Goal Orientation in Teams: The Role of Diversity

Organizations make increasingly use of teams as their basic structure, making it more and more important to determine what enables optimal team functioning. Over the past decades, the goals people focus on in achievement settings (i.e. goal orientation) is shown to be highly important for individual behavior. Nevertheless, little is known on how this plays out in a team context. The present dissertation focuses on uncovering the role of team composition in goal orientation on team functioning, with special emphasis on the role of diversity. In a series of experimental and field studies, we examine several important areas in need of clarification leading to several key insights. First, team members’ goal orientation may help or hurt teams dealing with ethnic diversity. Second, effects of mean levels of goal orientation on team performance may be dependent on other factors (moderators). Third, diversity in goal orientation is an important overlooked variable in the literature that plays a large role in team performance. Fourth, both group information elaboration and group efficiency are relevant underlying processes of this relationship. Fifth, team reflexivity may counteract the negative effects of diversity in goal orientation. Finally, a coordinating team leader may bring about the positive potential of diversity in goal orientation

A network utilization perspective on the leadership advancement of minorities

Social network researchers have shown that, compared to majority employees, structural constraints can cause minority employees to end up in network positions that limit their access to resources (i.e., social capital), and consequently, limit their access to professional opportunities. These findings, however, do not explain why structurally equivalent minority and majority employees achieve differential returns of social capital on their leadership advancement. We propose that majority and minority employees differ in the extent to which they utilize their existing network ties, termed network utilization. We theorize why and how network utilization processes—career and work utilization of network ties—can explain employees’ (i.e., actors) influence on their leadership advancement. We also explicate the process through which actors’ direct and indirect network connections (i.e., alters) contribute to such outcomes through both career-supporting utilization and work-supporting utilization with actors. We conclude by outlining the boundary conditions of network utilization theory; a theory that changes the current understanding of how existing social network ties can perpetuate the underrepresentation of minorities in leadership positions

Managing the downside of goal orientation diversity

Differences in individual goal orientations within a team can significantly impair group performance. Fortunately for companies, there are ways to mitigate these effects

Development and Change at Forty

As Development and Change completes its fortieth year, this note first describes the emergence of the journal’s critical, generalist identity. It then provides a glimpse into the journal’s ‘kitchen’, comments on the transformation in global access and readership since the journal went online, and reflects on the past, present and future of journal publishing in international development studies

News discourses on distant suffering: A critical discourse analysis of the 2003 SARS outbreak

News carries a unique signifying power, a power to represent events in particular ways (Fairclough, 1995). Applying Critical Discourse Analysis and Chouliaraki's theory on the mediation of suffering (2006), this article explores the news representation of the 2003 global SARS outbreak. Following a case-based methodology, we investigate how two Belgian television stations have covered the international outbreak of SARS. By looking into the mediation of four selected discursive moments, underlying discourses of power, hierarchy and compassion were unraveled. The analysis further identified the key role of proximity in international news reporting and supports the claim that Western news media mainly reproduce a Euro-American centered world order. This article argues that news coverage of international crises such as SARS constructs and maintains the socio-cultural difference between 'us' and 'them' as well as articulating global power hierarchies and a division of the world in zones of poverty and prosperity, danger and safety

Cosmopolitan presumptions? On Martha Nussbaum and her commentators

This article presents a framework for analysis of discourses on ethical cosmopolitanism, and applies it to Martha Nussbaum's Frontiers of Justice (2006), with comparisons to the views of other authors. After outlining the book's form of ethical cosmopolitanism, the article considers the psychological, philosophical and sociological presumptions, the methodology of abstraction, the implicit audiences, and the programmatic targets and implied strategy of social change. It links and comments on sister papers by Giri, McCloskey, Murphy, Nederveen Pieterse and Truong

Relational economies, social embeddedness and valuing labour in Agrarian change: An example from the developing world.

A relatively neglected area of research on agrarian and economic change is the role of indigenous concepts of labour value in the transition from subsistence to market production. In West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea, the presence of a migrant population on an oil palm land settlement scheme (LSS) in close proximity to village-based oil palm growers, provided an opportunity to examine changing notions of labour value through the lens of smallholder productivity. Voluntary settlers on the LSS are experiencing population pressure and are highly dependent on oil palm for their livelihoods. In contrast, customary landowners in village settings produce oil palm in a situation of relative land abundance. By examining differences in how these two groups practise and value commodity production, the paper makes four key points. First, concepts of labour value are not static and involve struggles over how labour value is defined. Second, the transition to market-based notions of labour value can undermine labour’s social value with a consequent weakening of social relationships within and between families. Third, Theories of Value developed in western contexts and used to frame development policies and projects in the developing world are often inappropriate and even harmful to the welfare of communities that have different registers of value. Fourth, in response to Point 3, and following Rigg (2007), there is a need for ‘theorising upwards’ using empirical data from the developing world to inform theory rather than applying to the developing world models of sociality and economy developed in western contexts

Below the Belt? Territory and Development in China’s International Rise

China’s internationalization has been heralded by some as a new era of South–South cooperation. Yet such framings of development are pitched at an abstract space of the ‘global South’ which conceals more than it reveals. With some theory moving towards ontologies of ‘global development’, we need to capture both the connectedness and the local specificity of increasingly diffuse processes. This article sets out a more fine-grained understanding of how political territories and processes are imagined and produced by and through China’s internationalization, focusing on infrastructure as a ‘technology’ of territorialization. Much of the focus on China’s internationalization has been on state-to-state relations, but this obscures the ‘omni-channel politics’ that China practises. Using a critical literature review and illustrative case study, this article develops the idea of omni-channel politics to posit a view of ‘twisted’ territories in which political processes and development outcomes are more complex and contingent

Between Choice and Stigma:Identifications of Economically Successful Migrants

In this contribution, we draw on the unusual but interesting comparison between ‘immigrants’ and ‘expats’, with the aim of scrutinizing identity construction and the tensions between stigma and identity of choice against the background of the (reluctant) superdiverse city of Rotterdam. We focus on two types of socioeconomically successful migrants which, despite their similarities in class position, are generally regarded as rather different. First, middle-class migrants and members of the second generation from ‘classic’ migration groups in the Netherlands (with roots in Surinam, Turkey and Morocco, including descendants of former guest workers). Second, expatriates or knowledge workers of various national backgrounds (including American, English, Indian, Chinese) who came to the Netherlands on a temporary basis because of their highly-skilled jobs (or the jobs of their partners, as we also included trailing spouses). We address the questions of how these migrants perceive themselves, how they think that others perceive them, and how discrepancies between these two affect their feelings of belonging in the city of Rotterdam and the Netherlands. Our findings suggest that while both ‘immigrants’ and ‘expatriates’ combine various identities, immigrants have more difficulty to adopt alternative identities (such as ‘cosmopolitan’) than expatriates because of their dominant label as ‘allochtoon’ (non-native Dutch).</p

Global inequality, human rights and power: a critique of Ulrich Beck's cosmopolitanism

This article is a critique of Ulrich Beck's advocacy of a cosmopolitan approach to global inequality and human rights. It is argued that cosmopolitanism does not bring a new and unique perspective on global inequality. In fact Beck's proposals on migration would reinforce inequality and anti-cosmopolitanism. It is argued that his `both/and' perspective on hybridization and contextual universalism is undermined by inequality, conflict and power that are glossed over in Beck's approach. I argue that human rights interventionism as advocated by Beck falls short of cosmopolitanism, in ways which are shown by qualifications about power and inequality that Beck himself makes in his arguments