Indiana Time Law and Its Detrimental Effects

The most enduring and contentious public policy issue in Indiana history may be the seemingly prosaic matter of “what time is it?” This analysis focuses on the implications of the State of Indiana’s recent change to daylight-saving time in conjunction with near-statewide Eastern time . I argue that the economic and commercial basis for the new temporal regimen is erroneous, and that its educational and humane implications are substantial . Finally, I outline a proposal for resolution of these issues . Although the concentration here is the Indiana situation, lessons are generalizable to other states, counties, and regions facing similar timeregulatory consideration

On contemporary misdefinition of power and the importance of definitional fidelity

This paper's conceptual treatment documents a recent tendency in the literature to abandon the traditional definition of an important social construct: power. Naturally, such flexibility or looseness of conceptualization contains detrimental implications for operationalization and theory. When very different measures or manipulations are derived from incongruent conceptual definitions for a given nominal construct, it can produce uncertainty about the variable really being measured, from which a theoretical void follows. So, in this case, it is possible that many published studies and empirical findings ostensibly applying to social power, in fact, may not be. Thus, an entire literature stream appears to be misleading, even vitiated. Along with empirical grounding, remedial information is provided here to address the concern

Correction to: Cluster identification, selection, and description in Cluster randomized crossover trials: the PREP-IT trials

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article

An enduring college classroom annoyance: The wandering student phenomenon

Anyone teaching at the U.S. university level for two decades or more may recall when a dramatic change in student classroom behavior first became manifest. A tendency to regard attendance at a given class session as flexible, volitional, variable, and without concern for disruptive side-effects—with respect to each class segment—arose rather suddenly within the last 20 years, and continues. Specifically, for students to casually leave the room during class has become commonplace. Diagnosis of possible cause(s) and motivation for such arbitrary or rude wandering is attempted here, along with tentative prescriptive response. Investigative methods are primarily analytic and exploratory, including hundreds of interviews, augmented by formal survey. The basic finding is that faculty respondents do find the referenced behavior a serious problem. This work-product is apparently the first research to target the designated behavioral change

Alienation in the Distribution Channel: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Initial Theory Testing

Of all the social phenomena that have been investigated in the distribution channel context – including power, conflict, dependence, role performance, and opportunism – one that has escaped attention until now is alienation. Borrowing from traditional behavioral science and consumer behavior, the following monograph defines the concept of distributor alienation and elaborates a method for its measurement. After surviving a validation regimen, the measure is applied within the confines of a test of a theoretical model. The results may provide a preliminary framework for a future structure of channel alienation theory