bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gershom Scholem
Authors: Biale David
Published: March 2013

Gershom Scholem (b. 1897–d. 1982) is generally considered the most important Jewish historian of the 20th century, as well as one of the most important contributors to modern Jewish thought. Born in Berlin, he rebelled against his assimilated, bourgeois upbringing and became a Zionist while still a teenager, teaching himself Hebrew. An adamant opponent of World War I on Zionist grounds, he was ejected from the family home by his father. Although he started studying mathematics at university, he soon switched to the study of Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), completing a PhD on the Sefer ha-Bahir, one of the earliest texts of medieval Kabbalah. Following completion of his PhD in 1923, Scholem moved to Palestine, where he became the Judaica librarian of the new Hebrew University and subsequently professor in the Institute for Jewish Studies. It was in that latter capacity that he trained a school of students. Although a handful of 19th-century scholars investigated the Kabbalah as a worthy historical subject, Scholem almost single-handedly turned the study of Kabbalah into a key discipline in the field of Jewish studies. He uncovered myriad new sources and suggested many innovative interpretations. Among his most striking findings were (1) proof that the greatest work of medieval Kabbalah, the Sefer ha-Zohar, was composed by a 13th-century Spanish Jew, Moses de Leon, rather than the 2nd-century rabbi Shimon bar Yohai (as held by Orthodox opinion); (2) an argument that the 16th-century Lurianic Kabbalah’s cosmic myth of exile in the wake of the expulsion from Spain in 1492 was a mystical response to that historical event; (3) a demonstration that the 17th-century Sabbatian messianic movement swept up virtually the entire Jewish world and thus constituted the most important worldwide phenomenon in premodern Jewish history; and (4) an argument that Sabbatianism represented the great watershed between the Middle Ages and modernity by undermining rabbinic authority from within. In addition to his major historiographical contributions, it has come to be recognized that Scholem was one of the towering Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, taking his place with such German Jewish philosophers as Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. Scholem held that there is no “essence” of Judaism but rather a plurality of conflicting forces, from the rational to the irrational. He restored myth and mysticism to a central place in Judaism and thus overturned the predominantly rationalist philosophy of the study of Judaism from the 19th century. Scholem also constructed a powerful argument for Zionism as the return of the Jews to history, although he rejected the more nationalistic forms of Zionism such as Vladimir Jabotinsky’s revisionism.
Women and Gender Relations
Authors: Baskin Judith R.
Published: March 2013

The recognition that gender plays an overwhelming role in shaping an individual’s socialization, educational, and vocational opportunities as well as spiritual and creative endeavors has changed how many scholars approach and interpret their research data. Before the last quarter of the twentieth century, with some exceptions, most studies of Judaism and the Jewish experience had little to say about differences between men’s and women’s lives and status. It was only in the 1970s and 1980s, influenced by methodologies emerging from women’s studies, that scholars of Jewish law and practice, history, literatures, thought, mysticism, religious movements, and cultural production began to use gender as a category of analysis. This attention to women and the ramifications of gender were driven in great part by the unprecedented number of women who were than entering doctoral studies and undertaking academic careers in numerous areas of Jewish studies. In recent decades, many female and male scholars have explored the constructions and consequences of gender in Jewish societies of many times and places. At the same time, popular interest in women and gender has grown as a result of the feminist movement of the last third of the twentieth century and its impact in expanding women’s personal and professional options. In the Jewish community, a burgeoning interest in scholarly analyses of Jewish women and their activities and representations has accompanied the ordination of women as rabbis and cantors in many Jewish religious movements; the expansion of intellectual, spiritual, and leadership roles for women in many synagogues and communal organizations; and an increased attention to the education of girls and women in all forms of contemporary Judaism. These developments, in turn, have promoted significant anthropological and sociological studies analyzing the impact of these changes. Interest in Jewish gender relations and cultural constructions of male identity in various Judaisms is a more recent development. However, increasing numbers of researchers are investigating how the relatively rigid roles mandated for men and women in rabbinic Judaism and performed in Jewish legal, religious, and social life over the centuries have defined the expectations that Jewish women and men have projected onto the gendered self and the gendered other. This article principally gathers English-language book-length studies and published collections of essays that focus on the contemporary Jewish community and the Jewish past from the biblical era through the twentieth century. With a few exceptions, the article does not address biographies of Jewish women of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries nor anthologies and monographs addressing the intersections of Jewish literatures and gender.
Yiddish Literature Before 1800
Authors: Baumgarten Jean
Published: March 2013

Old Yiddish literature—the works created and written in the vernacular Jewish language parallel to Aramaic, Hebrew, and the non-Jewish languages from the Middle Ages to the Haskalah in the Ashkenazi world—was for a long time locked up in a complex network of prejudice and a priori associations, or the texts were simply unknown or neglected. A few philological, cultural studies were written, often with an anti-Jewish perspective, during the Renaissance period by Christian Hebraists, theologians, and humanists. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, some scholars from the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement started to take an interest in Old Yiddish literature, but “popular Jewish literature” was defined as the expression of an obsolete society. In the beginning of the twentieth century, in connection with the national movements, and the recognition of Yiddish as a language of culture, Old Yiddish texts were brought to light and studied as an essential part of Jewish tradition, not as a dead, passéist culture but as a living expression of the Jewish life. Since that period, many texts were rediscovered and many critical editions were published. Old Yiddish literature is now recognized as a field of Jewish studies, essential to the understanding of traditional Ashkenazic culture and its shift to modernity. To be fully understood, the texts must be integrated into a broad historical and cultural context, in relation to the complex totality of Jewish culture, and must be linked with other constituent elements of European Judaism. If one considers the complexity of the Yiddish compositions with their dynamic relations to Aramaic and Hebrew culture and other coterritorial, non-Jewish cultures, the longevity of this literature, which appeared in the Middle Ages and which has endured up to our own day, and the vast geographical area where Yiddish was spoken, then one begins to comprehend the difficulties involved in delimiting this field, which both transcends the partitions of its constituent disciplines and their divisions into cultural domains and crosses into numerous fields of inquiry. Old Yiddish literature appears as a transnational, pluri- or transdisciplinary field of studies that requires connection to many domains of research. For this reason, Old Yiddish studies could be either relegated to the margins of many disciplines or, on the contrary, considered as an original contribution to many fields, such as history, linguistics, literature, religious studies, cultural and social anthropology, and folklore. Due to more than a century of research, Old Yiddish literature is now considered to be an important testimony regarding many issues central to Jewish society, Ashkenazi culture, and European languages and literature.
Flavius Josephus
Authors: Mason Steve , Glas Eelco
Published: March 2013

When scholars speak of the history of Judaea in the early Roman period, they invariably depend on the work of Flavius Josephus. He is our main source for the later Hasmoneans, Roman administration of the region, the notorious King Herod, and figures of importance for the study of the New Testament such as Pontius Pilate or the high priest Caiaphas. Born in the year of the Emperor Caligula’s accession to the throne, Josephus (b. 37–d. c. 100 ce) lived through the extraordinarily important decades before Jerusalem fell to Roman armies (70 ce). As a thirty-year-old member of Jerusalem’s priestly elite, he was commanding Galilee’s defenses against the Roman onslaught in early 67 ce, when he was besieged and forced to capitulate. After spending the rest of the war in Roman custody and assisting the enemy with military intelligence, he was granted his freedom and maintenance in the city of Rome. There he began to write the history of his people—first, of the recent war and its causes (seven volumes on The Judaean War), and later, of Judaean history, law, and culture (twenty volumes on Judaean Antiquities plus an essay in two volumes known as Against Apion). To the longest work (Antiquities) he appended an autobiography, which, in the ancient fashion, focused on his personal status, character, and military-political achievements during the crisis with Rome.
Baruch Spinoza
Authors: Schwartz Daniel B.
Published: March 2013

As one of the pioneers of modern Western philosophy and Bible criticism, Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (b. 1632–d. 1677) is generally considered the greatest philosopher of Jewish origin since Maimonides, though whether he should also be considered a Jewish philosopher is an age-old debate. Born into the Sephardic community of Amsterdam, Spinoza was excommunicated in 1656 for his “horrible heresies” and “monstrous deeds.” For the rest of his life, he made no effort to reconcile with his native community, and although he never converted to Christianity, it is hardly a given that he continued to consider himself a Jew either. From this foundational rupture in Spinoza’s life—one that would lead many in retrospect to label him the first modern Jew—myriads would follow in his thought. In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published anonymously in 1670, Spinoza broke with the premise that the Bible, in its entirety, is the word of God, a move that led him famously to spurn the Maimonidean practice of reading scripture allegorically, all so as to assure its agreement with philosophical and scientific truth. In its place, he called for a hermeneutic that would distinguish between the meaning of scripture and the matter of its truth, thus anticipating the historical-critical method of modern biblical criticism. In his magnum opus, the Ethics, which first appeared as part of his Opera Posthuma (Posthumous Works), in 1677, Spinoza broke with the very idea of an irreducible break between God and the world, arguing instead for a metaphysics of immanence in which only one substance, God-or-Nature (Deus sive Natura), could and did exist. Much has been written about Jewish aspects of Spinoza’s life and thought, especially by Jewish scholars seeking to determine to what extent, if at all, Spinoza belongs to the history of Jewish philosophy. The literature on this subject can be divided into three main categories that are distinguished by how they come at this problem. The first and most well-trodden approach investigates putative Jewish sources and contexts of Spinoza’s philosophy, from medieval Jewish rationalism to Kabbalistic literature to the Marrano background of his native Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam. The second focuses on Spinoza’s concept of and attitude toward Judaism, especially in comparison to his evaluation of Christianity. The third examines the ramifications of both Spinoza’s philosophy and personal example for modern Jewish thought and identity. This article is limited only to those aspects of Spinoza that touch on his Jewish identity, sources, and influence and thus does not include general philosophical studies per se.
Jewish Languages
Authors: Benor Sarah Bunin
Published: March 2013

Wherever Jews have lived, they have tended to speak and write somewhat differently from their non-Jewish neighbors. In some cases these differences have been limited to the addition of a few Hebrew words (e.g., among some medieval French Jews and some contemporary American Jews), and in other cases the local Jewish and non-Jewish languages have been mutually unintelligible (e.g., Yiddish in eastern Europe and Ladino in the Balkans). The resulting language varieties have been analyzed under the interdisciplinary rubric of Jewish languages, also known as Jewish linguistic studies, Jewish interlinguistics, or Jewish intralinguistics. The phenomenon of Jewish languages came to scholarly attention during the political debates about Yiddish and Hebrew in the early 20th century. Researchers began to analyze individual Jewish languages, including Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Italian, and Judeo-Arabic. In the mid-20th century the Yiddishists Solomon A. Birnbaum and Max Weinreich spearheaded comparative research on Jewish languages. The late 1970s and the 1980s saw a slew of edited volumes that dealt with several Jewish languages, a short-lived journal, and progress toward a theoretical understanding of Jewish languages based on comparative analysis. It was in these years that the study of Jewish languages transitioned from the realm of isolated publications to a small academic field. This field continues to blossom, as evidenced by conferences, publications, and online collaborations. In all of this scholarship on Jewish languages, as in language research more generally, there have been two major trends: descriptive and theoretical. The descriptive work has provided data on the written and spoken languages of Jews around the world and throughout history. This work is crucially time sensitive, as many of the long-standing Jewish vernaculars (such as Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Arabic, Jewish Aramaic, and Jewish Malayalam) are on the verge of extinction due to mass migrations and upheavals. Theoretical work has focused on classifying Jewish languages, describing their genesis, and analyzing features they have in common, especially Hebrew and Aramaic words. This bibliography offers an introduction to this diverse body of work, demonstrating that the field has come a long way in the 20th century. In addition, the fact that many of the references here are to edited volumes and journal articles, rather than book-length comparative analyses and theoretical treatments, suggests that much work remains to be done. (This bibliography does not include descriptive work on individual languages, including textbooks, dictionaries, grammars, and analysis of language variation, change, and ideology. For work of this type, readers are referred to General Overviews and Bibliographies and to the Oxford Bibliographies articles Yiddish and Ladino.)
Late Antique (Roman and Byzantine) History
Authors: Lapin Hayim
Published: March 2013

This bibliography surveys the span from the middle of the 2nd century to the first half of the 7th century. Already before the 2nd century, the number of Jews in the Diaspora probably exceeded the number in Palestine. During the time under review, the significance and apparently the geographic scope of the Diaspora grew. The geographic range covered is thus from Spain to Iraq. Not all periods and regions in this long time span and range are equally well documented, and some matters have attracted greater scholarly attention than others. Discussion of the rabbis greatly exceeds their numerical significance in Antiquity, for instance. This is due not only to their lasting importance (Jewish denominations in the 21st century trace their origins to the rabbinic movements of Palestine and Babylonia) but also to the volume and richness of rabbinic material. Similarly, the impact of the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the changing status of Jews in Late Antiquity and the history of Jews in Palestine have received considerable attention. By contrast, the late 2nd and the 3rd centuries, especially in the Mediterranean Diaspora, are underdocumented and understudied. The sections in this article aim at both representing the field and providing readers with the resources to gain a somewhat fuller view of the period under discussion. To that end, Geographies and Populations includes sections on the geographic regions covered. Jews as Roman Citizens and Subjects deals with material and issues not included in Roman codes and offers some material on the 3rd century. Society and Culture includes material on gender and draws attention to both rabbinic and nonrabbinic material. Because rabbis feature so prominently in other sections, The Rabbinic Movement is largely limited to a brief finding aid for rabbinic texts and to references to the history of the rabbinic movement as such.
Israeli Culture
Authors: Kaplan Eran
Published: March 2013

Modern Israeli culture, while related linguistically and religiously to an ancient tradition, is a recent phenomenon. The State of Israel has existed only since 1948, but the origins of Israeli culture can be traced to the late 19th-century rise of Zionism, a movement that sought to revolutionize and modernize Jewish life in all its forms, including the cultural realm. Zionism was, among other things, a revolt against the Diasporic Jewish tradition, which from a Zionist perspective emphasized passivity in the face of political, social, and economic challenges as well as a detachment from mainstream European society. Zionist culture sought to upend those tendencies: Zionists wanted to create a modern Western culture that embraced science, technology, and other hallmarks of the modern experience, while promoting an ethos of pioneering and strength—the signs of an active and virile society ready to embrace national challenges. At the core of this cultural revolution stood the revival of Hebrew not as a language of religious study but as the vibrant national tongue Modern Hebrew, as well as cultural products that championed the new pioneering ideals. While the culture of secular Ashkenazi Jews dominated the Yishuv (the Jewish community of Palestine up to 1948) and the Israeli state during its first decades, over time Israeli culture came to reflect the country’s many other sub-ethnicities, including Jews from Arab and Muslim countries who came to Israel mainly in the 1950s, as well as local Arabs who remained in Israel after the 1948 war and became Israeli citizens. One of the main characteristics of Israeli culture is thus the tension between the Ashkenazi cultural canon and the other cultures that are part of the Israeli experience. Also, as Israel has shifted over the years from a collectivist, melting-pot ideology to a more market-driven society, more and more cultural products have entered the Israeli public marketplace. So while Israeli culture is young, it is highly dynamic and fertile. It has also been the object of a considerable amount of scholarly inquiry. In this bibliography culture is treated in a rather comprehensive manner to include both cultural products (various works of literature, visual art, and cinema) but also as a system that provides meaning to people’s collective experience through language, space, and shared myths and traditions.
Swahili City-States of the East African Coast
Authors: Spear Thomas
Published: March 2013

Hundreds of Swahili towns and villages lie scattered along almost two thousand miles of the East African coast from Somali to Mozambique. While many Swahili are rural farmers and fishermen, others are cosmopolitan traders and craftspeople who reside in urban stone houses. Yet all are bound by a common language, culture, and Muslim religion that both Swahili and others have long seen as the product of Persian and Arab immigrants who came to trade and settled to create distinctive maritime communities. From the mid-1980s, however, the consensus of both local and scholarly opinion has shifted to stress their local origins, the fact that Swahili is an African language, and the ways coastal religious beliefs and cultural patterns came to embrace both local practices and foreign influences, as Swahili came to be seen as an African people who, on moving to the coast and engaging in overseas trade, developed into distinctive, mercantile, cosmopolitan communities that served as economic and cultural intermediaries between their mainland neighbors and overseas visitors. The earliest Swahili towns emerged in the 8th century and, with increasing trade and wealth, developed into prosperous and complex city-states in the 15th century before they were displaced by the Portuguese in the 16th and 17th centuries, Omani in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Europeans in the 20th century. Yet Swahili towns have endured throughout as bearers of a distinctive coastal culture.
Algeria
Authors: Naylor Phillip
Published: March 2013

Algeria, Africa’s largest country, remains understudied except for its modern history, which features an oppressive colonialism, a dramatic war of decolonization, and a contentious postcolonial period scarred by civil strife. Nevertheless, Algeria’s earlier histories are also important and impressive. In Antiquity, the kingdom of Numidia (fl. 3rd and 2nd centuries bce) emerged in eastern Algeria. During the Roman period, Algeria served as a granary and numerous cities flourished. Algeria significantly contributed to the development of Christianity. Augustine was a native who served as bishop of Hippo (modern Annaba). The Vandals and Byzantines had brief but significant presences before the Arab invasion and the introduction of Islam. The Rustamids established the Maghrib’s first Muslim polity in Algeria during the 8th century. Muslim dynasties—the Umayyads, Abbasids, Aghlabids, Fatimids, Zirids, Hammadids, Almoravids (Murābiṭūn), Almohads (Muwaḥḥidūn), Zayyanids, Hafsids, and Marinids exercised various degrees of power that integrated Algeria into a wider “Islamdom” (see General Overviews). Although under Ottoman suzerainty, the Algiers Regency acted autonomously. France seized Algiers in 1830, although Paris deferred the decision to colonize the territory for a few years. The Emir ‘Abd al-Qādir notably resisted French expansion until his capture in 1847. A year later, Paris administratively assimilated northern Algeria as French departments. Consequently, Algerians found themselves being administratively part of France, yet not citizens, while being victimized by a coercive colonialism. Nationalist movements eventually emerged, culminating in the successful War of Independence (1954–1962). Independent Algeria confronted the consequences of colonialism, including underdevelopment, illiteracy, and the perpetuation of French economic, social, and cultural influence. Thus, Algeria concurrently pursued postcolonial decolonization, highlighted by the nationalization of French oil concessions in 1971, while inaugurating state plans to accelerate development. Plummeting petroleum prices and disaffected youth primarily provoked the riots of October 1988, which led to rapid liberalization and Islamist electoral success. Fearing an Islamist takeover after the first round of parliamentary elections in December 1991, the “Pouvoir” (the oligarchic military and civilian “power” elite) overthrew the government and canceled the elections. This incited civil strife, reportedly costing 150,000 to 200,000 lives, which continues sporadically despite national reconciliation initiatives. While nominally democratic, Algeria is a presidential authoritarian state. Its hydrocarbon wealth (especially natural gas) and human dimension (e.g., the immigrant workers in France [and Europe], the pieds-noirs or European colonial settlers, and the harkis, Algerians who sided with the French) add to its contemporary strategic and social significance. Algerians have also distinguished themselves in literature, music, and film.
African Traditional Religion
Authors: MacGaffey Wyatt , Goshadze Mariam
Published: March 2013

The term “African Traditional Religion” is used in two complementary senses. Loosely, it encompasses all African beliefs and practices that are considered religious but neither Christian nor Islamic. The expression is also used almost as a technical term for a particular reading of such beliefs and practices, one that purports to show that they constitute a systematic whole—a religion comparable to Christianity or any other “world religion.” In that sense the concept was new and radical when it was introduced by G. Parrinder in 1954 and later developed by Bolaji Idowu and John Mbiti (see Proponents of African Traditional Religion). The intention of these scholars was to protest against a long history of derogatory evaluations of Africans and their culture by outsiders and to replace words such as “heathenism” and “paganism.” African Traditional Religion is now widely taught in African universities, but its identity remains essentially negative: African belief that is not Christianity or Islam. To understand the issue, one must go back to the beginnings of anthropology in the nineteenth century and follow its evolution (see 19th-Century Background). As the European empires in Africa began to break up after World War II, both missionaries and African nationalists sought to defend Africans and African culture from their reputation for primitivism and to claim parity with Christianity, the West, and the modern world. At the same time a movement that began after World War I and intensified after World War II supported the idea that Africans retained values that the militaristic and materialistic modern world had lost, and that Africans individually and collectively were spiritual people. Such generalizations have been challenged by scholars who say that Africa is too diverse to support these notions. Ethnographic studies contradict the simplicities of African Traditional Religion and reveal the complex relations of religion with politics, economics, and social structure (Ethnography). A more radical challenge has been mounted recently by anthropologists and historians who argue that the concept of religion itself has been defined in implicitly Christian terms and that the collection of data to be treated as “religion” depends on an implicit Judeo-Christian template that often radically mistranslates and misrepresents African words and practices (see Criticism). Certain religious topics have proved perennially fascinating to both scholars and the reading public with reference to the world as a whole, not just Africa. They include “witchcraft,” “symbolism,” and “ancestor worship.” These topics, lending themselves to exoticism, give rise in acute form to the problems of intercultural misunderstanding. “Healing,” on the other hand, sounds familiar and beneficial, although in practice what is called “healing” is often far removed from Western ideas of sickness and medicine.
North Africa to 600
Authors: Fromherz Allen
Published: March 2013

The history of North Africa in Antiquity is one of the most exciting, if still comparatively unexplored, fields of ancient history and archaeology. From the continuing, highly charged controversy over the origin of the Berbers, the original inhabitants of North Africa, to the prominence of Carthage—Rome’s one significant rival for the control of the ancient Mediterranean—to the astoundingly preserved and understudied ancient ruins that meet or surpass much of what can be seen on other Mediterranean shores, North Africa in Antiquity remains a subject of great importance to scholars of the ancient world. This bibliography will include sources up to the Arab conquests of the 7th century ce.
North Africa from 600 to 1800
Authors: Fromherz Allen
Published: March 2013

North Africa was shaped fundamentally by the coming of Islam and the subsequent migration of large numbers of Arab peoples. Although the Romans and the Phoenicians made important contributions, especially on the coasts and in fertile valleys, they did not alter the religious, linguistic character of North African society as deeply as did the Muslim conquests. Even though Sunni Islam has generally become the clear, dominant religion, many instances of resistance to orthodoxy have occurred in the North African frontier. Also, the Berber peoples, never happy to be under the yoke of central urban authority, were frequently organized under various religious ideologies. In the early 21st century Arabs and Berbers often see themselves as part of the same community and culture, especially because they have united for common cause against European rule and interference.
Organizational Behavior
Authors: Griffin Ricky W.
Published: March 2013

Organizational behavior (OB) is the study of human behavior in organizational settings, of the interface between human behavior and the organization, and of the organization itself. OB is multidisciplinary in nature, synthesizing several other fields of study, and this is reflected in the literature. Perhaps the greatest contribution is from psychology, especially industrial and organizational psychology. Sociology has also had a major impact on the field of organizational behavior. Other contributing disciplines include anthropology, political science, economics, and industrial engineering.
Attitudes
Authors: Schleicher Deidra J. , Watt John D.
Published: March 2013

Attitudes are a central concept in the organizational sciences (i.e., organizational behavior, human resources, and industrial-organizational psychology). They occupy much space in the research literature and are the focus of many practical interventions in organizations. This is because job and organizational attitudes serve as antecedents to important individual and organizational outcomes (e.g., performance, counterproductive behavior, withdrawal, and turnover). Such attitudes reflect employees’ relatively stable evaluative dispositions toward referents such as the organization, their supervisor, or the job; these evaluations vary in intensity and favorability and tend to guide an employee’s responses to these targets. A number of constructs that would fall under this definition of job attitude have been studied in the organizational sciences. There are multiple job attitudes, as opposed to just one, because although all entail an evaluation of aspects of the organizational context, specific job attitudes vary both with regard to the target of evaluation (e.g., the job or the organization) and with regard to what dimensions are believed to be important in the “favorability” assessment. The most popular of these specific job attitudes include job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job involvement, and employee engagement. In this bibliography, we first define attitudes, provide a brief history of the study of job attitudes in organizations, and review some conceptual issues related to attitudes in general that are important for understanding how attitudes operate in organizations. The remainder of the bibliography is organized around the most frequently studied specific job attitudes—job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job involvement, and employee engagement. For each of these job attitudes, we discuss definitional and measurement issues and review research examining their antecedents and consequences. We close with a brief summary of newer directions being taken in job attitudes research.
Management History
Authors: Van Fleet David D.
Published: March 2013

Although management and attempts to improve it are as old as civilization, the systematic study of management is only just more than one hundred years old. “Management history” refers primarily to the history of management thought as it has developed during that time, although some work covers the practice of management all the way back to Antiquity. Because the events, organizations, economic and social conditions, and even interested scholars are frequently the same, management history overlaps to some extent with related history fields, most notably business history, economic history, and accounting history. Management history utilizes the tools and methods of traditional historical analysis as well as drawing insights from business disciplines and the social sciences. This article includes, first, initial coverage of source material (introductory works, reference sources, and journals), and then presents reasons why history is important and provides a rough chronological presentation of major works for those interested in learning more about management history, from the early practice of management to the evolution of management thought as it has developed during the past one-hundred-plus years.
Workplace Meetings
Authors: Allen Joseph A. , Rogelberg Steven G. , Kreamer Liana , Mroz Joseph
Published: March 2013

Workplace meetings are typically defined as three or more individuals coming together to discuss a work-related matter. They are typically scheduled in advance, last between thirty and sixty minutes, and can be conducted face-to-face, in distributed contexts, or in a combination of forms. According to the research presented here, employees spend an average of six hours per week in scheduled meetings, and managers in larger organizations spend the majority of their time, up to 75 percent, on meeting-related activities (e.g., planning, scheduling, and attending meetings). These extraordinarily common workplace events take many forms (e.g., face-to-face, sit-down, stand-up, and virtual) and are used for a multitude of purposes (e.g., Decision Making, collaborating, organizing, directing work behavior, disseminating information, and developing strategy). Workplace meetings are studied across disciplines, including management, psychology, sociology, anthropology, management, and information systems.
Global Human Resources
Authors: Briscoe Dennis R.
Published: March 2013

Most of the management functions that are referred to as “human resource management” in the early 21st century have been around in various forms since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In the early years, as business organizations grew in size and importance, the first of these functions—such as payroll, safety, company stores, and hiring—were performed independently by line managers without being “collected” within a separate managerial function. As they began to be organized under a common theme, they were originally referred to as “personnel management,” a term that is still used in some countries and by some companies. Then as personnel management increased in scope and as the business and organizational environment placed greater emphasis on the components of personnel management, the function came to be referred to as “human resource management” (HRM). (Most standard HRM texts contain some history and background of the development of HRM.)
Ethics in Research
Authors: Wray-Bliss Edward
Published: March 2013

When compared to a number of other areas of the social sciences—sociology and anthropology being perhaps the best examples—discussions and debates around research ethics in the field of management are quite limited, both in number and scope. This is likely the consequence of a number of interrelated factors. It may speak to issues of the constitution of management faculty, the frequent separation of the business school from other parts of the university, or the historic construction of what is considered to be the role of the business school and management research in society. For whatever other reasons it has occurred, one of the factors must be the relatively homogenous nature of the field of management and organization studies—a field dominated by positivist research and a broadly functionalist, managerial orientation. In any field of inquiry largely constituted by conventional epistemological and ontological approaches, assumptions about “normal science” emerge and the impetus to question and debate, or indeed to defend, the ethics of normalized research practices is diminished. For many, the field of research ethics in management remains a formal process of compliance, requiring little discussion or reflection; it is a process of following a predefined code and satisfying the ethical review committee or institutional review board of one’s institution. Understood thus, ethics in management research is seen as something akin to a hurdle to be overcome by requisite form filling at the start of a research project. This is a limited—and limiting—understanding of ethical issues in management research. As the contributions cited in this bibliography attest, issues of ethics span the entire research process—from conception, through execution, to publication, and beyond. Assumptions regarding the purpose and value of research constitute an ethical warrant, legitimizing the very conduct of research in the first place. Additionally, the constitution of the management academy itself and its process of publication, citation, and review raises a number of ethical issues and concerns. Finally, management scholarship that draws on explicitly critical theoretical traditions and nonpositivist or antipositivist research approaches has heightened the questioning of conventional research practices and assumptions—generating critiques and some defenses of research ethics in management. This article maps out a significant proportion of the work and resources in the management academy that engage with such issues and debates.
Longitudinal Research
Authors: Wang Mo , Huang Zhefan
Published: March 2013

Longitudinal research refers to a family of research methods that involves obtaining repeated measures of variables from the same group of individuals over an extended period of time. Data are first collected at the outset of the study and may then be gathered repeatedly throughout the length of the study. When testing causal theories, social scientists typically prefer longitudinal research design over cross-sectional research design because longitudinal research can help establish evidences both for covariation between variables and for the temporal order of variables, and thus can enhance causal inference. Nevertheless, longitudinal research design cannot eliminate competing explanations (e.g., third-variable effects) and, as a result, does not absolutely establish a causal relationship or allow causal claims. Longitudinal research is also useful for studying changes in same variables as well as in associations between variables over time.
Creativity
Authors: Shalley Christina E. , Breidenthal Amy P.
Published: March 2013

Creativity is considered to be essential for societal and economic growth. At the individual, team, and organizational levels, creativity has been argued to be a key enabler and contributor to performance, entrepreneurship, growth, and competitiveness. Creativity as a research area has evolved over the years. Historically, it has its roots within the field of psychology, which provided a foundation for conceptual and empirical work focused on factors that can enhance or constrain creativity across all different areas (e.g., education, inventors). More recently, the body of work on organizational creativity within management has been growing. Creativity has been defined in two ways: as both a process and an outcome. It is believed that to produce creative outcomes, it is important to first engage in certain cognitive and behavioral processes (e.g., linking ideas from multiple sources, broad search) that can help enable individuals to be more creative in their work. The creative process is an iterative process and involves finding and solving new problems in different ways. Creativity as an outcome has been defined primarily in management as the generation of ideas, solutions, or processes that are novel and useful. Novelty and usefulness are both considered necessary conditions for something to be regarded as creative, so even if an idea is very novel, if it is not also useful or feasible it would not be considered creative. This definition differs from some work in psychology primarily focused on brainstorming, where creative outcomes are often defined in terms of originality (i.e., novelty), fluency (i.e., number of ideas), and flexibility (i.e., number of categories accessed). Individual differences can predispose certain individuals to be more creative, and different factors in the work context can facilitate or inhibit creativity: these personal and contextual factors can interact to affect creativity. Creativity can potentially occur in all different kinds of jobs and at all levels of the organization. Creative ideas or processes also can vary on a continuum from being new but somewhat incremental to those that are radically new and different. Also, within the organizational literature, creativity has been considered to be a necessary but insufficient condition for innovations to occur. The primary distinction between how creativity and innovation is defined is that when focusing on creativity the production of something that is new and useful is stressed, while innovation emphasizes the implementation of new ideas or procedures.
Job Design
Authors: Fried Yitzhak , Levi Ariel S. , Bi Ran , Taybron Andre
Published: March 2013

Job design refers to the processes and outcomes of how work is structured, organized, experienced, and enacted. As a key contributor to individual attitudes, motivation, and work performance, job design has generated substantial interest in the scientific community. Much research has been conducted in the area of job design, leading to a better understanding of the attitudes and behaviors of employees at work. This article is a review of some key readings on job design theories and research. Unlike other changes at work, such as those associated with managerial practices, training programs, or reward systems, job design focuses solely on the work itself—namely, the tasks or activities that individuals perform in their organizations. The popularity of job design as a research topic and managerial strategy is based on its focus on the work itself. Although individuals can avoid dealing with many aspects of their work context, they typically cannot avoid dealing with their jobs, which is the primary purpose of being “at work.” Therefore, jobs represent the key contact between the employee and the organization. Consequently, the way in which jobs are designed and structured plays a major role in affecting how people react in their employing organization. Interest in the field of job design spans over one hundred years. The subject garnered tremendous attention in the twentieth century, and it continues to be highly relevant in the twenty-first century. The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic during 2019–2022 led to dramatic changes in how and where jobs were performed. In countries that imposed lockdowns to prevent the spread of the disease, many organizations required their employees to work remotely through technology. The “digitalization” of work (e.g., meetings held through technological means such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams) required many employees to engage in new tasks and learn new skills. From a job design perspective, the changes brought about by the pandemic are continuing, and their full impact has yet to be fully understood. In the following sections, key historical approaches to job design are covered, followed by a discussion of future directions in the field.
Unobtrusive Measures
Authors: Lee Raymond M.
Published: March 2013

It has long been understood that the act of eliciting data from research participants is capable of affecting the character of the responses obtained, and that the presence of the researcher within the research situation can introduce potentially distorting factors that need to be taken into consideration. Worries about the extent to which the social sciences rely on methods that are “reactive” have encouraged interest in what came to be dubbed “unobtrusive measures” (known also as “nonreactive measures”), sources of data that avoid problems caused by the researcher’s presence or involvement in the data-gathering process. Such sources include the physical traces produced by people as they traverse their environment, data derived from nonparticipant observation, and the use of documents of various kinds. The data produced by unobtrusive methods can be used alone, but an important strength of such methods is their use in combination with other methods so that the weaknesses inherent in data produced by one set of means can be offset by using data produced in a different way with different strengths and different weaknesses. A further important feature of the literature on unobtrusive measures is its stress on unusual, imaginative, or innovative sources of data rather than relying on the standard repertoire of approaches to be found in research methods textbooks.
Human Resource Management
Authors: Cohen Debra J. , Alonso Alexander , Hamilton Montrese , Geller David S.
Published: March 2013

Human resource management (HRM) is a professional field consisting of both academic study and practitioners. The HRM profession is responsible for the interface between employees in an organization and the policies and procedures of that organization, overseeing everything from staffing to compliance, to performance management, to total rewards, to a myriad of other workforce issues and processes. In addition to the day-to-day workforce issues covered by HRM, there is also a strong strategic component to the function. HRM professionals operate as strategic business partners in an organization, providing guidance, advice, and direction that add value to organizational processes. The study of HRM has increased since the late 20th century, as has research of specific HRM issues. However, significant gaps in research exist in many areas of HRM practice.