Compaine, was titled Who owns the media? The first edition of Benjamin H. Bagdikian’s book The media monopoly was published in 1983. Over the following
Structures of media ownership take the form of either public or private enterprises. “Public” refers to those media funded at least partially out of general public revenues, whereas in the general sense “private” means media whose financing is provided by individuals, families, or groups. Public media can be state-owned (as in the former Soviet Union)
The origin of the term “piracy” dates back to the thirteenth century when rogue seamen who intercepted merchant and military vessels to rob them of their cargo were known as “pirates.” In the early eighteenth century, the term took on a new meaning, referring to the unauthorized use of intellectual property. Images of the swashbuckling
For several professions, the initial career choices are followed by the need to choose a specialty within that profession. For example, physicians-in-training need to decide whether to specialize in pediatrics, orthopedics, psychiatry, or some other field. However, much of the career development literature has focused primarily on the initial career choice of a profession with
Succession planning refers to an effort by organizations to select and develop future leaders who are prepared to replace current leaders. As such, a literature search will typically include articles that refer to analogous terms, such as the following: Replacement planning—to plan who will replace which key leaders in the firm High potential management—to select
Sweatshop labor describes work performed under conditions that violate normal standards of minimum wage, employment, worker treatment, and workplace health or safety. It is an issue of great concern to human resource professionals charged with implementing employment laws and policies. While the term is most often associated with globalization and the movement of relatively low-technology
For an increasing number of jobs, the future belongs to teams. Due to the complexity of tasks, the need to integrate multiple perspectives and disciplines into work products and services, and/or the sheer volume of work, more people than ever will find themselves working in teams. For the many who have not been well trained
In the first half of the twentieth century, employment careers were often characterized by long periods of stable, uninterrupted employment at a single firm. However, contemporary career models are becoming more episodic in nature. Gone are expectations of career-long, stable employment. They have been replaced by expectations of substantial job mobility. Because workers are more
A difficult task facing career counselors concerns applying abstract career theories to concrete problems presented by clients. Over the years, counselor educators have voiced concern about their trainees’ ability to accurately assess client problems and make sound clinical decisions. In practice, novice career counselors also become perplexed by the multitude of career methods and materials
There is an adage, “Give people a fish and they eat for a day, but teach them to fish and they eat for a lifetime.” This wise maxim succinctly captures the ultimate aim of the cognitive information processing (CIP) approach to career counseling—that is, enabling individuals to become skillful career problem solvers and decision makers.
DISCOVER Career Planning Program from ACT, inc., is a comprehensive computer-based career guidance system offered on the Internet for Grade 5 through adult. it includes inventories of interest, abilities, and values plus detailed information about occupations (civilian and military), majors, schools, financial aid, and the job search. The results of the career exploration process are
The Environmental Assessment Technique (EAT) was developed by John L. Holland and Alexander W. Astin to quickly and easily capture the dominant beliefs, functioning, and goals of the individuals within an organization, using Holland’s six environmental models. The EAT consists of eight scales: Institutional Size, Aptitude Level, and six Personal Orientation scales. Theoretical Background of
Frederic Kuder published his first career interest assessment in 1939. The Kuder Preference Record was different from the other vocational assessments of the day in that it asked respondents to indicate their preferences for everyday activities rather than their occupational preferences. The 1943 version became the standard career assessment used to assist World War II
Phonology, also called phonemics, is the study of the organization of speech sounds into a linguistic system of contrasting elements called phonemes. Unlike phonetics, phonology must account for native-speaker judgments as to what is contrastive and what is not. There are two broad approaches to this study: ones regards phonology as a level of structural
Pictographs, sometimes referred to as pictograms or pictoglyphs, are written, painted, or engraved signs that express ideas or meaning in the form of pictures. In a pictograph, the sign takes the form of the object it is supposed to represent. These physical resemblances can be highly iconic—such as a picture of a specific animal—or more
Dr. Kenneth Lee Pike was born in Woodstock, CT, in 1912. He earned his B.A. in theology from Gordon College in 1933. After being denied missionary work in China, he joined the Summer Institute of Languages to study Amerindian languages in Mexico in 1935. There he learned to speak Mixtec directly from Mixtec speakers without
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who has argued that human capacities for speech and abstract thought are based on evolved components of our brain that are not shared by other primates, and that much of human behavior results from evolutionary adaptations. Pinker was born in 1954 in Montreal, Canada. He earned his doctorate at
The field of political economy is defined by a set of questions surrounding economic modes of production and their subsequent interactions with both the social and political realm. As such, its research mandate is among the broadest in the social sciences. It impacts questions not just in the disciplines of economics and political science, but
In its most basic form, political science can be defined as the study of both the institutions that form states and governments, and the political processes that animate them. The project of systematically examining both normative and positive theories of government and social relationships is an ancient one, dating back at least 3,000 years. Plato
Political scientists have delineated five “crises” that nations seem to undergo, in sequence, in their political development. Identity: People develop a national identity over and above their tribal, regional, or local identities. Bretons came to think of themselves as French and Bavarians as Germans. We see now that Uzbeks and Latvians never considered themselves “Soviets,”
The major thesis of political anthropology is that politics cannot be isolated from other subsystems of a society. Political anthropology has defined its interest in how power is put to use in a social and cultural environment. Power is defined as political influence to accomplish certain aims. Through cultural interpretation, the political culture defines certain
Anthropologists have long recognized that marriage, while widely variable in meaning and form, is cross-cultural. One way that marriage varies pertains to the cultural norms dictating the appropriate number of spouses in the marriage. Monogamy is a marriage pattern where a person may only have a single spouse at a time. Polygamy is a marriage
Polynesia (“many islands”) is one of the three major cultural areas or regions in the Pacific Ocean, the others being Micronesia (“small islands”) and Melanesia (dark or “black islands”). It was Dumont d’Urville who first subdivided Oceanic peoples into these groups based primarily on cultural traits, but these regions also have geographical boundaries, some of
All the goods and services used in everyday life possess intrinsic qualities that meet human wants, and even those that cater to basic needs, like hunger, may also satisfy a desire for beauty or a wish to communicate. Food is more enjoyable if made with love or artistically presented and served with style. These material
Media enterprises operating under various types of media systems globally all have incentives to perform well and compete with other media units and types for resources and a variety of rewards. The differences in how performance is determined and types of rewards provided vary among the systems, however. Media systems result from a variety of
Concentration of ownership in the media sector presents important problems for the cultural industries. First, concentration creates dominant positions for some players, which can affect the necessary pluralism of ideas in a society. From another point of view, there are strong pressures to allow strong players in a given market because of the growing trend
Consolidation refers to the expansion of media firms through mergers and acquisitions. Formally, it is distinct from the concentration of media markets, although the terms are often used interchangeably. To some observers, consolidation responds to the growth of new television networks and cable and satellite channels – e.g., MTV, HBO, ESPN, CNN, Fox News, Canal
Communication researchers have devoted a substantial amount of attention to understanding consumers in media markets. The processes by which audiences select between the various content options available, as well as the mechanisms by which media organizations seek to understand, anticipate, and respond to these choices have traditionally resided at the core of research focusing on
Media rely on different combinations of revenue from consumers and advertisers to pay production costs and earn a profit. Reliance on either revenue source is determined by the characteristics of the media good, and by consumer and advertiser demand for the good. Consumers select media products that meet needs such as entertainment or information for
Marketing refers to activities that promote and organize the distribution and sales of products to consumers. Specifying “cross-media” focuses on those activities that involve multiple media. As such, the term “cross-media marketing” can be used to describe two somewhat related phenomena: general marketing and promotion activities that cross media boundaries; and efforts to increase sales
Communication requires the distribution of information from its creator to audiences, through some medium. This may occur in simple ways, such as talking, through broadcast networks, or through the production and physical distributions of fixed forms such as newspapers or books. Distribution systems can be thought of as networks connecting senders and receivers, with structural
Diversification is a defining characteristic of media firms and products in the new millennium. There was a time when media companies concentrated on their core business, whether through management decision-making or government mandate, and when there were fewer distribution channels available to media producers. Time and innovation altered both of these to dramatic degrees. The
Since Samuelson (1958), the economic literature has considered that production in the media industries (films, TV programs, music, etc.) is characterized by high fixed costs and economies of scale. For instance, the costs of creating a TV program are high, but the incremental cost of physical distribution to an additional consumer is very low or
Pay-for-performance reward systems are one of the major types of variable-based pay plans. In compensation terms, the guaranteed salary a person receives in each paycheck is referred to as base pay. Variable pay is a monetary component that is offered in addition to base pay. Thus, variable pay plans, including pay-for-performance, involve money that is
Phased retirement (or gradual retirement) normally means that an older worker remains with his or her employer while gradually reducing effort and hours worked. The reduced work time is viewed as a step toward full retirement and can take the form of fewer hours per day, week, month, or year. The term phased retirement is
Rater errors are errors in judgment that occur in a systematic manner when an individual observes and evaluates another. What are the types of rater errors and why do they occur? The opposite of this is the horn effect, which occurs when the employee is seen as weak in one or more areas and is
The term wrongful dismissal (or discharge) describes those instances where an employer illegally chooses to terminate (including a constructive discharge, forced resignation, elimination of the job, permanent layoff, or failure to recall or rehire) the employment of an employee. There are a number of factors to take into account in attempting to determine whether the
The workplace has become a common and natural place for romantic relationships to evolve. It is where most employees spend the majority of their waking hours, and those who work closely together often have a lot in common—they are likely to have similar interests, values, educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, and job pressures. In addition, today’s
Two-career relationships, also referred to as dual-career families, represent a unique variation of the larger category of two-wage relationships or dual-earner families. This entry begins with a definition of two-career relationships and how this family form differs from the larger category of dual-earner families. Described next are factors related to its emergence and increased prevalence
Employment practices are biased or unfair when employment decisions (e.g., hiring, promotion, job transfer) are based on factors (e.g., race, gender, age, disability, religion, and physical attractiveness) that are unrelated to a person’s ability to succeed on the job. Biased employment practices are a very important issue, because selection systems control access to jobs and
Wellness and fitness programs sponsored by and conducted in organizations have historically aimed at enhancing individual health, providing health risk screenings, avoiding the burden of suffering associated with distress, health, and safety problems, and reducing the organizational costs of distress at work. Because cardiovascular disease continues as the leading cause of death for men and
White-collar work is perceived as being corporate level or business-oriented and is performed in an office setting or at a desk using technical and electronic resources such as computers. Whereas some organizations may be solely composed of positions defined as white-collar work, others have a variety of work to include white-collar, blue-collar, and service-level positions.
Social constructionism is a postmodern perspective that emphasizes the socially constructed nature of knowledge. Underscoring the linguistic and relational nature of all knowledge, it emphasizes personal, social, and cultural processes that inform, and limit, the development of knowledge. In contrast to modernist notions of reality as singular, stable, universal, and nonhistorical, social constructionists emphasize that
The art of communication has been practiced by many people in many different ways. However, one individual by the name of Francine Patterson has focused on a unique study that has received national and international attention. Patterson has chosen to make her professional life a study of communicating with gorillas and doing what she can
In his seminal book, Peasants, Eric Wolf explains that peasants are “those large segments of mankind which stand midway between the primitive tribe and industrial society. “Wolf’s book is a tour-de-force explanation of who peasants are, as well as a 1960s state-of-the-art statement about what had become one of the more important classificatory categories in
Pentecostalism is a global religious movement that focuses on the immediate experience and empowerment of the Holy Spirit. It is arguably the most important development in Christianity of the 20th century. Some see it as the third stage in the history of Christianity, from Catholicism to Protestantism to Pentecostalism. It may also be the fastest
Any consideration of cultural diversity in the world, past and present, cannot ignore the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. The modern political units in this part of East Asia changed significantly during the 20th century. In 1949 Mao Zedong (Mao Tsetung) established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the Chinese mainland after defeating
Archaeology in the South American country of Peru has an extensive history that has uncovered the development of the largest native state to evolve in the Western Hemisphere, the Inca. The material representations of the Inca include monumental architecture, and ceramics and metallurgy craftwork from nearly a dozen separate and distinct cultures, each with their
Ancient Petra (Greek: “rock”), located in the southeast corner of modern Jordan, was the capital of the Nabataeans, and later, a provincial capital of the Roman and Byzantine Empires. Today, Petra is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Middle East. Petra is situated in a valley bordered by mountain ridges on its
Petroglyphs are a subset of the general category of rock art or rock graphics, which also includes pictographs and geoglyphs. Petroglyphs (petro-rock, glyph-carving) are man-made images or a series of geometric patterns that are carved, pecked, chipped, or abraded into stone using crude hand-held implements such as rocks, bones, antlers, and a wide variety of
Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) Cactaceae is a spineless cactus that is native to central and northern Mexico and to the Rio Grande Valley of the southwestern United States, and that is used in ceremony among participants of the Native American Church. When prepared correctly, peyote is a hallucinogenic drug, or a chemical substance that distorts the
Throughout the history of Western thought there have been key thinkers who have approached the world through a process view. The idea is that the world is constantly changing, both on its own and as people interact within it. These changing interactions and our understanding of reality and knowledge can collectively be called dynamic philosophy.
Phonetics is the scientific study of speech sounds. Unlike phonemics (the study of the organization of speech sounds into a linguistic system), phonetic studies can be carried out without necessary regard for the language system within which they may be found. That is, researchers making a phonetic inventory of the sounds of a language, say
The need for the companionship of others is one of the fundamental features of human social nature, and talk is a primary form of human communion. “Small” talk is a type of talk through which we mark co-presence, e.g., the mutual recognition provided by threat reducing talk to strangers in a lift or neighboring airline
Any discussion of questions and questioning needs to distinguish between questions as a linguistic form and the various social actions that are accomplished through this form. Questions, or “interrogatives,” can be formed in a variety of ways. One type of question uses a specific question word: “which,” “when,” “why,” “where,” “who,” “whose,” “whom,” or “how,”
A public meeting is a gathering in which there are limited, if any, restrictions on who may participate. Public meetings, as an ideal, are a form of democracy, but in fact are often viewed as frustrating and futile. Researchers have studied issues and topics related to public meetings (e.g., leadership, public participation); there is now
The terms “voice,” “prosody,” and “laughter” refer primarily to vocal, nonlinguistic aspects of communication. Human communication is rich with meaning conveyed through multiple channels, often divided into verbal (language, words, and symbols) and nonverbal. It may be tempting to think of nonverbal communication as primarily visual, but speakers convey much meaning vocally, too. Considering prosody
The economics of advertising are crucially important in understanding the history of modern mass media as well as their continued development. Sometimes called “indirect” funding (compared to the “direct” funding provided by consumers to such media as books and recorded music), advertising as an economic institution involves several different industries and collectives. Advertising’s influence as
As a neo-liberal approach to media policymaking has spread, many nations have relied more heavily on competition and the marketplace to shape the structure and output of their electronic media industries. The result has been a greater reliance on antitrust laws designed to maintain a competitive marketplace rather than industry-specific regulations. Indeed, this faith in
The audience commodity is the main product produced by media that earn their primary revenues from advertisers. Traditionally, advertiser-supported media have included newspapers, magazines, and commercial forms of radio, broadcast television, and cable television. Advertiser-supported media are often contrasted with media whose primary sources of incomes are audiences: books, recorded music, and films. Depending on
In the late 1800s, a brand was a tool used to identify ownership. Cattle ranches placed their brands on their cattle, and biscuit manufacturers burned their brands onto the barrels containing their products. As manufacturing processes improved throughout the Industrial Revolution, brands became a way for parity products to differentiate themselves (Pope 1983). Today, a
Circulation is the fundamental audience measure for print publications such as newspapers and magazines. Its importance lies in the fundamental relationship between circulation and advertising rates in the business models of most print publications. Taking the US as an example, prior to 1830 US newspapers depended primarily on subscription revenues. Content was focused mainly on
“Commerce” is a longstanding synonym for business as it is conducted in capitalist societies. It refers both to the institutions and practices of market economies and to the imaginative landscapes they produce. Commercial systems have two defining characteristics. Organizationally, they rest on the assumptions that competition between privately owned companies is the most effective way
Networking refers to a set of behaviors used to develop and maintain relationships that can potentially provide information, influence, guidance, and support to individuals in their careers. Actively maintaining contacts inside and outside of one’s organization, engaging in professional and community activities, and increasing one’s organizational visibility through accepting challenging work assignments are examples of
The obsolescence of knowledge and skills has long been recognized as a problem affecting individual careers and organizational effectiveness. While obsolescence has been discussed from a management as well as a psychological perspective at least as far back as 1930, concern over the problem became widespread following the rapid changes that began during the post-World
For many individuals and for a long time, occupational choice has been seen as the goal of career development. Theory and practice focused on either occupational choice or career development, but more recently these have been integrated into more complex conceptions of career. Historically, occupational choice is a comparatively new phenomenon. Up until the twentieth
The inclusion of prestige as part of interest assessment is not a new phenomenon but has gained increasing attention over the past few years. As a construct, prestige encompasses level of aspiration, level of training, preference for public recognition and esteem, desire for high income, occupational level, responsibility, and socioeconomic status. Prestige may also reflect
For more than a century, people who study work, occupations, and society more generally have been interested in what distinguishes a profession from an occupation and how an occupation becomes a profession. Over time, theorists have provided different answers to these questions and proposed different processes of occupational professionalization. What underlies all of the theories
Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is an action taken by an individual that is discretionary and not formally recognized or rewarded by an organization but in total promotes the organization’s effective functioning. Simply put, it is behavior that goes above and beyond the requirements of the job yet is not necessarily compensated by the traditional organizational
Organizational socialization describes how people learn to fit into a new organization or job. It is a process by which an individual learns appropriate attitudes, behaviors, and knowledge associated with a particular role in an organization. The general theory asserts that people who are well socialized into an organization are more likely to stay and
Organizational staffing is concerned with having the right people at the right place and time to achieve organizational outcomes. Staffing is a complex, multifaceted process that affects all areas of the organization but is particularly important with regard to organizational effectiveness. As such, the organization strives to attract, motivate, and retain a workforce with the
Outsourcing affects hundreds of thousands of employees around the world every year and generates over $100 billion in outsourcing contracts in the United States alone. In simple terms, outsourcing is the contracting out of non-core organizational activity to an outside vendor. Outsourcing occurs both domestically and globally. Offshoring is the term used to describe the
Part-time employment is a formalized work arrangement where an employee works fewer hours than what an employer judges to be customary for a full-time employee. For legal and comparative purposes, the U.S. Department of Labor defines part-time employees as those working 1-34 hours during a typical work week and full-time employees as those working 35
Paleoecology is both a field of ecology concentrated on the study of the ecology of fossil organisms and a branch of cultural and environmental anthropology aimed at the detection of the mutual influence and interdependence of prehistoric culture (or society) and its natural environment. The formation of paleoecology as special field of knowledge coincided with
Found in the Cretaceous limestone of the Paluxy River basin in Texas, the Paluxy footprints are tracks— genuine, forged, and imaginary—that a number of creationists have notoriously adduced as evidence for the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs. After a 1908 flood near Glen Rose, Texas, a number of large (15-18″; 38-46 cm) footprints, superficially and
Palynology is the study and analysis of microscopic organic material, predominantly pollen and spores, but also a multitude of other organic particles with tough exterior surfaces that defy acid digestion, collectively known as Palynomorphs. Palynologists use the data on distribution and abundance of palynomorphs for a growing range of applications, from geology and archeology to
Panama is a central American country, with a population of 2,839,170 (2000). It shares borders with Costa Rica to the west and Colombia to the east. Panama’s social, economic, political, and cultural history has been marked by its strategic geopolitical location. Panamanian intellectuals have considered their republic a “place of transit,” and have struggled to
Pantheism may be defined as the doctrine that God is coextensive with and identical to all things. Clearly distinct from both atheism (the belief that there is no God) and panentheism (the belief that all things are suffused with God’s essence, but are distinct from God), pantheism generally arises only in cultures with a fully
Paralanguage refers to verbal communications that have meaning but are not part of the system of words and grammatical rules we call language. Paralanguage includes such elements as pitch, amplitude, rate, and voice quality. Laughter, imitatitive speech, and prosody are also forms of paralanguage. Paralanguage emphasizes the fact that people convey meaning not only in
Born on February 14, 1864, in Harveyville, PA, and raised in Minnesota, Robert Ezra Park graduated from the University of Michigan, where he studied with the philosopher John Dewey. Concerned with social issues of his day, especially racial problems in urban settings, Park became a newspaper reporter, and eventually resided in Chicago. In 1898, he
Often described as immersion in a culture, participant-observation is the principal methodological component of ethnographic fieldwork. The researcher watches people and their activities in the social situation under study, gradually increasing participation in the culture as a check on observations. In turn, continuing observation allows for greater and more accurate participation. As the process proceeds
Pascal was a polymath who became a major figure in religious thought and polemics, mathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy, and French literature, along with the design of public transport. There are surprising connections between different parts of his thought. For example, his mathematical ideas on probability are used in a famous “proof’ of the existence of
Patriarchy is a theory about social organization that refers to a system of male authority that is seen to oppress women through its social, political, and economic institutions. In a patriarchal society, power rests in the hands of men, who have a greater access to, and control of, resources and rewards both in the domestic
The origin of linguistic pragmatics as a discipline can be traced back to an article titled “How to make our ideas clear,” written by Charles Sanders Peirce in 1878. In this essay, the founder of semiotics, the science of signs, presented a general principle of inquiry, which was later identified by William James as the
3 such as paralanguage and gestures in discourse) in extended texts or episodes of communication. Meta-discourse refers to the pragmatic use of language to comment reflexively on discourse itself. The prefix “meta” (from a Greek word meaning with, across, or after) here denotes a shift to a higher-order frame of reference. Meta-discourse shifts the focus
Microethnography, sometimes called video-based ethnography, addresses “big” social and organizational issues through careful analysis of “small” moments of human activity. Working at a particular site or institution, such as an archeological dig or an investment banking firm, researchers create video recordings of activities as they naturally occur, i.e., activities that would have happened whether or
The concept of power, who holds it and how they use it has been of great interest to almost every field of social science. A crucial way in which power is expressed and resisted is through language. Ng and Bradac (1993) argue that language reveals power, language creates power, language reflects power, and language obscures
Transcribing is the process of representing, in written form, some stretch of lived activity. The resulting transcription provides a document that is easily perused and examined, and in a variety of institutional settings it serves as the official record of the actual proceedings. Such governmental and commercial transcripts are generally perceived as impersonal or unbiased
Telephone talk has been a central communication practice and site of study since Shannon and Weaver developed their fundamental model of communication at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1940s to explain how technological and human channels of communication transmit information. As telephone service spread and ushered in the information age in the latter half of
Communication in today’s world is mediated by technologies in a multiplicity of ways. Telephones and mobile phones are integrated into the very cultures of sociability and personal connectivity, especially in large-scale industrialized societies where contacts and relationships are maintained across significant distances. Hopper (1992) characterized such populations as “people of the phone” in an attempt
Problems and troubles are a common aspect of human life; descriptions of these problems and troubles usually make relevant some kind of affiliative or supportive response. The study of support talk examines how interactants seek and obtain aid in a variety of informal and institutional settings. Support talk occurs when interactants attempt to aid, assist
Communication research has long recognized the centrality of storytelling in the construction of identities, relationships, and communities. Fisher (1987) went so far as to propose the metaphor of man as “homo narrans,” pointing to the narrativization of experience as a fundamental human cognitive strategy and social practice. Narratives are made up of sequentially organized verbal
Speech codes are historically situated and socially constructed systems of symbols, meanings, premises, and rules about communicative conduct. The “speech” in “speech codes” is a shorthand term, a figure of speech, standing here for all the possible means of communicative conduct that can be encountered in a given time and place. The “code” in “speech
Internet career assessment is an emerging though complex endeavor based on multiple methods; it is under continuous development. This relatively new approach, which has emerged along with the rise of the Internet as an alternative communication tool, is still characterized by limited investigations. Thus, its use, though becoming gradually pervasive, is generally based on users’
Organizational initiatives focused on supporting employees’ careers, also referred to as “organizationally supported career management practices,” are geared toward career planning and development. Using job-posting programs, organizations can play a critical role in their employees’ career-development efforts by providing accurate and updated information about promotion and growth opportunities within the organization. Organizations can proactively focus
Job search is a process that consists of gathering information about potential job opportunities, generating and evaluating job alternatives, and choosing a job from the alternatives. It is a self-regulatory process that begins with the identification and commitment to pursuing an employment goal and ends when the employment goal has been achieved or is abandoned.
Karl Ulrich Mayer describes institutional careers as the orderly flow of persons through segmented institutions. A number of scholars have pointed to occupational careers as providing the organizational blueprint for the adult life course, which begins with a period of education, followed by years of productive work (often in a series of related jobs) and
Employed persons living close to or below the poverty line can be considered low-income workers. Some examples of occupations characterized by low income are food service, retail, secretarial work, and cleaning jobs. Low-income workers face many challenges in the workplace, and traditional vocational interventions often do not meet the needs of this population. There is
Mentoring within the workplace is typically described as a relationship between two individuals, usually a senior and junior employee, in which the senior employee takes the junior employee “under his or her wing” to teach the junior employee about his or her job, introduce the junior employee to contacts, orient the employee to the industry
Organizations often seek to link pay to a measure of performance in order to attract, motivate, and retain the best employees. The organization can link pay increases to the performance of an individual, a group, or the whole company. There are many forms of individual performance-related pay, the most popular being merit-based pay, because it
When people talk, or even think, about careers, they typically use metaphors. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which one concept, usually a relatively abstract one, is substituted by another, usually more concrete, to provide clarity and dramatic effect. Thus, Nelson Mandela did not title his autobiography My Career or My Life, but
Early career theorists studied careers as a linear progression that generally corresponds to a person’s life span. They focused primarily on men who worked for one or two organizations, with a ladder of opportunities for promotion. In a typical career, the middle career stage is the point at which an individual attains a level of
The Minnesota Theory of Work Adjustment (MTWA), developed by Rene Dawis and Lloyd Lofquist, provides a way of conceptualizing the fit between an individual and a job or organization. It was initially influenced by research into the job placement problems of the physically disabled, which was the focus of a consultancy undertaken at the University
One of the most controversial fossil primates known, Oreopithecus bambolii has generated substantial debate since its original discovery in the 1870s. Although only distantly related to humans, this Miocene hominoid shows several features that later evolved in parallel in the earliest human ancestors, including potential bipedalism and hand grasping ability. While its taxonomic placement and
Ornamentation is decorating or beautifying objects or human bodies. Architecture is ornamentation on a larger scale; human beings alter their surroundings using artistic methods such as stained glass, textured walls and ceilings, and murals. Throughout history human beings have esthetically improved their surroundings. Ornamentation is present in physical objects such as pottery, textiles, and art.
George Orwell’s contributions to the field of anthropology are related to his opinions on individual freedom in relation to the state. Through both his writings and his many exploits, Orwell stressed the importance of each person’s individuality over the threat of authority. He reached adulthood at a time when fascism and communism were both making
Osteology is the subdivision of anatomy pertaining to the study of bones of vertebrate animals, including humans. It comprises the names of specific bones of the skeleton, their placement and articulations in relationship to other bones, body proportions, and visible and microscopic features of osseous tissue. Among Greco-Roman anatomists, who followed the Hippocratic proposition that
The Pacific Rim is an area that encompasses those land masses surrounding and within the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Rim as a region is significant due to its high levels of volcanism and tectonic activity. The boundaries are often referred to as the “Ring of Fire” because it is home to the world’s foremost belt
Few subjects captured the imagination of early European explorers more than the seafaring exploits of Pacific islanders. In 1768, the French explorer, Bougainville, dubbed Samoa “The Navigators’ Islands,” and the British captain, James Cook, noted that Polynesian canoes were often as fast and maneuver-able as his ships. Subsequent commentators, particularly within the anthropological community, have
Paleoanthropology is a multidisciplinary approach to exploring the evidence for the evolution of humans and their fossil ancestors. Paleoanthropology explores human anatomical structure, archaeological remains, habitat, and chronology through the diverse disciplines of biological anthropology, primatology, archaeology, ecology, geology, paleontology, biology, genetics, and cultural anthropology. In exploring the question of human evolution, paleoanthropologists link ideas
At the time of the first European contact, among the aboriginal groups that inhabited the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego were the Selk’nam, or Onas. Onas was the name their neighbors, the Yaganes or Yamanas, gave to this group. The Selk’nam lived in the northern steppe grassland of the grand island of Tierra del Fuego.
To anyone with a rudimentary understanding of paleontology and anthropology, it may not be readily apparent that these disciplines can be in any way related to one another or useful in informing the other’s primary interests. Anthropology, broadly speaking, is concerned with the study of human culture and behavior, with data provided directly by investigations
increments. This leads to an effect known as polar wander. This continuing process is still active today and forces charts of the earth’s magnetic field, known as isomagnetic maps, to be redrawn every 5 years. The phenomenon of polar wander has been used extensively in geology as an indicator of global position and the geologic
Individual and group behavior is governed in part by ethics, the moral principles or values on which judgments are made as to whether actions are right or wrong, good or bad. The minimum ethical standards in a society are codified in law, but ethical behavior requires going beyond mere adherence to the letter of the
From ancient times through the colonial era, expatriation was a means of enhancing political and economic influence to dominate new frontiers. Today, business expatriates are performing similar functions. A business expatriate is a citizen of the country in which the parent corporation is located but works in a foreign country at a subsidiary or branch
Recognizing the difficulties that an increasing number of workers face when they combine job with family responsibilities, many lawmakers and activists fought for and won the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993. Moving beyond prior legislation that allowed maternity leave, the FMLA mandates that employers provide up to 12 weeks
Family-responsive workplace practices are employer-sponsored programs and practices designed to help employees manage the demands of work and personal life. Such practices are intended to help organizations in their recruiting efforts, enhance their employees’ work-related attitudes and job performance, and encourage their employees to remain with the organization, all of which can ultimately improve an
A fast-track career offers advancement opportunities to top-level positions based on a series of developmental experiences provided by the organization. Stated differently, high-potential individuals are given accelerated development opportunities, with the idea of their reaching senior-management levels more quickly than those who are not on such a track. There are individual (e.g., needs, personality, education)
Flexible work arrangements refer to employer policies or managerial practices designed to give employees greater flexibility in influencing the time (duration), timing (when), or location (place) of work. Typically, these practices permit greater individual autonomy in self-managing work-role enactment in relation to family and other nonwork demands. Flexible work arrangements can be based on formal
Human resource information systems (HRIS) are means of acquiring, storing, manipulating, analyzing, retrieving, and distributing pertinent information regarding an organization’s human resources. They may be as simple as a box of index cards or a file cabinet full of manila folders or as complex as an interactive, Web-based computer application with role-based portals (an integrated and
Human resource planning is a combination of forecasting staffing needs and strategic planning. It involves planning, developing, implementing, administering, and performing ongoing evaluation and assessment of recruiting, hiring, orientation, and organizational exit to ensure that the workforce will meet the organization’s goals and objectives. The typical role of an HR professional performing the staffing function
As the term implies, human resource support systems are the various activities, programs, and initiatives used by organizations to assist in the development of human resources. In general, these systems, which are typically operated by an organization’s human resource department, include training and development, performance appraisal and feedback, career management, formal mentoring, and various types
Individual career management is the process by which a person can make reasoned, appropriate decisions about his or her work life as well as the relationship between the work and nonwork domains. This process of career management takes place over the course of a person’s lifetime and is based on the idea that individuals constantly
The 1848 publication of Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley by Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis marks not only the jumping-off point for American archaeology as an academic discipline but the beginning of our nation’s fascination with the mounds and earthworks of central Ohio and the ancient Americans who built them. Today we
The Oldowan is the earliest of the Lower Paleolithic or Early Stone Age typological “cultures.” At present, the earliest Oldowan sites date from about 2.6 my and come from Gona, in the Afar region of Ethiopia. The Oldowan industry terminates at about 1.6 my, which coincides with the beginning of the Acheulean. The Developed Oldowan
The Amerindians known as the Ojibwa, Ojibway, Ojibwe, Chippewa, Bungi, Mississauga, Saulteaux, or Anishinaabe (as they call themselves) number well over 220,000. Their territory extends east to west from Lake Ontario to Lake Winnipeg and north to south from the Severn River Basin to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. In Canada there are over 100 Ojibwa
The term “Olmec” derives from Olmeca-Xicalanca, the Aztec name for conquest-era Gulf Coast traders. This designation, however, is not without problems given the ethnic and historical links it implies. Indeed, “Olmec” refers to two things: (1) an art style and symbolic system widely dispersed throughout Mesoamerica; and (2) a pre-Columbian culture that flourished from 1200
The Omaha (also called Maha) are a Native American nation with a reservation in the northeastern corner of Nebraska, tribal headquarters in Macy, and a government-to-government relationship with the United States that was documented by the treaty of March 16, 1854. This treaty ratified reservation boundaries and recognized the Omaha as a sovereign nation governed
Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin, a Russian biochemist, advanced theories on the origin of life based on the chemical components of the early atmosphere. At first his theories were met with skepticism, but later they achieved some measure of acceptance in the scientific community. Oparin was born in the village of Uglich, near Moscow. His family moved
Orality, a term used in anthropology to interpret the performances of “verbal art,” was not a term created or defined by anthropologists for their particular use. It is a very old concept, formulated as the opposite of “literacy,” and has a long history in the humanities. It is encrusted with many beliefs and ideas that
Wild orangutans are now found only in the lush, swampy forests on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra in Indonesia. In prehistoric times, there were huge orangutans that roamed over Asia. The genus Gigantopithecus, the largest fossil ape known to science, is related through primate evolution to the living orangutans of today. The orangutan is
The last populations of orangutans are in dire straits and possibly face extinction within the next few decades. Over 80% of wild orangutan populations live in Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra, while 20% or less are found in Malaysian Borneo. The survival of orangutans is threatened by massive habitat destruction, forest degradation, and forest fragmentation. Orangutans
Orangutans are great apes of the genus Pongo; they are the largest living nonhuman primates after gorillas, and one of the most critically endangered. They live only on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, in Southeast Asia. They are found over most of Borneo, but in Sumatra they are restricted to the northern quarter, with
What are the means of communication used by people when they conduct their everyday lives; and what meanings does this communication have for them? These are central questions guiding the ethnography of communication. The ethnography of communication is an approach, a perspective, and a method to and in the study of culturally distinctive means and
When communicators interact with one another, they necessarily gaze (or look) at each other or gaze separately or together at objects, artifacts, or events in the perceptual world. Gazing, scholars in language and social interaction have shown, is a fundamental mechanism through which people manage, coordinate, and choreograph their communicative activities. Gaze-in-interaction, then, is the
Scholarship on gender and discourse has a long, interdisciplinary history. Anthropologists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries documented differences between women’s and men’s speech in non-European cultures. However, gender differences within cultures have never been sufficient to constitute separate women’s and men’s languages. Around the early twentieth century, academics’ attention also turned to the English
The communicative roles of gestures during talk in interaction are partly a function of their placement within unfolding turns and action sequences. Gestures occur both as free-standing unit-acts and as components of multimodal turns. A facial gesture, usually enacted with eyebrows and/or the mouth, can occur in the role of operator on a concurrent or
Erving Goffman was a sociologist, but what he studied was communication. He established the “interaction order” as a legitimate topic of study; in doing so, he provided the logic for why, and the method for how, to study face-to-face behavior. People construct the social world through language and interaction, he argued, so if we are
Social scientists are not interested in identity in the sense of an individual’s unique name and address. They are interested in identity in the sense of the category that an individual belongs to (or is made to belong to). All languages have explicit names which allocate people to a category of person (e.g., madre in
Interactional sociolinguistics is concerned with how speakers signal and interpret meaning in social interaction. The term and the perspective are grounded in the work of John Gumperz (1982a, 1982b), who blended insights and tools from anthropology, linguistics, pragmatics, and conversation analysis into an interpretive framework for analyzing such meanings. Interactional sociolinguistics attempts to bridge the
Intimate talk with family and friends can be examined as a product, process, or resource. It is a product of a relationship that has become intimate over time. This is the focus of studies involving social penetration (Altman & Taylor 1973) or social exchange theories (Thibaut & Kelley 1959), which find that as one person
Social psychology is conventionally defined as the scientific study of how the actual or imagined presence of others influences an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The social psychology of language (SPL) concentrates on the role of language in the dynamics between individuals and their social world; language use is argued to affect and be affected
The term “language varieties” covers “language” and “dialect.” A variety may be characteristic of a particular social group, or associated with a particular speaking style across groups of speakers in a community. “Variety” makes no direct or indirect assertions about the relative status of the linguistic system being described (“dialect” often refers with negative overtones
Cross-training, also known as multiskilling or multiskill training, is a movement in the training industry prompted by the increase in global competition and the need for workforce flexibility. The term cross-training applies to workers who are trained across a broad spectrum of an organization’s work. Cross-training typically involves training employees to perform new tasks in
Recently, researchers have turned their attention to the phenomenon of stress contagion that has been labeled crossover, namely, the reaction of individuals to the job stress experienced by those with whom they interact regularly. An influential article by Niall Bolger and colleagues distinguished between two situations in which stress is contagious: spillover, when stress experienced
Culture is defined as the beliefs and values that shape the customs, norms, and practices of groups of people that help them solve the problems of everyday living. Thus, culture influences the Culture and careers refers to the way that culture influences the way people work, the way they make decisions about work, and how
Customized careers are unconventional patterns of workforce engagement by individuals who would ordinarily be expected to adhere to traditional career paths. Customized careers differ from traditional careers on one or more of the following three dimensions: work time (e.g., working reduced hours rather than full time), timing (e.g., late entry into the workforce or taking
Employers around the globe are increasingly recognizing their employees’ domestic partnerships as a basis for extending human resource benefits. The practice has generated a number of human resource policy implications and has created a variety of legal, economic, and social issues and considerations. These issues and considerations have often created political and social controversy, which
One of the most important milestones in an individual’s life and career is the transition from school to work. Much research has examined how individuals come to understand who they are by the work they perform and the occupations they choose. Early psychological theories examined the importance of work, especially as measured by hierarchical rank
The term elder care describes the unpaid help provided by family members, friends, and/or neighbors to frail or disabled elders, including aging parents, grandparents, spouses, other relatives, or friends. Elder care involves care at the person’s home or in a care facility that may be nearby or miles away. Many informal caregivers to elders have jobs
Electronic employment screening (EES) is preemployment assessment using any electronic hardware or software, including the Internet. EES is typically conducted by employers or others with whom the employer contracts. For practitioners, EES includes electronic applications, resume scanning and tracking, online interviewing and videoconferencing, and electronic database access for inquiries into applicants’ backgrounds. These background assessments
Employee assistance programs (EAPs) function to treat a variety of work- and nonwork-related problems that may interfere with an employee’s job performance and/or productivity. EAPs were originally developed in the 1950s to treat employees whose job performance was negatively affected by alcohol abuse, but they have evolved greatly over the past several decades. The scope
The employment-at-will doctrine governs employment contracts of an unspecified duration. The doctrine’s classic formulation holds that absent a clear intention to contract for a term or other employment protections, the employee-employer relationship can be severed for any reason. As the Tennessee Supreme Court famously declared in Payne v. Western Atlantic R.R. Co. in 1884, an
The term Neolithic is frequently used to refer to that stage in humanity’s history when people became sedentary and started farming. The Neolithic is normally conceptualized as a package that includes farming, sedentism, the making and use of stone tools, and crafts such as pottery and weaving. It is thus viewed as a new food-producing
Neurotheology is the scientific study of religious or spiritual experiences and feelings. By using psychology and neuroscience, scientists explore the biological basis of religious experiences and are beginning to uncover the capabilities of the human mind. Neurologists have found evidence in the mechanics of the human brain that facilitates the capacity for spiritual, religious, or
The German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche presented scathing criticisms of the human sociocultural world (particularly religion and theology) and called for a rigorous reevaluation of all values. Like Darwin, Nietzsche presented a dynamic view of reality. The philosopher had been greatly influenced by the evolutionary movement of the 19th century (although the intellectual relationship between Darwin
Nomads are mobile people with no fixed settlement and whose livelihoods integrally involve frequent movement. There are many manifestations of nomadism. Perhaps the most common is pastoral nomadism, but hunter-gatherers can also be nomadic, and shifting cultivators are sometimes described as seminomadic. Throughout the world, Gypsies (and in the West, Travellers) also lead nomadic lifestyles.
Charles Darwin was never entirely satisfied with the evolutionary role he originally gave to natural selection in On the Origin of Species. He later expressed reservations about attributing too much of evolution to the action of natural selection and survival of the fittest because he became convinced that nonfunctional structures evolving without natural selection could
Norms (from Latin norma, a square, used by carpenters, masons, and other artificers to make their work rectangular) are either statistical or ideal. In the statistical sense, the norm is the average. In the ideal sense, however, a norm prescribes or expresses an ideal pattern or standard of behavior in a given social group or
Kenneth Page Oakley was born on April 7, 1911 in Amersham, England. He received an undergraduate degree in geology in 1933 and a Ph.D. from University College, London in 1938. From 1935 to 1969 he was curator of paleontology at the British Museum of Natural History. While Dr. Oakley carried out research in the fields
A broad name for a class of pigment bases, ochre is a fine clay that has been deeply colored by iron oxide in the soil. The amount of iron oxide present in the soil is the largest determinant of the degree of redness of the ochre; excavations of an aboriginal mining site showed that the
Ngandong is an archaeological site located on the High Terrace deposits near the Solo River in eastern Java, Indonesia, that includes remains of early Homo sapiens. Excavations of the site were conducted between 1931 and 1933 by Eugene Dubois. Originally called Homo solonesis, or “Solo Man,” the remains were thought to belong to a more
John Ogbu was a major figure in educational anthropology. The impact of his writings and his influence on hundreds of students and colleagues will be felt for decades to come. His work has been translated into numerous languages and has influenced educational debates within and beyond the field of anthropology. Like many scholars before and
The “truth-bias,” the expectation that, normally, one tells the truth, is proposed to be the cornerstone of humanity (Bok 1978). Yet, it is the skill of displacement – speaking of things which are not present – and thus also the ability to deceive that is the basis of human language (Aitchison 1996). A society of
Directives were described by Searle (1975) as one of five basic speech acts. In his approach, taken from linguistic philosophy, speech acts were defined by a particular fit between words (propositional content) and the world. Directives are the class of speech acts that attempt to fit the world to the words; they are attempts by
Most Language and Social Interaction (LSI) researchers would agree that their findings about the social functionality of details of language use and social interaction have potential value for cognitive science. Schegloff (2006) cites evidence that people have cognitive capabilities for managing, detecting, and processing the socially consequential details of expressive acts whose complexity exceeds what
The law operates primarily through language. Legislative bodies enact statutes and ordinances, judges hand down decisions, juries issue verdicts, and people enter into a wide variety of contractual relationships; in each case, a legal effect is produced through language. Nevertheless, until recently, the study of legal discourse was not well developed. Since the 1980s, however
Using language – “languaging” (Becker 1988) – is possible at two levels of discourse. Generally, when we use language, we look through it at a world we believe to exist beyond language. However, we can also use language for metalanguaging, i.e., in order to look through it at the process of using language itself. Discourse
Discursive psychology examines how psychological issues are made relevant and put to use in everyday talk. Unlike traditional psychological perspectives, discursive psychology does not approach the question of what psychology comprises and explains from an analyst’s perspective. Instead the focus is on how psychological characteristics are made available, ascribed, and resisted by people themselves, as
The world’s leading medical schools and journals officially recognize that what doctors and patients say to each other, and how they say it, dramatically affect the welfare of both patients and health-care organizations. Within the discipline of communication generally, and specifically within the sub-field of language and social interaction (LSI), the study of doctor–patient “talk”
Human emotionality is an ongoing stream that pervades every aspect of social life, talk, conversation, and discourse. Emotions are appraisals of situations; they have somatic bodily characteristics and their expressions can take nonverbal forms (facial, vocal, posture). Theoretical approaches to the emotional dimensions of discourse are found within three traditions of research: psychology of emotions
English-only movements seek to establish English as the official language of a nation, part of a nation, or a colony. As such (as with other dominant languages), English acts as a communicator of social identity and a vehicle of culture and economic power. Although proponents of English-only cite concerns about the erosion of English as
Harold Garfinkel introduced the term “ethnomethodology” (by analogy to “ethnoscience”) in the 1950s and 1960s and gave the approach its fullest explication in his widely influential Studies in ethnomethodology (1967). Ethnomethodology consists of the effort to discover and analyze generic practices – methods – found across different occasions by which people in concert with one
The word salience comes from the Latin word salire, “to go out,” as out of a door or gate. Salient may also mean “standing out from the rest” or “prominent.” Donald Super linked the idea of salience, meaning prominent or standing out from the rest, to career development theory in the 1970s. During the next
Career satisfaction is an important variable in research on career development and other areas of inquiry dealing with occupations, work dynamics, and individual adjustment. Although career satisfaction is seldom the primary topic of research investigations, it is often studied as an important criterion variable in relation to many different personal and organizational factors. It should
A career strategy is any behavior, activity, or experience designed to help a person meet career goals. A career strategy represents a conscious choice by an individual as to the type of investment he or she is willing to make in attempting to reach career objectives. Ideally, people pursue a particular career strategy based on
Career success can be defined as the positive material and psychological outcomes resulting from one’s work-related activities and experiences. This definition reflects both objective and subjective aspects of career success. Career success is important because it reflects an overall evaluation of the individual’s career: the ultimate outcome of career development. Theoretical explanations of career success
The term career transition has developed out of years of important and groundbreaking research and theoretical work on the process of vocational development. Beginning in the 1950s, Donald Super wrote extensively on the stages of vocational development, with each stage marking a specific “transition” in an individual’s career path. These stages span an entire life
The link between social and occupational standing on the one hand and health on the other has long attracted interest. Michael Marmot has investigated this issue for over 30 years, a program of research for which he received a knighthood in the United Kingdom. In a diverse and broad collection of studies, Marmot and his
The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) is an internationally recognized resource for understanding and expanding the leadership capabilities of individuals and organizations from across the public, private, nonprofit, government, and education sectors. A nonprofit educational organization founded in 1970, CCL’s mission is to advance the understanding, practice, and development of leadership for the benefit of
College student career development refers to the processes involved in making career decisions and the outcomes of those decisions for individuals in college. According to developmental theories of career decision making, traditional-age college students are often attempting to refine their understanding of themselves, learn about the world of work, and discover how they might make
Comparable worth is a policy implemented by a small number of state, local, and national governments to remedy wage disparities between men and women due to occupational segregation, a situation in which women are more likely to be employed in low-paying occupations and men are more likely to be employed in high-paying occupations. Comparable worth
Computer-based career support (CBCS) systems are information and communication technology (ICT) applications aimed at assisting individuals in their careers through the provision of online career support services. CBCS systems include a mix of career support services that correspond to four general functions of “social support”: informational, appraisal, instrumental, and emotional support. Informational CBCS is provided
Naturalism is the term that summarizes the coherent philosophical application and generalization of the methods and conclusions of the sciences. Naturalism is a tendency among thinkers, one that spans most disciplines of thought. Naturalism is not a closely defined school of philosophy, as materialism and idealism have tended to be. Thinkers identified as naturalist often
The universe, including the planet Earth, was established by means of natural evolution; the process and the result of the Big Bang activity. Usually, nature is understood as something that originated naturally, that is, the opposite to culture or just the opposite to spiritual culture (human mind, activities). The term nature sometimes comprises the whole
Nature, at its microphysical level, constitutes the subject matter of quantum theory, also known as quantum mechanics. Never in the history of physics has there been a theory that has changed so drastically the shape of science as quantum mechanics; nor has there been a scientific theory that has had such a profound impact on
The Navajo have an amazingly rich history and cultural background. One of the best known Native American groups because of their weaving and silver jewelry, it is difficult to adequately paint their picture in a condensed historical portrait. The Navajo, also known as Dine (or “the people”), are relative newcomers in the American Southwest. More
Nazca culture, also known as Nasca, flourished in southern Peru during the period around A.D. 1 to A.D. 700. The Nazca culture emerged in distinct stages: Early, Middle, and Late, with a Classic period between A.D. 250 and A.D. 750, the time during which the Nazca lines were constructed. From studies of ceramic designs in
Although it is possible that early humans buried their dead for purely hygienic reasons or to discourage scavengers, many anthropologists view intentional burial as a kind of symbolic behavior. Some have even suggested that it represents the earliest evidence of religion. Therefore, it is understandable that the subject of Neandertal burials is a controversial one.
Neandertals made their appearance midway through the 19th century, at a critical moment in intellectual history, when old but comfortable ideas about the human past were beginning to fall apart and new but shocking ideas (such as evolution) were coming in. The old ideas did not explain Neandertals. The new ones, which could, were generally
Neandertal sites are found throughout most of Europe, in Western Asia, and in parts of Central Asia. In the early and mid-1900s, anthropologists Franz Weidenreich and Ales Hrdlieka proposed that all modern humans went through a Neandertal stage of evolution. Under this model, all Middle Pleistocene hominid fossils that were morphologically intermediate between Homo erectus
Neandertals were a morphologically distinct human population that existed in Europe and Western Asia from about 200,000 to 30,000 BP (before present). The first recognized Neandertal discovery occurred in 1856, when the remains of part of the skeleton of one individual was discovered in the Feldhofer grotto, in Neander Valley, near Düsseldorf, Germany. This material
What is the theoretical framework of modern biology? If we would question a professional biologist, or even an eager reader of popular books on biology, we would await the answer: Darwinism, that is, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. But this answer is not entirely precise. Of course, Darwin’s position in the history
Political journalists, viewed through the lens of the editorial organization, are those who report on political affairs or work on the political desk. This perspective foregrounds organizational factors in news production, particularly the division of labor in the editorial process. Typical Anglo-American newsrooms make a functional distinction between news gatherers (reporters) and news processors (editors)
Apology is an action in which one admits the wrongful nature of an act and one’s responsibility for it in dealing with some type of problematic situation; for instance violations of social expectations, offenses, rule-breaking behaviors, social predicaments, and embarrassment. The concept can be traced back to apologia, the speech of self-defense identified in Greek
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975) was a Russian philosopher, scholar, and cultural theorist who devoted his writings to the study of language and social structure as it appeared in literature. He was educated in classical studies and taught as a schoolteacher before moving to a small town in Russia to escape the social and political revolution
In interpersonal situations, language can be used to convey information about one’s personality, temperament, social status, group belonging, and so forth. Although many of us like to think that we interact essentially the same way to virtually every person we encounter, thanks to fairness and our integrity, this simply is not true. In most instances
Communities of practice are groups of people who share similar interests and objectives. In pursuing these interests and objectives, they make use of common practices, work with similar artifacts, and use a common language (Wenger 1998). The concept of community of practice was first coined by Lave and Wenger (1991), when discussing learning processes within
A central puzzle that people face is how to make possible communication that is otherwise difficult, impossible, or unimagined. Communication design is a response to this puzzle. It happens when there is an intervention into some ongoing activity through the invention of techniques, devices, or procedures. Such interventions redesign interactivity and thus shape the possibilities
The concept of argument has a long history in communication. An argument is a concluding statement that claims legitimacy on the basis of reason. But argumentative discourse is a form of interaction in which the individuals maintain incompatible positions. More specifically, argumentative discourse directs attention to the arguments of naïve social actors engaged in intersubjective
Most radio and television programming encompasses talk in some form, but the term broadcast talk is usually understood as a specific category of programming in contrast to both fictional entertainment and traditional news. It refers to various programming genres that are broadly informational, to some extent nonscripted, and organized around processes of interaction. Although some
Studies of business discourse examine how the work of a business institution gets accomplished through talk and texts. Academic and practitioner interest in business discourse has emerged in a social context where business institutions, notably corporations, have a powerful presence in the world. Close attention to business discourse is predicated on the following suppositions: that
Conversation Analysis (CA) is a primary mode of inquiry for understanding how people talk with one another in everyday casual encounters, as well as in more specialized institutional settings involving bureaucratic representatives (e.g., medical, legal, educational, corporate, government). Research materials are naturally occurring audio and video recordings, and carefully produced transcriptions, of a broad range
Career change has been alternatively defined as any major change in work role requirements or work context or as a process that may result in a change of job, profession, or one’s orientation to work while continuing in the same job. Here, career change refers to a subset of work role transitions that include a
Career education refers to both a historical education reform movement and an evolving concept that reflects a process of bringing occupational relevance to academic curriculum and informing adolescents about themselves and the world of work. As a reform movement in the 1970s, U.S. Commissioner of Education, Sidney P. Marland Jr., initiated and sustained an effort
Goal setting is often a significant component of performance improvement programs in the corporate world, because employees who are committed to specific, challenging goals perform more effectively on the job. Researchers have identified a number of factors that explain why goal setting can improve job performance. Working toward a specific, challenging goal motivates an individual
Career indecision, the state of being undecided regarding occupational interest or career path, has been defined in a variety of ways, making it somewhat difficult for investigators in this area to reach consensus on its nature and causes. Researchers have described individuals as undecided if they have not chosen or declared a college major, if
Career interruptions are breaks, pauses, or disruptions in one’s current career. A career interruption occurs when an individual’s typical and usual work is interrupted or changed by some internal (e.g., change in one’s desired career path or life’s goals) or external (e.g., job loss or disability) event. Alterations or changes in a person’s career activities
Career progress of various groups is one of the central concerns in organizations, occupations, and work. People choose careers for different reasons. Chief among them are occupational prestige, rewards, and prospects for advancement. People are constantly making conscious decisions on career progress in light of their own interests and circumstances. At the same time, multiple
Initially called “vocational maturity,” the construct now known as career maturity (CM) was proposed by Donald Super more than 50 years ago. In the context of developmental theories current at the time, Super saw careers as unfolding in a series of developmental stages, with each stage characterized by certain tasks. The developmental task of relating
Career mobility represents individuals’ patterns of transitions between organizations and within organizations in the course of their work lives. It is a very broad term that essentially incorporates all possible movements in one’s career. As organizational layoffs and restructuring are becoming common, it is not surprising that employees, who realize that lifelong job security may
American citizens enjoy a relatively large number of educational and career options from which to choose. Thus, planning for career entry or change can require individuals to engage in a number of relatively complex and interconnected career-related tasks and activities. Many individuals elect to facilitate their progress in career planning by participating in career-planning workshops
Since Thomas Ference, James Stoner, and Kirby Warren’s seminal work first defined the career plateau, researchers have continued to investigate this antithetical phenomenon. This is due to the fact that many employees consider promotions and upward hierarchical movement as synonymous indicators of success at work. The career plateau phenomenon involves situations within which an employee
June C. Nash stimulated feminist anthropology and the anthropology of work, and she has been a key figure in the study of social change within the global economy. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1961 and spent most of her career at City College and the Graduate Center of the City
The discovery in 1982 of a fossilized skull in the central Narmada valley in Madhya Pradesh, India, provides the first scientifically recorded evidence of human skeletal remains from the Indian subcontinent dating to the late Middle Pleistocene of 300,000 to 150,000 years ago. Dr. Arun Sonakia of the Geological Survey of India found the fossil
John R. Napier was a British anatomist and primatologist renowned for his comparative studies of fossil primates and early hominids from Africa, and for his pioneering work on primate locomotion. After medical training at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, Napier served as a surgeon in its orthopedic unit. From 1946 to 1967 he taught anatomy
Myths may be classified as traditional stories that deal with nature, ancestors, heroes, and heroines or supernatural beings that serve as primordial types in a primitive view of the world. Myths appeal to the consciousness of a people by embodying its cultural ideals or by giving expression to deep and commonly felt emotions. These accounts
A genetic mutation is a spontaneous random change in the chemistry of DNA. The word mutation is related to the Latin verb mutare meaning “to change.” Mutagenesis is the process by which mutations arise, and a product of mutagenesis is sometimes referred to as a mutant. Science fiction frequently has popularized mutants as negative beings
Muslims, literally those who submit to God’s will, are the community of more than 1.3 billion practitioners of one of the world’s major and fastest growing religions, Islam. Although Islam began in the Middle East in the Arabian Peninsula, the largest populations of Muslims today live in Central, South, and Southeast Asia in countries such
Mutants, human or otherwise, historically were defined as those individuals whose appearance or functional capabilities lay beyond the boundaries of the perceived “normal.” Synonymous words include monsters, freaks, and paranormals. Today the terms mutant and mutation refer more commonly to specific alterations at the genetic level that give rise to our full spectrum of phenotypic
Currently, the United States has 562 federally recognized Native American communities and more than 270 reservations. Reservations range in size from the largest, inhabited by the Navajos in New Mexico and containing approximately 16 million acres, to fewer than 10 acres, as is the case for various Native communities in states across the United States.
Native studies is a relatively new discipline. Although there is no common definition, it is generally distinguished as dialogue between Western and Aboriginal perspectives to a critique of Native-state relations. Many focus on the need for an Aboriginal perspective that encompasses Aboriginal history grounded in colonization, traditional knowledge and language, Aboriginal rights, and decolonization focusing
Since Dorothy A. E. Garrod’s 1928 excavations at a cave in Wadi en-Natuf (located about 10 miles northwest of Jerusalem), archaeologists have continued to define and explain the distinctive cultural phase that is called “Natufian.” As the type-site for this cultural subdivision of the late Epipalaeolithic period, Shuqba Cave’s Layer B yielded a configuration of
The term “partisan press” commonly describes a pattern of organizing competing journalism outlets along party lines, but may also represent a period in emerging national journalism systems. In creating and distributing news, publishers and editors may work within or make arrangements with parties, resulting in reportage that openly espouses the positions of leaders or factions.
The telegraph enabled rapid, continuous, and simultaneous diffusion of public information across space. Its application to news reporting transformed journalistic practices, institutional arrangements, and audience experiences. The advent of telegraphic news further affected political, socio-economic, and cultural processes internationally. Introduced in the US in 1844, the telegraph helped sustain the press for nearly a century
The term “yellow journalism” first emerged in the United States as a pejorative to characterize the news produced by publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer in their competition for New York City readers during the late 1890s. Their success in achieving daily circulations surpassing one million helped spread their innovations, including sensationalism, to other
Research on verbal accounting examines how language is used to retrospectively explain or make sense of events. Citing one’s motive or describing the context may serve to portray events in a different way – as understandable, excusable, or less culpable. An accounting can range from a lengthy discourse (a narrative or courtroom cross-examination) to a
Action-implicative discourse analysis (AIDA) is an approach to analyzing talk or text in a social context. It is a relatively new method of discourse analysis, developed by Karen Tracy in 1995. AIDA views communication as composed of different practices in which communicators are problem-solvers. People reflect on what they did do (or would do) in
War correspondents provide first-hand accounts of military conflict for dissemination to the public. The literature of war correspondents manifests a decidedly western focus. War correspondents originated during the imperial age, when British newspapers sought first-hand accounts of distant continental and colonial wars, and became an institution during major nineteenth- and twentieth-century wars. Newspapers originated the
Violence against journalists is universal, found everywhere there is journalism. But the level and type of violence vary according to a series of factors, involving the general level of violence in a society or political system, the level of professionalism in the news media, and the extent to which violent action is useful in representing
News standards connote normative qualities, such as accuracy and decency, but the term specifically means the way information is gathered, made into news reports, and presented (Dicken-Garcia 1989). For example, objectivity encompasses six standards: verified facts, fairness, non-bias, independence, non-interpretation, and neutrality (Ward 2004). Journalists develop standards to gain credibility in society, and standards change
In a classic sense science journalism deals with results, institutions, and processes in science, technology, and medicine. Its main occasions have been publications in journals, lectures at conferences, and prizes (such as the Nobel Prize). Science reporting is not necessarily prompted by the science system. The occasion may also arise from interesting phenomena in daily
The concept of rumor covers a wide range of realities: false or unverified news, of course, but also any journalistic errors or disinformation maneuvers when publicly revealed, any prejudices and stereotypes made into narratives, some propaganda pieces if ambiguous enough, some hoaxes their authors do not kill, some realistic contemporary legends, and even some examples
The Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) is one of two inventories operationalizing John L. Holland’s person-environment fit theory. The other inventory, the Self-Directed Search, is intended to simulate the vocational guidance experience, whereas the VPI is intended to be a personality-interest inventory. The item content of the VPI consists of 160 occupational titles. Respondents choose either
The Wechsler Intelligence Scales consist of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI), the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). These are the most widely taught, used, and researched contemporary measures of human intelligence. Each Wechsler test consists of extensive interaction between a test taker and
The Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT) is one of the most widely used tests of general cognitive ability (g). A recent search of an automated database located over 1,000 references to the WPT. The current form is the result of more than 60 years of research and development. Wonderlic Inc., the WPT’s publisher located in Libertyville
Competent career planning is generally understood to rest on a tripod of interests, skills or abilities, and values. Interests and skills or abilities have a long assessment history; assessment of work values has only recently emerged. One of the original assessment tools is Donald Super’s Work Values Inventory (WVI). Generally speaking, work values can be
Academic advising has been important to the success of undergraduates in colleges and universities since the beginning of American higher education. Developmental advising, which addresses the social and cultural acclimation of a student as well as academic success, is the most effective type of advising. Developmental advising makes it possible for advisor and student to
Age discrimination is one of the fastest-growing areas of employment law. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency charged with administering the law, has received upward of 19,000 claims of age discrimination per year over the past several years. This growth is most attributable to the increasing number of aging employees in
Organizational assimilation is a necessary process that benefits both organizations and newcomers. Some perceive assimilation to be a negative necessity in organizational life. This unenthusiastic view stems from a conceptualization of assimilation as newcomers conforming to existing organizational norms and rules, thereby stripping neophytes of their individuality. Essentially, newcomers are coerced into conformance by more
Biculturalism refers to an individual’s ability to interact competently in two different or disparate cultural systems. Cultural systems are based on ideas, values, beliefs, and knowledge learned and shared by individuals within the same culture and can include those based on national origin and ethnic background. The meaning derived from cultural systems represents shared perspectives
Many individuals feel “burned out” from their jobs. Indeed, job burnout can be a substantial obstacle to employee and organizational well-being. Christina Maslach, a pioneer in the study of the burnout process, has defined job burnout as a prolonged response to chronic (that is, long-lasting) stressors in the workplace. Maslach has also developed several versions
The new era of organizational life has ushered in critical changes in how people conceive of their careers and how organizations think about the work trajectories of their employees. Trends toward shorter relationships between individuals and the organizations in which they work have forced revised ways of thinking about the structure of careers. While the
The term mummy describes the corpse of an organism where decay is arrested for a considerable period of time and a semblance of life-like appearance is preserved. Some natural environments can mummify animal and human bodies spontaneously, thereby preserving them over great periods of time. Mummification practices by humans occur worldwide and may represent significant
Lake Mungo is 1 of a series of 17 dry lakebeds in the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area of Mungo National Park in New South Wales, Australia. Today the area is extremely arid, and the lakebeds rarely retain water except at the peak of a flood, but from 40,000 to 20,000 years ago, this area
George Peter Murdock was an American anthropologist, with strong roots in Yale University sociology, whose major contribution was the testing of propositions with ethnographic data drawn from large samples of societies representing all levels of sociopolitical complexity. He achieved this through a series of cross-cultural studies that focused on various aspects of social organization, including
Museums of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are commonly defined as permanent nonprofit institutions that serve society by acquiring, conserving, and displaying material so as to provide the public with opportunities for education and entertainment. Whether dedicated to art, culture, history, or natural history, museums often provide people with their first introduction to
Music is an integral part of culture. Not only is it interesting in itself and an object worth studying as is any other part of culture, but it also sheds light on various cultural processes. Anthropological interest in music, moreover, is not limited to so-called “primitive” or “folk” music any more than anthropology itself is
Native Americans of the Great Plains are an important part of popular culture. They have been represented in anthropological studies, literary works, and the cinema. Many of these representations focus on nomadic communities engaged in hunting bison, military activities, and religious practices alien to many citizens of the United States. Although the vast majority of
The study of native peoples of Central and South America addresses many scientific and humanistic debates. It is a subject of considerable intrigue for archaeologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists. Who are these people? Are they exotic others who engage in hallucinogenic drug use and shamanistic healing? Are they remnants of lost empires, victims of Western
Our species, being a product of organic evolution, developed a complex social structure that reflects the biological structure of the human brain. The progression of this social structure is illustrated by both primate behavior and the archaeological record. Driven by biological and environmental factors, the development of culture became a decisive, and often divisive, adaptation.
Just as there is no single American Indian “language” and “culture,” so there is no single American Indian “religion.” There once existed a diversity of Native peoples whose 2 million descendants today represent the heirs of many languages, cultures, and religious practices that still define Indian country. This world of experience included sacred ritual practices
Raoul Naroll was an American anthropologist whose major contribution to anthropology and other social sciences, including history, was the development of methods for conducting and evaluating comparative studies. He developed many procedures for subjecting comparative studies to rigorous analysis, and he was equally concerned with the trustworthiness of ethnographic sources. His goal was to have