What Determines Interest in an IS Career? An Application of the Theory of Reasoned Action

This study posits an IS specific career choice model that provides good predictive power and elucidates the nuances of factors underlying attraction to an IS career. IS is a relatively new career option, which many students may be unaware of or may misconstrue; this suggests the need for discipline-specific understanding. In this study, we used the Theory of Reasoned Action, which is a well-developed and widely applied theoretical model, but it has only recently begun to be applied to understanding occupational intentions. We argue that the TRA is an especially useful model for developing an IS-specific model of career attraction because, unlike other theories of career choice, it specifies the effect of social environment and allows for a more nuanced understanding of the factors underlying attraction to IS. Undergraduate students in an introductory IS course at a large public university were surveyed to test the study’s model, providing empirical validation of a career choice model comprising IS-career relevant beliefs and values. Overall, findings reveal that intentions significantly influence actual behavior—completion of an IS degree. IS career attitudes and social beliefs, in turn, collectively form intentions about pursuing IS careers. More specifically, attitudinal beliefs such as software/programming skill self-efficacy and technical, income, leadership, and job-variety-related work values have significant influence on favorable attitudes. The normative beliefs derived from one’s referent others, i.e., family members, friends, teachers, and significant others, significantly impact IS attitudes and intentions. The research contribution and practical implications of this work are discussed

Some Conceptional Thoughts on the Impact of Social Networks on Non-farm Rural Employment

Everybody knows: rural regions offer fewer possibilities for non-farm employment than urban areas. For this reason, it was the semi-subsistence farm structures that had to absorb the released workers from the big rural state enterprises and the urban-rural migrants fleeing unemployment in the towns in the course of economic transformation. This has created hidden unemployment in farm households and thus low agricultural labour productivity in the European transition economies. From a policy point of view, it is therefore desirable to promote new jobs outside the farm sector in order to decrease the livelihood dependency on agriculture. But do rural people actually have a choice? And if so, will they go for non-farm employment? In Europe's transition economies rural people taking up non-farm jobs seem to do this predominantly due to distress-push and not so much due to demand-pull factors. The former would imply that distress pushes them to earn money even in very low-paid jobs. The latter indicates better remunerated job options because there is demand. When individuals decide what kind of employment to go for, they consider among other factors also the support they can get from relatives and friends, the opinion of the local society in general, the resources they can mobilize and the barriers they are supposed to overcome. Since the late 1990s, a number of studies have been done with respect to non-farm rural employment (NFRE) and its contribution to rural development. However, the role of social capital and the underlying networks in getting access to NFRE has not yet been researched. The objectives of this paper are to give an overview of the social capital concepts, stressing on bonding, bridging and linking social capital.Rural non-farm employment, social networks, transition, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Labor and Human Capital,

On Knowledge Behaviors

Where large organizations make an effort to boost knowledge sharing, the solutions they fabricate can aggravate problems. Designing jobs for knowledge behaviors and recruiting people who are positive about sharing to start with will boost knowledge stocks and flows at low cost

What determines logistics sub-degree students’ decision to pursue a bachelor’s degree?

With the growing importance of the logistics industry and the increasing demand for logistics professionals with a bachelor’s degree qualification, the government and industry in China have long been looking for ways to attract more logistics sub-degree students to pursue higher education. This article aims to provide insights into the factors that determine logistics sub-degree students’ intention to pursue a bachelor’s degree. The study extended the theory of reasoned action (TRA) model to include four variables, namely perceived difficulty, job opportunities, job starting salary and genuine interest. The findings from the study involving 361 logistics sub-degree students from three institutions show that logistics sub-degree students’ decision to pursue a bachelor’s degree is determined by attitude, subjective norm, perceived difficulty, job opportunities, job starting salary and genuine interest. Genuine interest is identified as a new precursor of intention. The findings also show that there is a significant difference between students from different types of programmes. Based on the findings, this article proposes some measures for the relevant parties to motivate and attract logistics sub-degree students to further their study at bachelor’s degree level

Conjoining the Concepts of Visitor Attitude and Place Image to Better Understand Casino Patrons\u27 Behavioral Intentions

The importance of visitor attitude and place image in understanding individual’s visit behavioral intention has both been emphasized in tourism literature. However, the two concepts seem to have been amalgamated; their distinctive and interactive roles are rarely discussed. To fill this gap, this study investigated visitor attitude from two different aspects in the context of casino gaming – one’s generic attitude versus specific attitude. A conjoined conceptual model based on the theories of planned behavior and place image is developed and empirically tested in the context of casinos in Central Indiana. The results indicate that ‘generic attitude,’ ‘specific attitude’ and ‘cognitive image’ all play significant and distinctive roles in the process of formulating visitor’s behavioral intention. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed

Memory, Imagery, and Self-Knowledge

One distinct interest in self-knowledge concerns whether one can know about one’s own mental states and processes, how much, and by what methods. One broad distinction is between accounts that centrally claim that we look inward for self-knowledge (introspective methods) and those that claim that we look outward for self-knowledge (transparency methods). It is here argued that neither method is sufficient, and that we see this as soon as we move beyond questions about knowledge of one’s beliefs, focusing instead on how one distinguishes, for oneself, one’s veridical visual memories from mere (non-veridical) visual images. Given robust psychological and phenomenal similarities between episodic memories and mere imagery, the following is a genuine question that one might pose to oneself: “Do I actually remember that happening, or am I just imagining it?” After critical analysis of the transparency method (advocated by Byrne 2010, following Evans 1982) to this latter epistemological question, a brief sketch is offered of a more holistic and inferential method for acquisition of broader self-knowledge (broadly following the interpretive-sensory access account of Carruthers 2011). In a slogan, knowing more of the mind requires using more of the mind

What Is This Lobbying That We Are So Worried About?

Lobbying is both an essential part of our democratic process and a source of some of our greatest fears about dangers to that process. Yet when Congress, the public, and scholars consider loosening or, as is more often the case, tightening the restrictions on lobbying, they usually assume that everyone knows what activities are in fact lobbying. They therefore overlook the fact that multiple definitions of lobbying currently exist in the various federal laws addressing lobbying. This Article seeks to fill this gap by answering the question of how lobbying should be defined for purposes of the existing federal laws relating to lobbying. The Article first explores the three sets of applicable laws, which tax lobbying, disclose lobbying, and restrict lobbyists. This exploration reveals that all three sets of laws arise out of a common concern regarding the influence of interest groups on government actions. Drawing on the extensive research regarding how interest groups wield such influence, the Article then determines that this research strongly suggests that the vulnerability to interest group methods that raise the greatest concerns varies depending on the type of government actor that an interest group seeks to influence. The Article therefore proposes the adoption of single definition of lobbying that covers all direct attempts to influence government officials and employees in Congress and at the very highest levels of the Executive Branch, while excluding attempts to influence other types of government actors and to influence the public

What Is This Lobbying That We Are So Worried About?

Lobbying is both an essential part of our democratic process and a source of some of our greatest fears about dangers to that process. Yet when Congress, the public, and scholars consider loosening or, as is more often the case, tightening the restrictions on lobbying, they usually assume that everyone knows what activities are in fact lobbying. They therefore overlook the fact that multiple definitions of lobbying currently exist in the various federal laws addressing lobbying. This Article seeks to fill this gap by answering the question of how lobbying should be defined for purposes of the existing federal laws relating to lobbying. The Article first explores the three sets of applicable laws, which tax lobbying, disclose lobbying, and restrict lobbyists. This exploration reveals that all three sets of laws arise out of a common concern regarding the influence of interest groups on government actions. Drawing on the extensive research regarding how interest groups wield such influence, the Article then determines that this research strongly suggests that the vulnerability to interest group methods that raise the greatest concerns varies depending on the type of government actor that an interest group seeks to influence. The Article therefore proposes the adoption of single definition of lobbying that covers all direct attempts to influence government officials and employees in Congress and at the very highest levels of the Executive Branch, while excluding attempts to influence other types of government actors and to influence the public

Moral Intuitions and Organizational Culture

Many efforts to understand and respond to a succession of corporate scandals over the last few years have underscored the importance of organizational culture in shaping the behavior of individuals. This focus reflects appreciation that even if an organization has adopted elaborate rules and policies designed to ensure legal compliance and ethical behavior, those pronouncements will be ineffective if other norms and incentives promote contrary conduct. Responding to the call for creating and sustaining an ethical culture in organizations requires appreciating the subtle ways in which various characteristics of an organization may work in tandem or at cross-purposes in shaping behavior. The idea is to identify the influences likely to be most important, analyze how people are apt to respond to them, and revise them if necessary so that they create the right kinds of incentives when individuals are deciding how to act. This can be a tall order even if we assume that most behavior is the result of a deliberative process that weighs multiple risks and rewards. It’s even more daunting if we accept the notion that conscious deliberation typically plays but a minor role in shaping behavior. A focus on what two scholars describe as “the unbearable automaticity of being” posits that most of a person’s everyday life is determined not by conscious intentions and deliberate choices but by mental processes outside of conscious awareness. In this article, I discuss a particular strand of research that is rooted in the study of non-conscious mental processes, and consider its implications for ethics and culture in the organizational setting. This is work on the process that we use to identify and respond to situations that raise what we think of as distinctly moral questions. A growing body of research suggests that a large portion of this process involves automatic non-conscious cognitive and emotional reactions rather than conscious deliberation. One way to think of these reactions is that they reflect reliance on moral intuitions. When such intuitions arise, we don’t engage in moral reasoning in order to arrive at a conclusion. Instead, we do so in order to justify a conclusion that we’ve already reached. In other words, moral conclusions precede, rather than follow, moral reasoning. If this research accurately captures much of our moral experience, what does it suggest about what’s necessary to foster an ethical organizational culture? At first blush, the implications seem unsettling. The non-conscious realm is commonly associated with irrational and arbitrary impulses, and morality often is characterized as the hard-won achievement of reason over these unruly forces. If most of our moral judgments are the product of non-conscious processes, how can we hope to understand, much less influence, our moral responses? Are moral reactions fundamentally inscrutable and beyond appeals to reason? If reason has no persuasive force, does appreciation of the non-conscious source of our moral judgments suggest that any effort to promote ethical conduct must rest on a crude behaviorism that manipulates penalties and rewards? I believe that acknowledging the prominent role of non-conscious processes in shaping moral responses need not inevitably lead either to fatalism or Skinnerian behaviorism. Research has begun to shed light on how these processes operate. Related work has suggested how our moral responses may be rooted in human evolution. This perspective focuses on the ways in which our capacity for moral judgment is embedded in physical and mental processes that have provided an adaptive advantage in human evolution. These bodies of research contribute to a richer portrait of human cognition and behavior that can be valuable in thinking about how to promote ethical awareness and conduct. As Owen Flanagan has put it, “seeing clearly the kinds of persons we are is a necessary condition for any productive ethical reflection.” If there were such a thing as a normative theory of human movement, it would be futile if it exhorted us to fly. Efforts to create an organizational culture that encouraged people to fly would be doomed as well. In thinking about ethics, we need to have a sense of what lies between simply accommodating what we tend to do and demanding that we fly. My hope is that this article takes a small step in that direction