bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Henry David Thoreau
Authors: Rossi William
Published: March 2013

Henry David Thoreau (b. 1817–d. 1862) was given the name David Henry at birth, outside Concord, Massachusetts, on the farm of his maternal grandmother. In 1833, he entered Harvard College, and he graduated in 1837, the year Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his Phi Beta Kappa address on “The American Scholar” (though Thoreau’s attendance at the event is unconfirmed). One of several youths deeply influenced by the transcendentalist movement that gathered around Emerson, Thoreau enjoyed the older man’s professional encouragement and friendship throughout the 1840s. During the twenty-five years of his writing life, before he died of a tubercular condition at age forty-four, Thoreau published numerous magazine articles in well-established national venues, as well as two books: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), a reflective account of a journey taken with his older brother, John, ten years earlier, and Walden (1854), published by Ticknor and Fields, for which he is best known. Shortly after his death, four more essays were published in the Atlantic Monthly, and in the next few years Ticknor and Fields brought out four collections of his writings, including Excursions (1863), The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-slavery and Reform Papers (1866). Although never a bestselling author, nor able to make a living solely by his pen, Thoreau was modestly successful in his own day and well recognized nationally as a writer of ambition, sharp humor, and great skill. The commercial failure of A Week, which sank his plan of publishing Walden immediately afterward, did nothing to diminish Thoreau’s ambivalence toward the literary marketplace. But A Week suffered less critically than commercially, and that failure was probably more the result of unfavorable negotiating and inadequate marketing than the author’s haughty disdain for his readers or the book’s anti-Christian critique. Walden, an immediate critical success, fared considerably better in sales (though hardly a blockbuster), owing both to energetic promotion by Ticknor and Fields and to the author’s growing stature. From the late nineteenth century to the present, critical interest in Thoreau as writer, social and environmental philosopher, and cultural icon has ranged through many dimensions of his work—the descriptive fidelity and moralism of the natural history essays, the social and political critiques leveled in early chapters of Walden and the reform essays, the literary artistry of Walden, and the ecological sensibility that characterizes the later Journal and two natural history projects, edited and published in 1993 and 2000, that Thoreau left unfinished at his death.
Chemical Ecology
Authors: Kessler André
Published: March 2013

“Ours is a world of sights and sounds. We live by our eyes and ears and tend generally to be oblivious to the chemical happenings in our surrounds. Such happenings are ubiquitous. All organisms engender chemical signals, and all, in their respective ways, respond to the chemical emissions of others. The result is a vast communicative interplay, fundamental to the fabric of life” (Eisner and Meinwald 1995, p. v), cited under General Overviews). Chemical ecology is the study of ecological interactions between organisms mediated by chemicals produced by those organisms. Chemical interactions between organisms can be analyzed across all organizational levels, reaching from cell-cell interaction and intraspecific and multitrophic-level interactions to whole community interactions and environmental ecological processes. Because of their ubiquity, chemical signals that carry information (semiochemicals) can be categorized by the types of ecological interactions they mediate, such as intraspecific social communication, antagonistic interactions, and mutualism. Accordingly, this article is organized into three core areas, one formed by the chemicals mediating interactions between members of the same species (pheromones), and the others by interspecific interactions involving allomones (where the sender benefits), and synomones (where both sender and receivers benefit). A fourth group of signals, kairomones (where the receiver benefits), can comprise all other signal categories when they are perceived and utilized by a third organism that itself gains a benefit from eavesdropping on communication between others. While primary studies in chemical ecology focused on the identification of compounds mediating interactions between organisms, today’s debates are dominated by micro- and macroevolutionary aspects of chemical interactions. The very rapid growth of the chemical ecology literature over recent decades has been, in part, driven by the growing appreciation of the high economic value of understanding chemical communication, reaching from applications in pest management over the control of disease vectors in agriculture to the use of chemical signals in medicine. Moreover, the field has dramatically profited from innovations in analytical chemistry, making the separation of complex compound mixtures as well as the identification of compound structures efficient and accessible to a broader community of researchers. Recent advances in molecular ecology have aided an even more rapid mechanistic and functional analysis of semiochemicals, leading to a modern consolidation of different research fields. This collection of significant publications focuses on the functional and evolutionary analysis of chemical signals important in mediating ecological interactions. Moreover, attention has been given to publications that provide conceptual frameworks and are among the most highly cited in the respective subdisciplines. They can thus provide a good introduction for the interested reader and allow efficient forward and backward searching for more detailed information.
Top-Down and Bottom-Up Regulation of Communities
Authors: Shurin Jonathan B.
Published: March 2013

The dichotomy between top-down and bottom-up forces acting on populations and communities has informed and motivated research in ecology over its entire history. Early practitioners emphasized the importance of bottom-up control because of the apparent association between many species and the supply of resources from the environment. Consumers and predators, the sources of top-down control, were often assumed to exert little influence over the composition of communities or the dynamics of ecosystems. Thomas Huxley’s famous assertion in 1883 that “all the great sea fisheries, are inexhaustible; that is to say, that nothing we do seriously affects the number of the fish” reflects the general impression about the effects of many consumers, including humans, on populations of their prey (“The abundance of the seas,” New York Times, 17 November 1895). Predators were considered to be agents of natural selection, removing unfit individuals but having little impact on the numbers of their prey, which were often thought to be capable of mounting effective defensive strategies and prodigious reproduction. Top-down regulation became a strong contender as an alternative to bottom-up control in the 1960s, when theoretical and empirical evidence began to accumulate that consumers exert considerable influence over the ecosystems they inhabit. Since then a much-richer picture has emerged of how, where, and when top-down and bottom-up forces come into play and of the interaction between the two. This article deals with approaches to disentangling the effects of predators and resources on communities and ecosystems and what they have revealed about the structure and dynamics of nature.
Kin Selection
Authors: Bourke Andrew F. G.
Published: March 2013

According to Hamilton’s kin selection theory (also known as “inclusive fitness” theory), kin selection is the process by which social evolution occurs in nature. The theory extends the genetical theory of natural selection to social behaviors and finds that their evolution is affected by the likelihood that individuals share genes (relatedness). In biology, a social behavior occurs when one individual (the actor) behaves so as to affect the direct fitness (number of offspring) of itself and another individual (the recipient). For example, altruism occurs when the actor’s behavior decreases the actor’s direct fitness and increases the recipient’s direct fitness. Conversely, selfishness occurs when the actor’s behavior increases the actor’s direct fitness and decreases the recipient’s. Social behaviors are widespread in nature. A classic example is the altruism shown by the sterile workers of social insects such as ants, which sacrifice their own reproduction in order to rear the queen’s offspring. At first sight, altruism poses a problem for the genetical theory of natural selection, which seems to preclude the spread of a gene for reduced reproduction. Kin selection was devised by William Hamilton in the early 1960s to address this “problem of altruism.” The basic principle behind kin selection had been hinted at by Darwin, Fisher, and Haldane, but it was Hamilton who provided the first general model. Hamilton called his idea “inclusive fitness” theory, and it was later dubbed “kin selection” by Maynard Smith in 1964. For most purposes, the two can be considered identical, although inclusive fitness theory technically includes kin selection theory because the relatedness it invokes need not involve kin (genealogical relatives). Kin selection theory solved the problem of altruism by showing that a gene for altruism can spread if altruism is directed at individuals likely to bear the same gene. By definition, kin are likely to share genes. So, a gene for altruism can spread if altruism is directed at kin and the loss of gene copies through the actor’s decreased reproduction is more than offset by the gain in gene copies through the increased reproduction of the recipient. The algebraic version of this condition is termed “Hamilton’s rule.” Although kin selection theory was devised to explain altruism, it also applies to the other forms of social behavior such as selfishness. The theory is therefore now widely used to investigate and explain many kinds of social behavior in living organisms as diverse as bacteria and human beings.
Soil Ecology
Authors: De Vries Franciska T. , Bardgett Richard D.
Published: March 2013

The study of soil ecology has a long tradition. Most of this interest, until relatively recently, has been from an agricultural perspective, but now it is widely accepted that soil ecology is central to the study of terrestrial ecology. Early research in soil ecology was largely descriptive, detailing the abundance of diversity of organisms in soils of different habitats. However, interest in functional soil ecology started in the 1980s with studies of trophic interactions in soil and their importance for nutrient cycles and decomposition. Now, the topic has blossomed, with the help of new technologies that allow the study of soil organisms and their activities in situ, and there is currently widespread recognition that soil ecology is fundamental to our understanding of the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems and their response to global change. Today, the field of soil ecology is dominated by discussions on the use of new molecular tools that enable ecologists to understand what regulates patterns of diversity in soil, the functional role of soil biodiversity and plant-soil interactions, especially those that occur at the root-soil interface, and the role of soil biological communities in regulating ecosystem responses to global change, including the global carbon cycle under climate change. Many challenges still remain in soil ecology, and perhaps the most significant is the need for a stronger theoretical basis for the subject; almost all studies in this area have been carried out from an empirical perspective, and modeling approaches are still in their infancy. As a consequence, our ability to make predictions about the role of soil biological interactions and feedbacks in regulating terrestrial ecosystem processes and their response to global change remains limited.
Dietary Laws
Authors: Kraemer David
Published: March 2013

The body of Jewish dietary laws expanded considerably through the ages. The biblical laws were quite limited, pertaining almost exclusively to meat and animal products, which, outside of the priestly estate, constituted a small part of the everyday common diet. During the Persian and Hellenistic age, Jews descended from those who had returned from the Babylonian exile sought to supplement the Bible’s restrictions by forbidding all gentile foods. The early rabbis added the prohibition of mixing meat and dairy products, and subsequent generations expanded the application of this prohibition in a variety of ways. The terms “Jewish dietary laws” and “kashruth” (the nominative form of the adjective “kosher”) are often used interchangeably. But it is important to distinguish between them. The Hebrew root “k-sh-r,” a postexilic term, is never used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to Jewish dietary laws. It was first used by the rabbis of Late Antiquity in this connection (among others; it means simply fitting or proper), so it is more accurate to use the term “kashruth” in reference to the dietary laws of the rabbis, which were not, however, the dietary laws of all Jews. There were laws regulating the Jewish diet both before kashruth—beginning in the Torah itself—and outside of rabbinically observant communities, such as among Karaite (i.e., scripturalist) Jews. This bibliography covers both kashruth in the specific sense and Jewish dietary laws more generally. Unfortunately, writers on this subject have generally assumed that kashruth and Jewish dietary laws are synonymous, and they have mostly neglected to note developments in these practices through history. Furthermore, the vast majority of writing on these laws has been technical rabbinic commentaries or treatises pertaining to the details of the laws. In other words, until the late 20th and early 21st centuries there has been no genuine history of Jewish dietary laws, nor has this been a field of academic study. But as foodways in general have drawn increasing academic attention, a number of writers have turned to Jewish food and eating practices, bringing new perspectives and new understandings to an emerging field.
Early Modern Jewish History
Authors: Ruderman David B. , Bregoli Francesca
Published: March 2013

The term “early modernity” as the name of a period roughly extending from the end of the 15th century to the end of the 18th century has been only recently employed by historians of Jewish culture and society. Despite a plethora of new studies in the last several decades, few attempts have been made to define the period as a whole as a distinct epoch in Jewish history, distinguishable from both the medieval and the modern periods. Some historians have remained indifferent to demarcating the period, have simply designated it as an extension of the Middle Ages, or have labeled it vaguely as a mere transitional stage between medievalism and modernity without properly describing its distinguishing characteristics. A few historians have used the term “Renaissance” to apply to the cultural ambiance of Jews living in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries alone without delineating the larger period and the more comprehensive geographical area. The bibliographical survey that follows focuses on the entire period of three hundred years and attempts to provide a panoramic view of European and Ottoman Jewries both as distinct subcommunities and in their broader connections with each other.
Sabbatianism
Authors: Maciejko Pawel
Published: March 2013

Sabbatianism was a movement in Judaism spurred by the messianic pronouncements of the Ottoman Jew Sabbatai Tsevi (b. 1626–d. 1676). In contrast to earlier messianic upheavals, which had limited and localized character, Sabbatianism spread over all main Jewish communities in Europe, Asia, and North Africa and became a large public movement attracting thousands of followers and the careful attention of outside observers. Redemptive hopes associated with Tsevi were dashed in summer 1666, when the Ottoman authorities had him arrested. In September of that year he converted to Islam, thus putting an end to Sabbatianism as a public movement. The majority of Jews proclaimed Sabbatai a false messiah. However, a few of his believers interpreted the apostasy as a part of the messiah’s mission and founded sectarian groups recognizing the nominally Muslim leader as the true redeemer of Israel. One such group, later known as the Dönmeh, also converted to Islam. Others continued to operate within the framework of normative Judaism. Sectarian Sabbatianism elicited intense opposition of rabbinic authorities: a number of bans of excommunication were issued, and scores of polemical works were composed. It also developed highly original theological doctrines, in which traditional Jewish Kabbalistic motifs were reinterpreted in very novel ways and blended with Muslim and later also Christian elements. The last stage of the movement was the sect of Jacob Frank (Frankism), which was founded in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 1750s. Sabbatianism dwindled by the late 18th century, but it had significant impact on the most-important phenomena of 19th-century Judaism, such as the Haskalah.
Apocalypticism and Messianism
Authors: DiTommaso Lorenzo
Published: March 2013

Apocalypticism and messianism originated in ancient Judaism. Apocalypticism, or the apocalyptic worldview, is a distinctive combination of several core axioms, including a conviction in the imminent end of history. The first apocalypses date from the Hellenistic era (323–363 bce) and include the early Enochic literature and the biblical book of Daniel. Messianism is the expectation for an end-time agent who plays a positive, authoritative, and usually redemptive role. It derived from the postexilic hope for a future ideal Davidic king. Messiah figures are thus foremost a symbol for national-political restoration but can also have priestly or prophetic dimensions. Apocalyptic speculation and messianic expectation survived the failure of three revolts against Rome (66–73, 115–117, and 132–135 ce) to play important roles in Judaism in the rabbinic, medieval, and early modern centuries and remain significant in contemporary Jewish life, both inside and outside Israel.
Israeli Politics and Political Leaders
Authors: Ben-Porat Guy
Published: March 2013

Israeli politics has been characterized since the 1990s as both overloaded with social schisms that undermine existing political arrangements and suffering with a governance and leadership crisis reflected in the difficulty for elected politicians to make decisions and implement them. In the late 19th and early 20th century the visionaries of Zionism led European Jews to immigrate to Palestine and establish what would later be the State of Israel. The Labor Party that came to dominate the Zionist movement continued to dominate the young state from its inception in 1948 until the 1970s. In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the party rapidly lost its hegemony and political power. Its successor, the right-wing Likud Party, was unable to replicate its hegemony and dominance. Growing schisms in Israel were manifested in the decline of the large parties and the emergence of small parties that have made coalition building difficult and rendered the decision-making process and policy implementation all but impossible. Since the early 1980s many governments have not been able to complete their terms and, more importantly, to contend with the major challenges the country faces.
Life Cycle Rituals
Authors: Goldberg Harvey E. , Sabar Shalom
Published: March 2013

Life cycle events have been part of Jewish life since biblical times, but scholarly focus on them emerged only in the nineteenth century. This stemmed from the development of modern Jewish studies along with the new fields of anthropology and folklore. These disciplines only slowly gained legitimacy among Judaic scholars over the course of the twentieth century, while detailed attention to life cycle rituals at times appeared in other research disciplines: rabbinic law (halakha), often complemented by the attempt to elucidate accepted customs (minhag); social and more recently cultural history; and Kabbalah (mysticism). A milestone in the study of life cycle events in general was Arnold van Gennep’s 1909 formulation of the notion of rites de passage (rites of passage). Only in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have some Judaic scholars sought to engage theoretical concerns in the analysis of ritual, including those linked to life cycle developments.
Dead Sea Scrolls
Authors: Schiffman Lawrence H. , Schiffman Marlene
Published: March 2013

The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish manuscripts that have been discovered around the shore of the Dead Sea. They range in size from large scrolls and nearly complete documents to fragmentary scraps of just a few letters. They have been located in eleven caves at Qumran, at Masada, and in caves from the Bar Kokhba era. Chronologically they span the last several centuries bce to the second century ce and so have profound value for the study of ancient Judaism and the background of early Christianity. (This bibliography does not include the material from Wadi el-Daliyeh and Khirbet Mird.) The most extensive collection of documents was found at Qumran on the western shore of the Dead Sea, south of Jerusalem. Most of the more than nine hundred separate manuscripts from this site are actually only fragmentary remains of ancient books that can be divided into three, roughly equal categories: (1) Bible manuscripts of all books of the Hebrew Bible, except for the book of Esther, have been identified at Qumran, (2) apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, books known to have circulated in the Second Temple period among all Jewish groups, and (3) sectarian materials peculiar to the Jewish inhabitants of Qumran, who separated themselves from the mainstream Jewish groups and from the Jerusalem Temple. Their texts outline their beliefs, rules on how to enter their closed sect, and their regimens and rituals. Adjacent to the caves are remains of a Jewish site inhabited for several centuries, until its destruction by the Romans in 68 ce. The scrolls in the caves have been regarded by most scholars as the library of those who occupied that site. Masada was a fortress south of En Gedi on the Dead Sea and was used as a rebel stronghold during the Great Revolt against the Romans (66–73 ce), until destroyed by the Roman legions. The scrolls recovered from this site include parts of fifteen biblical and apocryphal books widely known during Second Temple times. The Judaean Desert climate also has preserved documents from the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–135 ce) in refuge caves for victims of the war, located primarily north of Masada and south of Qumran, at Wadi Murabba’at, Naḥal Ḥever, and other sites. The documents include letters from Bar Kokhba to his military commanders, and archives of people who fled to the caves with their personal effects.
Modern Hebrew Literature
Authors: Mann Barbara
Published: March 2013

Modern Hebrew literature emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in European centers of Jewish life, such as Berlin, Vilna, and Warsaw. Often considered as part of the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment), its various themes and genres were acutely attuned to historical change and may be understood in relation to the modernization of large segments of eastern and central Europe’s Jewish population. Early typical themes of the techiya (revival or renaissance) treated the evolving structure and tenor of traditional Jewish societies as they experienced the physical and psychological pressures of secularization. Hebrew writing often expressly addressed the tension between the individual and the community and the ethical bond between writer and nation while depicting the social and geographic upheavals in traditional Jewish life and the encounter of small-town values with the chaos and opportunity of cosmopolitan urban centers. These transformations were reflected in a new range of attitudes toward the body and the natural landscape as well as the worlds of secular learning and aesthetics. Though historically influential, this newly revived audience of Hebrew writers and readers was a minority, an educated elite constituting a literary republic that by the early 20th century stretched from London to New York to Jerusalem. Modern Hebrew belles lettres maintained a close if tense relation to the ancient Hebrew sources, including biblical texts and the two thousand–year gamut of legal and aphoristic writing in Hebrew. The presence of intertextual allusions to sacred texts in ostensibly “profane” genres, such as the lyric and prose fiction, made modern Hebrew literature a paradoxical amalgam both of the familiar and the new, pointing simultaneously toward an ancient, illustrious past, the uncertainties of the present, and the possibilities of the future. At the same time, Hebrew literature was also intensely shaped by aesthetic trends, such as romanticism, modernism, and the avant-garde. While always produced in relation to the languages of the surrounding host cultures, including Slavic tongues, German, Arabic, Ladino, and English, Hebrew has had a special relationship with Yiddish, which shares its orthography and many of its thematic and ideological preoccupations. With the advent of modern Jewish settlement in Palestine in the early 20th century, Hebrew became a spoken vernacular, a condition that influenced its literary production. The existence of normative literary groupings or generations, such as the moderna (modernism), Palmach, and state generation—all coexisting during a period of just several decades—indicates the tremendous velocity with which Hebrew literature has evolved since its early modern origins. In contemporary Israel, Hebrew writing is an increasingly multicultural endeavor, one that often reflects the cultural, political, and psychological tensions inhering in territorial sovereignty.
Ahad Ha' am
Authors: Zipperstein Steven J.
Published: March 2013

Ahad Ha’am is a pen name for the Russian Jewish essayist, editor, and Zionist thinker Asher Ginzberg (b. 1856–d. 1927), meaning in Hebrew “one of the people,” a consciously jarring choice for an intellectual whose central preoccupation was the need for Jewry to consolidate a new, postreligious elite; Ahad Ha’am consolidated around himself an entire school of Jewish nationalist thought called “cultural” or “spiritual” Zionism. In the form of essays, mostly brief, he savaged Zionism from within the movement—of which he was also in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the preeminent intellectual voice. He loathed (and was probably also jealous of) Theodor Herzl, the movement’s head until his death in 1904, and critical of his reliance on diplomacy, his understanding of culture, his secrecy, and the excitement that he engendered, which, as Ahad Ha’am saw it, encouraged a potentially lethal messianic fervor. Drawing eclectically on a wide range of thinkers in German, English, French, Russian, and, of course, Hebrew, he argued that culture, embodied for Jews first in statecraft, then in rabbinic law or philosophy, and now ever more frayed because of modernity’s assimilatory pressures, was what held Jews together or, potentially, undermined it. Jewish history was built out of successful accommodation with the larger world, creative integration whereby Jews drew on the best of what other cultures had to offer while making it their own. In modernity, this now required a geographical concentration of Jews in the Land of Israel where in a Hebrew-speaking milieu modern currents could more dexterously be blended into Jewish life. His primary theme centered on the prerequisites of leadership, prophetic in their origins, resolutely moral—he was the first major Zionist thinker to call attention to the corrosive impact on Jews of the oppression of Arabs—and gradualist in his approach to the building of the Land of Israel. He envisioned an enterprise with great cultural institutions at its core, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the mainstay of Israel’s liberal press, Haaretz; its Federation of Hebrew Writers; the founding principle of the city of Tel Aviv, whose long-standing mayor, Meir Dizengoff, was a disciple of Ahad Ha’am—all owe their early inspiration to his teachings. He inspired (and sought) the loyalty of his followers, creating around him in the late 1880s a Masonic-like, semisecret group called the Bnei Moshe (Sons of Moses), whose devotion to him not infrequently morphed into fierce opposition. To varying degrees, his followers included Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann; Hebrew’s canonic poet, Hayyim Nahman Bialik; and founder of Reconstructionist Judaism in the United States, Mordecai Kaplan. Ahad Ha’am also emerged as a touchstone for binationalism. Ahad Ha’am lived much of his life in Odessa, moving to London in 1907 and to Tel Aviv in 1921, where he died.
Performance Appraisal
Authors: DeNisi Angelo S.
Published: March 2013

Performance appraisal is concerned with assessing the performance of employees at work, although the concept and models apply to any situation where assessment of performance is important. Although the literature considers multiple purposes for conducting appraisals, the term really refers to the specific types of decisions that will be based on appraisal information. Ultimately, the purpose of conducting an appraisal is to improve the performance of the workforce. But the specific process of changing that performance is more properly considered performance management. Thus when considered together, performance appraisal and performance management represent one of the most critical processes that exist in organizations for managing employee behavior.
Decision Making
Authors: Bromiley Philip , Rau Devaki
Published: March 2013

Decision making, in its broadest sense, is a vast area of research that spans many disciplines, including psychology, economics, political science, and management. Researchers examine decision making at various levels of analysis (individuals, groups, organizations, and nations). They study decisions that range from the trivial (e.g., choices among gambles paying small amounts of money) to the very important (e.g., decisions risking nuclear war). Some scholars attempt to describe or explain actual decisions while others emphasize how individuals should make decisions. Decisions may result in a variety of outcomes that occur over a variety of time spans. The decision maker(s) may make similar types of decisions either repeatedly (e.g., a banker assessing loan applications) or once in a lifetime (e.g., a merger). This article focuses on strategic decision making in an organizational context. Strategic decisions are decisions that critically influence the future of an organization. A description is given of three fundamental theoretical perspectives—the behavioral theory of the firm, behavioral decision theory, and agency theory—that researchers typically use to study strategic decision making in organizations. Discussion is provided of two additional perspectives on decision making, namely, top management teams and cognition. These latter two approaches, while not unified by a central theory, are, nevertheless, widely used for examining and predicting strategic decisions. Strategic decisions usually involve risk. This article therefore examines the treatment of risk by the various studies in this area. It concludes with a look at some Future Directions for Strategic Decision Making research.
Organization Development and Change
Authors: Bartunek Jean M.
Published: March 2013

Organization development and change (ODC) is a term used to refer to organization development (OD) as it emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as a discrete area of inquiry. The term also refers to subsequent developments in planned organizational change and broader labels (such as change management) since the mid-20th century. ODC originally focused on humanistically oriented process interventions within comparatively small groups of organizational members aimed at improving their functioning. Its scope has expanded considerably over the decades to include many more types of interventions, a much wider array of participants, and a much broader scope of activity.
Training and Development
Authors: Brown Kenneth G.
Published: March 2013

Training and development is the study of how structured experiences help employees gain work-related knowledge, skill, and attitudes. It is like many other topics in management in that it is inherently multidisciplinary in nature. At its core is the psychological study of learning and transfer. A variety of disciplines offer insights into this topic, including, but not limited to, industrial and organizational psychology, educational psychology, human resource development, organizational development, industrial and labor relations, strategic management, and labor economics. The focus of this bibliography is primarily psychological with an emphasis on theory and practice that examines training processes and the learning outcomes they seek to influence. Nevertheless, literature from other perspectives will be introduced on a variety of topics within this area of study.
Benefits
Authors: Fay Charles H.
Published: March 2013

Employee benefits include a wide variety of noncash compensation programs provided by employers to employees. The major programs cover retirement, income protection, health care, and paid time off. In addition, benefits include a broad range of services. While there is a small literature on benefits in general, each of these benefit types has a distinct scholarly literature and a professional literature. The disciplines required to work in the benefits arena are predominantly economics, finance, and public policy, with lesser emphasis on tax law, communications, demographics, and organizational psychology. Employee benefits are very much determined by national law, culture, and tax policies. This review focuses on US employee benefits but also speaks to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and other international programs where possible. Because the United States is the only major economic power where pensions and health care are employer-based rather than government-based, most of the pension and health-care literature relevant to management research has originated in the United States. Similarly, the focus here is on works that speak to management options. Thus, while public policy constrains management action, it is not a primary interest of this review. Finally, it is important that management researchers understand how employee benefit programs actually work, and professional journal articles providing this background are an important part of this review.
Qualitative Research Methods
Authors: Cassell Catherine
Published: March 2013

Qualitative research methods in the field of management typically rely on nonquantitative forms of data collection and nonstatistical forms of data analysis. A variety of methods are encompassed under this umbrella term, and because these methods are used in a diversity of philosophical approaches, they offer a complex and rich source of research techniques. Qualitative researchers are keen to generate rich data that focus on the meanings and interpretations that individuals or groups ascribe to a given concept or situation. Because research usually takes place in naturalistic settings, such as in organizations, researchers may be concerned with reflexivity or the researcher’s impact on the conduct of the research and the production of knowledge. Furthermore, qualitative researchers see the informants in their research as active participants in the research process rather than simply as subjects who are on the receiving end of various treatments. A number of different research strategies can focus entirely on qualitative methods, including Case Studies, Ethnography, and Action Research. Above all, the qualitative researcher seeks to use these methods to access the subjective experience of organizational life and behavior.
Time and Motion Studies
Authors: Harper Steven , Mousa Fariss-Terry
Published: March 2013

Time and motion study (also referred to as motion and time study, the terms are used interchangeably) is the scientific study of the conservation of human resources in the search for the most efficient method of doing a task. A fascination with the word “efficiency” began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when it was considered one of the most important concepts. Time study began in the 1880s as a means of wage-rate setting by Frederick W. Taylor, who is regarded as the “father of scientific management.” It consists of a wide variety of procedures for determining the amount of time required, under certain standard conditions of measurement, for tasks involving some human activity. Motion study was developed by Frank B. Gilbreth and Lillian M. Gilbreth and consists of a wide variety of procedures for the description, systematic analysis, and means of improving work methods. It is difficult to separate these two aspects completely. Therefore, the combined term usually refers to all three phases of the activity: method determination, time appraisal, and development of material for the application of these data. Frank and Lillian also broadened scientific management by including the human element, therefore using psychology to gain the cooperation of employees. Motion and time analysis could be used to help find a preferential way of doing the work and could assist in effectively managing or controlling the activity. This approach has been successfully applied to factories, hospitals, department stores, housework, banks, cafeteria work, libraries, music, and to many other human activities. For instance, factories have used it to reduce wasted time and improve the time to compete a task, while banks use it to help team members reach their sales goals. However, the goal of a time and motion study is not simply efficiency. These studies are done to create a baseline that can be used in the future when evaluating procedural, equipment, or personnel changes. The goal can be to understand the skills required to enable individuals to perform the work and, thus, to provide the correct training. Another may be to reduce the discomfort experienced, especially in the case of surgical procedures—a goal such as this, namely, to create less tissue damage, may run counter to efficiency. In the case of athletes, the goal may be faster speed or more endurance, which may be achieved not necessarily by the most efficient way.
Ethical Leadership
Authors: Schaubroeck John , Woessner Zachary W. , Malonson Bernie
Published: March 2013

Within the past fifteen years ethical leadership has become a topic of scientific inquiry, with established measures and a corpus of research and theoretical work examining antecedents and consequences. During the same period the unethical acts of organizational leaders have received increasing attention in both the commercial media and the organizational literature. A practitioner literature has emerged that presents observations of events and proposes solutions to the problem of unethical behavior among leaders. This article does not seek to review the literature on the unethical behavior of leaders; rather, it focuses on the psychological construct of ethical leadership.
Self-Efficacy
Authors: Gist Marilyn E. , Gist Angela
Published: March 2013

Self-efficacy refers to an individual’s perception of his or her capacity to perform a specific task. Albert Bandura is credited with recognizing the importance of self-efficacy in human agency. He clarified that self-efficacy is the belief in one’s capabilities to mobilize personal resources, such as motivation, cognitive, and behavioral skills, in order to orchestrate task-specific performance. Theoretically and empirically, self-efficacy has been shown to have wide-ranging implications for organizational behavior. Much evidence supports its importance in human agency and its interaction with variables involved in cognitive self-regulation (goal setting, feedback, etc.). Self-efficacy also has been validated as making an impact on learning and performance applications, such as training, leadership, decision making, and creativity. In addition, scholars have found that self-efficacy predicts differential behaviors in a number of job situations. To date, the most important of these are work stress and strain, unemployment and job seeking, employee citizenship and extra-role behaviors, employee attitudes, commitment and adaptability to change, newcomer socialization, and entrepreneurial behavior. Importantly, self-efficacy measures must be adapted to the specific task under investigation. Self-report tools are used to address perceptions of capability across a range of performance outcomes. Guided by Bandura’s work, some scholars differentiate self-efficacy “magnitude” from self-efficacy “strength” and self-efficacy “generality.” Magnitude refers to a comparative level of performance (e.g., whether one believes she can produce one, two, or three publications next year), while strength refers to one’s confidence (e.g., probability) in achieving at that level. Less commonly measured, generality refers to the application of efficacy beliefs across situations. Because self-efficacy is task-specific, care must be taken in scholarly research to understand the dynamics of the task involved in the evaluation; for instance, different types of tasks require different skills and motivations. For the same reason, caution is needed when generalizing empirical findings to new tasks. However, this limitation also illustrates how potent the construct of self-efficacy is, given the vast body of evidence showing its predictive validity in organizational behavior. In addition, constructs derivative of self-efficacy have evolved to address group situations. These refer to group efficacy, team efficacy, or collective efficacy, and have been measured using both single ratings of team consensus and averages of individual ratings. The potency of self-efficacy also has relevance to a popular dispositional construct: core self-evaluations. Findings from studies of group efficacy and core self-evaluations generally support the predictive validity of these broader measures, although the predictive path may operate through self-efficacy.
Behavioral Theory of the Firm
Authors: Greve Henrich R.
Published: March 2013

The “behavioral theory of the firm” refers to a research tradition that follows the basic assumptions and interests of Richard M. Cyert and James G. March’s pioneering work, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Cyert and March 1963, cited under Classic Treatments). This work examines how organizations function when managers have bounded (not full) rationality, there is disagreement on goals, and the environment is uncertain. This is seen as a more realistic model of organizations than fully rational models or models with full agreement on goals and full knowledge of future states of the environment. Research in this tradition has focused on organizational stability through rules and routines, reduction of conflict through sequential attention to goals operationalized as constraints, and organizational change through the search for solutions that satisfy the goal constraints. Over time it has become broader, and it now includes a significant body of work on how organizations learn from their experience and the experience of other organizations. This bibliography is organized by topic area, and it displays representative work within each topic. For ease of exposition, the space devoted to each topic is not proportional to the work covered; that is, some topics are significantly more developed than others, so that a full coverage of these topics would consume a disproportionate amount of space.
Data Analytic Methods
Authors: Landis Ronald S.
Published: March 2013

Data analytic methods cover the myriad techniques used to make sense of the information collected through research. Organizational scientists use a variety of analytic methods to clean/screen data, describe characteristics of the data, test hypotheses, and draw inferences. Broadly speaking, data analytic methods also include topics of measurement (e.g., reliability, validity) and statistical significance testing (e.g., null hypothesis significance testing [NHST], Bayesian approaches). Frequently, data analytic methods are discussed in conjunction with research design because of the fundamental relations between the two.
Geopolitics
Authors: van Efferink Leonhardt
Published: March 2013

Since the term geopolitics was coined in 1899 it has had many different meanings. They all evolve around its two parts, “geo” and “politics.” Dealing with the possible meanings requires a thorough understanding of what distinguishes them from one another. First, “geo” can denote various geographic aspects, such as space, soil, or territory. More specifically, it can denote geographic conditions, such as the presence of natural resources in a bounded area. Whether geography should be considered a static or a dynamic factor has also been subject to debate. Furthermore, “politics” generally concerns factors that are related to power, such as foreign policy, international relations, and military strategy. Here the discussion has been fueled by different views on the relative importance of states vis-à-vis nonstate actors. Causality and its intensity is another cause of disagreement, with some arguing that geography is decisive for political outcomes (geographic determinism). An alternative view is that geographic and political processes mutually influence each other. Finally, intellectual discord has originated in the descriptive, prescriptive, and predictive possibilities of geopolitical research. Are experts in the field capable of analyzing the interaction between geography and politics objectively? Is it desirable that these experts are involved in formulating policy advice? And is a geopolitical specialist able to produce reliable forecasts? These perspectives explain why one widely accepted definition of “geopolitics” does not exist. As a working definition for this contribution, the study of the ways space and power are linked would be appropriate. Please note that this bibliography concerns publications in English, French, German, and Dutch.
Hurricanes
Authors: Bossak Brian
Published: March 2013

Hurricanes are a significant hazard along the East Coast, Gulf Coast, the Florida peninsula, and in many other basins, such as the western Pacific (typhoons), Indian Ocean, and Southern Ocean (cyclones). Hurricanes are the strongest form of tropical cyclone in the Atlantic basin, with the other strengths termed tropical storm and tropical depression, in decreasing intensity, respectively. Hurricanes are multifaceted hazards in that they are contingent events (i.e., require a specific set of ocean–atmospheric parameters to form, develop, intensify, and to eventually make landfall or to remain offshore). These storms present great variability in respect to formation, track, and intensity. In addition, evidence suggests that hurricanes may be linked to long-term trends associated with climate features in the atmosphere and ocean. This online reference guide contains information for basic hurricane reference resources; commonly cited journals containing hurricane-related research articles; and reference papers categorized by frequency, intensity, situation, track, hazard, and climate links. Hurricanes exist (by various names) in basins other than that of the Atlantic Ocean (including the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico), such as typhoons in the southwestern Pacific Ocean and cyclones in the southeastern Indian Ocean and Australia; however, this bibliography focuses primarily on US-centric hurricane research, and thus, on Atlantic basin hurricanes. The sections in this bibliography include publications that may contain aspects of more than one particular topic—therefore, many of the suggested sources are not mutually exclusive to one section or heading. With that in mind, the effort has been toward placing each entry in the section where it provides the best relevance to the topic under discussion.