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World society: from analytical dustbin to master concept of international relations?
No full textThis chapter examines Barry Buzan’s reconceptualization of world society as a master concept of international relations (IR), which is part of his wider project of reconvening the English School (ES) of IR. In his seminal work From International to World Society? (2004), Buzan clarified the concept of world society and elevated it to a theoretical cornerstone of his socio-structural reworking of the ES. By introducing three analytical domains – interstate, transnational, and interhuman society – Buzan also charted a novel path for studying the interactions between states and non-state actors. Later, Buzan refined this framework by identifying three versions of world society – normative, political, and integrated – which enabled a more systematic exploration of the primary institutions that structure world societal relations. However, with Making Global Society (2023), Buzan pivots towards a merging of IR, historical sociology, and global history, framing world society as a transitional phase in humanity’s socio-political evolution rather than a standalone analytical category. This shift replaces world society with global society as the main master concept, inadvertently reducing world society’s status within ES theory. The chapter critically assesses this intellectual trajectory, evaluating its implications for big picture analysis, while reflecting on the persistent conceptual ambiguities surrounding world society debates
The mental health impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on health and social care workers
Get PDFThe COVID‐19 pandemic placed exceptional strain on essential services, raising urgent concerns about the mental well‐being of workers in critical sectors. This study examines the short‐ and medium‐term effects of the COVID‐19 pandemic on the mental health of health and social care (HSC) workers in the UK relative to other occupational groups. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study and measuring mental health via the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), we apply a difference‐in‐differences strategy, where both groups could be treated only in the second period (a pre‐post design), to investigate whether HSC workers experienced distinct mental health trajectories compared to other key workers (KWs) and workers in non‐essential sectors (non‐KWs). The results for the immediate post‐pandemic period (April–November 2020) show no significant differences in mental health for HSC workers compared with either comparator worker groups. Medium‐term outcomes remained statistically insignificant across occupational comparisons. Additional analyses of individual GHQ items and potential mechanisms (financial stability and social isolation) suggest limited heterogeneous effects for each worker group using yearly data. While all studied groups exhibited some deterioration in mental health after 2020, HSC workers' trajectories largely mirrored those of other KWs and non‐KWs, suggesting that factors such as stable employment and financial security may have cushioned the psychological impact for this sector
Perceived organizational exploitation and employee health: an examination of processes and boundary conditions
Get PDFRecent research has argued that exploitative working relationships can be present in any context and experienced by any employee, and their forms can range from extreme to subtle. Drawing on the Conservation of Resources theory, we argue that, through the depletion of resources, employees' perceived organizational exploitation is likely to affect their emotions, cognition and motivation, with subsequent effects on their physical and psychological health. Moreover, we suggest that coworker support serves as a critical boundary condition to alleviate the negative effects of perceived exploitation. Specifically, we propose that inward‐focused negative emotions, rumination and thwarted psychological needs are intertwined mechanisms that link perceived exploitation to health‐related outcomes. Using an experiment and a multi‐wave field study, we demonstrated that employees' perceptions of organizational exploitation predicted their negative emotions, rumination and thwarted psychological needs. We also found that the perception of exploitation had direct and indirect effects on employees' health. Furthermore, our findings revealed that emotional and motivational pathways mediated the relationship between workers' perceived exploitation and depressive symptoms, while cognitive and motivational pathways mediated the relationship between their perceived exploitation and somatic complaints. Finally, rather than neutralizing the negative effect of perceived exploitation, coworker support was found to have amplifying effects
Putting power back in the 'separation of powers'
No full textThis chapter reconceptualises the principle of separation of powers by rebalancing attention from institutional “separation” to agential “power.” Traditional accounts have treated separation of powers as a structural arrangement among branches designed primarily to prevent tyranny. By contrast, this chapter argues that the principle is best understood as a general grammar for managing power within a purposive constitutional order. Modern constitutions pursue multiple enduring purposes and must contend with a dynamic constellation of powerful agents capable of realising or frustrating those aims. When a constitution chooses to “domesticate” an agent—transforming it into a constitutional actor charged with performing public functions—the principle of separation of powers supplies the managerial logic through which that agent’s power is calibrated. Drawing on a taxonomy of agential power and its modalities—capacity calibration, field structuring, incentive modulation, and perlocution—the chapter shows that separation of powers operates not merely by allocating functions or insulating institutions, but by organising how power flows across a constitutional system. On this account, independence, accountability, checks and balances, comity, and collaboration are techniques rather than ends. The principle is instrumentally oriented yet normatively thin: it can serve liberal, socialist, theocratic, or even authoritarian purposes, while retaining a conceptual core. Separation of powers thus emerges as a dynamic practice of constitutional domestication rather than a static institutional blueprint
Messages matter: how voter education campaigns affect citizens’ willingness to vote for women
No full textGovernments and organizations around the world pour money into campaigns designed to increase female political representation, including voter education campaigns. Do such campaigns promote women in politics? We argue that where single-member district contests and clientelism incentivize voters to support viable candidates, information about discrimination against women can undercut support for women in elections. Instead, messages that stress women candidates’ electoral viability and political successes are more effective. We work with one of the longest running voter education campaigns, Malawi’s 50∶50 campaign, to combine randomized exposure to campaign videos with a conjoint experiment and text analysis of respondents’ answers to open-ended questions. We find that exposure to a campaign message makes participants more willing to vote for a woman. But, in line with our argument, a campaign message that includes information about the progress of women in politics has a stronger positive effect than one that discloses information about discrimination against women candidates
The causal effect of an income shock on children’s human capital
No full textWe investigate the causal impact of a generous unconditional cash transfer at birth on children’s health and academic performance. Using rich administrative data, we take advantage of the unexpected introduction of a baby bonus in Spain in 2007 and implement a difference-in-discontinuity approach comparing children born in the surrounding months in different years. We find little impact on children’s health and test scores. We also fail to find meaningful changes in household structure, maternal employment, parental time, or child-related monetary investments. Our results contribute to understanding which interventions are effective at fostering children’s health and human capital formation
Frosty: bringing strong liveness guarantees to the Snow family of consensus protocols
No full textSnowman is the consensus protocol used by blockchains on Avalanche and is part of the Snow family of protocols, first introduced in the Avalanche whitepaper [28]. A major advantage of Snowman is that each consensus decision only requires an expected constant communication overhead per processor in the ‘common’ case that the protocol is not under substantial Byzantine attack, i.e. it provides a solution to the scalability problem which ensures that the expected communication overhead per processor is independent of the total number of processors n during normal operation. This is the key property that would enable a consensus protocol to scale to 10,000 or more independent validators (i.e. processors). On the other hand, the two following concerns have remained: (1) Providing formal proofs of consistency for Snowman has presented a formidable challenge. (2) Liveness attacks exist in the case that a Byzantine adversary controls more than O(n−−√) processors, slowing termination to more than a logarithmic number of steps. In this paper, we address the two issues above. We consider a Byzantine adversary that controls at most f<n/5 processors. First, we provide a simple proof of consistency for Snowman. Then we supplement Snowman with a `liveness module' that can be triggered in the case that a substantial adversary launches a liveness attack, and which guarantees liveness in this event by temporarily forgoing the communication complexity advantages of Snowman, but without sacrificing these low communication complexity advantages during normal operation
Empirical likelihood for manifolds
No full textThere has been growing interest in statistical analysis of random objects taking values in a non-Euclidean metric space. One important class of such objects consists of data on manifolds. This article is concerned with inference on the Fréchet mean and related population objects on manifolds. We develop the concept of nonparametric likelihood for data on manifolds and propose general inference methods by adapting the theory of empirical likelihood. In addition to the basic asymptotic properties, such as Wilks’ theorem of the empirical likelihood statistic, we present several generalizations of the proposed methodology: two-sample testing, inference on the Fréchet variance, quasi-Bayesian inference, local Fréchet regression, and estimation of the Fréchet mean set. Simulation and real data examples illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology and its advantage against the conventional Wald test
The value of leaders we trust and leaders who make us stronger: exploring the distinct contributions of different components of identity leadership to group member outcomes
No full textThis study investigates the critical role of social identity in leadership, specifically examining identity leadership (IL) and the unique contributions of its four subdimensions: identity prototypicality, identity advancement, identity entrepreneurship, and identity impresarioship. To date, research has largely focused on the global construct of identity leadership and shown that in organizational contexts, it is a predictor of a range of outcomes, including group members’ burnout and organizational citizenship. However, the distinct roles of the four subdimensions remain little understood. Extending earlier findings, we address this gap by testing the hypothesis that the four subdimensions are differentially implicated in two key mechanisms that underlie the relationship between IL and group outcomes: (a) trust in the leader and (b) team identification. The present study explores this proposition by using structural equation modeling with latent factors to test a mediation model in 2020–2021 data from the Global Identity Leadership Development project (GILD; N = 7,855). As hypothesized, we found that identity prototypicality and identity advancement predominantly predicted greater trust in the leader, whereas identity entrepreneurship primarily predicted greater team identification. Contrary to our hypothesis, identity impresarioship showed a negative relation with trust. In turn, both trust in the leader and team identification were positively associated with organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and negatively with burnout. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of these findings for both the theory and practice of leadership
Linking space and ordinal position in working memory: a multi-level meta-analysis of the SPoARC effect
No full textWhen individuals are asked to keep in mind arbitrary sequences of items such as words, letters, numbers or images, they spatialize them in working memory forming a horizontal mental line. This study is the first meta-analysis of this phenomenon known as SPoARC (Spatial Positional Response Codes) effect or OPE (Ordinal Position Effect). For this purpose, we had access to the raw data of 21 of the 24 behavioral studies ever published on this topic. A multilevel meta-analysis was performed with participants nested within experiments, both used as levels. After confirming the existence of the SPoARC effect, we analyzed it as a function of four features: the size and nature of the memoranda, the pace of presentation of the memoranda and the type of classification of the probes. Results showed that (a) the SPoARC effect varied as a function of the nature of the memoranda, which we suggest highlights the importance of phonological processes in WM spatialization, (b) the SPoARC effect was the largest when the presentation pace was around 3 s per item or above and (c) the SPoARC effect increased when participants were asked to pay attention to the ordinal structure of the memoranda (whenever a temporal classification task is used), confirming the link between order information and WM spatialization