COR Faculty Workshop
Friday, April 12, 2013
Venue: 306 Social Ecology I
12.00 PM – 1.30 PM
Prof. Gerardo Okhyusen
Professor of Organization and Management
The Paul Merage School of Business
University of California, Irvine
Understanding Individuals’ Subjective Perceptions of Group Effectiveness: An Inductive Approach
Discussants: Dr. Jone Pearce (Paul Merage School of Business, UCI) and Dr. Dan Stokols (Social Ecology, UCI)
We use an inductive methodology to explore how individuals subjectively evaluate their experiences in successful and unsuccessful groups. We asked experienced managers in business and education to provide descriptions of groups they participated in at work. Using a concept mapping approach, we specifically elicited specific experiences in one successful and one unsuccessful groups. A subset of participants in each sample sorted and categorized statements from these descriptions for cluster analysis and assisted in the interpretation of the cluster solution. Using these solutions, we engaged in an inductive process and find that participants evaluate successful and unsuccessful groups using features that are not fully accounted for in our theories of groups, such as judgments of the motivation of others and emotional expression. Our findings also suggest that successful and unsuccessful group outcomes are evaluated using qualitatively different criteria and that participants evaluate success and failure in terms of processes as well as outcomes. Our research highlights the importance of understanding the structure of individuals’ subjective perceptions of group success and failure, particularly as these evaluations can help us understand individuals’ behavior in groups.
COR Faculty Workshop
Friday, May 17, 2013
Venue: 306 Social Ecology I
12.00 PM – 1.30 PM
Prof. Seth Pipkin
Assistant Professor of Planning, Policy and Design
School of Social Ecology
University of California, Irvine
How Culture Matters for Economic Development: Repertoires of
Contention on The US-Mexico Border.
Discussants: Scott Bollens (Social Ecology) and Charles Ragin (Social
Sciences)
This paper offers a new perspective on the causes of economic
development by applying tools of cultural sociology and social movement
analysis directly to the workings of the political economy. Based on a
controlled case comparison of cross-border US-Mexico city pairs, an a
priori unlikely economic divergence is accounted for by local repertoires
of political claim-making and problem-solving. Through these different
cultural repertoires, the cities garnered differential benefits from the
novel economic environment created by the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA.) Insofar as they pertain to patterns of communication
and trust, repertoires relate to the network literature; however, in the
cases observed here, the repertoires seem to predate the key networks of
interaction, suggesting that they are the underlying causal mechanism.
Based on their durable, community-level influence on the implementation of
policies, repertoires represent both an opportunity to rethink how culture
affects economic development, as well as for theorizing development
phenomena at a “middle range” in between individual mean effects of local
policy and the bounded rationality impacts of macro-institutional rules.