EU citizens in Britain are already being stigmatised - and it's likely to get worse

After the Brexit vote, a 'silent majority' was revealed, whereby those prejudiced against EU immigrants now felt they could express those views freely. But discrimination is not only the result of bigotry, writes Thomas Roulet. He explains the many ways EU citizens are already being stigmatised in Britain, and how such treatment may progressively lead to an erosion of their rights

Good to be Disliked? Exploring the Relationship Between Disapproval of Organizations and Job Satisfaction in the French context.

Previous research has found that a positive relationship exists between favourable perception of a firm and employees’ job satisfaction: the more positively an organization is perceived, the happier are its workers. However, the current literature has overlooked the consequences of a negative corporate image or disapproval of organizations. Building on the concept of organizational identification and the social identity literature, we fill in this gap and counterintuitively argue that employees are more likely to identify and align with their organizations when it faces illegitimate criticism. We test our hypotheses on a large-scale survey collected in France and find that perception of disapproval of an organization has indeed an adverse effect on job satisfaction. However, if employees perceive criticism as illegitimate, job satisfaction is positively impacted. This study suggests the existence of micro-level social identity reactions in case of unjustified disapprobation: employees stick together and hold the line against criticism, strengthening the collective identity and adding positive emotional value to the work experience.</jats:p

Open-access management research at a turning point: giving relevance to a stigmatized object

In this short piece, we start by briefly discussing why the model chosen by M@n@gement – free-to-submit, free-to-publish and free-to-read – remains a relevant template, indeed perhaps more relevant today than ever. Despite these assets, our model must compete with other open-access outlets, and contend with negative perceptions, on the part of academics and the general public, of the distance taken by research from its practical impact. We discuss this multidimensional stigma and consider how we, as a community of management researchers, can overcome these challenges to make open-access research sustainable and impactful

Qu’il est bon d’être méchant! Paradoxe de l’illégitimité organisationnelle dans le contexte des banques d’investissement.

This study explores the relationship between organizational legitimacy and illegitimacy. It combines media content analysis and quantitative approaches to empirically investigate this link in the specific context of investment banks in the United States. Illegitimacy can paradoxically signal conformity to field level norms. Thus, the more banks are attacked by the print media, the more prestigious they are seen by their peers

Unemployment insurance and reservation wages : evidence from administrative data

Although the reservation wage plays a central role in job search models, empirical evidence on the determinants of reservation wages, including key policy variables such as unemployment insurance (UI), is scarce. In France, unemployed people must declare their reservation wage to the Public Employment Service when they register to claim UI benefits. We take advantage of these rich French administrative data and of a reform of UI rules to estimate the effect of the Potential Benefit Duration (PBD) on reservation wages and on other dimensions of job selectivity, using a difference-in-difference strategy. We cannot reject that the elasticity of the reservation wage with respect to PBD is zero. Our results are precise and we can rule out elasticities larger than 0.006. Furthermore, we do not find any significant effects of PBD on the desired number of hours, duration of labor contract and commuting time/distance. The estimated elasticity of actual benefit duration with respect to PBD of 0.3 is in line with the consensus in the literature. Exploiting a Regression Discontinuity Design as an alternative identification strategy, we find similar results

Qu’il est bon d’être méchant! Paradoxe de l’illégitimité organisationnelle dans le contexte des banques d’investissement.

This study explores the relationship between organizational legitimacy and illegitimacy. It combines media content analysis and quantitative approaches to empirically investigate this link in the specific context of investment banks in the United States. Illegitimacy can paradoxically signal conformity to field level norms. Thus, the more banks are attacked by the print media, the more prestigious they are seen by their peers

Reconsidering the value of covert research: the role of ambiguous consent in participant observation

In this article, we provide a nuanced perspective on the benefits and costs of covert research. In particular, we illustrate the value of such an approach by focusing on covert participant observation. We posit that all observational studies sit along a continuum of consent, with few research projects being either fully overt or fully covert due to practical constraints and the ambiguous nature of consent itself. With reference to illustrative examples, we demonstrate that the study of deviant behaviors, secretive organizations and socially important topics is often only possible through substantially covert participant observation. To support further consideration of this method, we discuss different ethical perspectives and explore techniques to address the practical challenges of covert participant observation, including; gaining access, collecting data surreptitiously, reducing harm to participants, leaving the site of study and addressing ethical issues

Blame Game Theory: Scapegoating, Whistleblowing and Discursive Struggles following Accusations of Organizational Misconduct

Research on organizational misconduct has examined how audiences generate discourses to make sense of behaviour that may transgress the line between right and wrong. However, when organizations are accused of misconduct, the resulting ambiguity also opens opportunities for organizations and their members to generate discourses aimed at deflecting blame. Little is known about how actors who are at risk of being held responsible actively respond to misconduct accusations by engaging in discursive strategies. To address this question, we build on crisis communication and discourse theory to integrate processes of scapegoating and whistleblowing into a holistic model. We develop a blame game theory – conceptualizing the sequence of discursive strategies employed by an organization and its members to strategically shift blame by attributing responsibility to others or denying misconduct. Our model identifies four blame game pathways as a function of two types of ambiguity: moral ambiguity and attributional ambiguity. We highlight accusations of misconduct as pivotal triggering events in the social construction of misconduct. By conceptualizing the discursive dynamics of strategic reactions to accusations of misconduct, our blame game theory contributes to the literature on organizational misconduct and has implications for research on social evaluations

Laser annealing of silicon on sapphire

Silicon-implanted silicon-on-sapphire wafers have been annealed by 50-ns pulses from a Q-switched Nd : YAG laser. The samples have been analyzed by channeling and by omega-scan x-ray double diffraction. After irradiation with pulses of a fluence of about 5 J cm^–2 the crystalline quality of the silicon layer is found to be better than in the as-grown state