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"Thomas Powell"
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In food we trust : the politics of purity in American food regulation
\"One of the great myths of contemporary American culture is that the United States' food supply is the safest in the world because the government works to guarantee food safety and enforce certain standards on food producers, processors, and distributors. In reality U.S. food safety administration and oversight have remained essentially the same for more than a century, with the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 continuing to frame national policy despite dramatic changes in production, processing, and distribution throughout the twentieth century. In Food We Trust is the first comprehensive examination of the history of food safety policy in the United States, analyzing critical moments in food safety history from Upton Sinclair's publication of The Jungle to Congress's passage of the 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act. With five case studies of significant food safety crises ranging from the 1959 chemical contamination of cranberries to the 2009 outbreak of salmonella in peanut butter, In Food We Trust contextualizes a changing food regulatory regime and explains how federal agencies are fundamentally limited in their power to safeguard the food supply. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Entrepreneurial failure: Statistical and psychological explanations
Research summary: Entrepreneurial start-ups suffer high rates of business failure. Previous research on entrepreneurial failure has focused on two kinds of explanations: statistical and psychological. Statistical explanations attribute excess entry to random errors made by boundedly rational entrepreneurs attempting to estimate business opportunities in risky markets. Psychological explanations focus on entrepreneurial overconfidence and competition neglect. These explanations emerged independently and have not been tested or compared in the same study. In this experimental study, we distinguish entrepreneurial markets from other types of markets and test statistical and psychological hypotheses for all market types. We find that excess entry is significantly greater in small, risky markets than in other market types, and that confidence levels account for excess entry, over and above the effects of unbiased statistical errors. Managerial summary: How can we explain the fact that most entrepreneurial ventures fail within five years? Market risk, inadequate capital and inexperienced management certainly play a role. However, from an economic point of view, it seems odd that inexperienced, under-funded people continue to engage in risky behavior that is widely known to fail. We conducted experiments that tested two explanations of entrepreneurial failure. The first explanation - the statistical hypothesis - argues that entrepreneurship involves high uncertainty, so random errors are inevitable and can produce excess entry (or under-entry). The second explanation — the psychological hypothesis - says that entrepreneurs ' mistakes are not random but skewed heavily toward excess entry; hence, their decisions are distorted by psychological factors such as overconfidence. Our experiments found support for both of these explanations. Random errors under uncertainty explained 60% of the excess entry in our experiments. However, the overconfidence hypothesis correctly predicted that excess entry exceeds under-entry, and our psychological measures of overconfidence found support in the data. We also found that the markets that most often attract entrepreneurial investment - emerging markets with high uncertainty - were the markets most conducive to excess entry, due to a combination of psychological and market factors. Hence, we conclude that potential entrepreneurs should pay less attention to their own abilities and aspirations, and more attention to the external realities of competition in the marketplace.
Journal Article
Sequential Sympatric Speciation Across Trophic Levels
A major cause for biodiversity may be biodiversity itself. As new species form, they may create new niches for others to exploit, potentially catalyzing a chain reaction of speciation events across trophic levels. We tested for such sequential radiation in the Rhagoletis pomonella (Diptera: Tephritidae) complex, a model for sympatric speciation via host plant shifting. We report that the parasitic wasp Diachasma alloeum (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) has formed new incipient species as a result of specializing on diversifying fly hosts, including the recently derived apple-infesting race of R. pomonella. Furthermore, we show that traits that differentially adapt R. pomonella flies to their host plants have also quickly evolved and serve as ecological barriers to reproduction, isolating the wasps. Speciation therefore cascades as the effects of new niche construction move across trophic levels.
Journal Article
Behavioral strategy
Behavioral strategy merges cognitive and social psychology with strategic management theory and practice. Despite much progress, the aims and boundaries of behavioral strategy remain unclear. In this paper we define behavioral strategy and identify the main unsolved problems. We propose a unifying conceptual framework for behavioral strategy and conclude by introducing the papers of the Special Issue on the Psychological Foundations of Strategic Management.
Journal Article
Operationalising positive tipping points towards global sustainability
Non-technical summaryTransforming towards global sustainability requires a dramatic acceleration of social change. Hence, there is growing interest in finding ‘positive tipping points’ at which small interventions can trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks that accelerate systemic change. Examples have recently been seen in power generation and personal transport, but how can we identify positive tipping points that have yet to occur? We synthesise theory and examples to provide initial guidelines for creating enabling conditions, sensing when a system can be positively tipped, who can trigger it, and how they can trigger it. All of us can play a part in triggering positive tipping points.Technical summaryRecent work on positive tipping points towards sustainability has focused on social-technological systems and the agency of policymakers to tip change, whilst earlier work identified social-ecological positive feedbacks triggered by diverse actors. We bring these together to consider positive tipping points across social-technological-ecological systems and the potential for multiple actors and interventions to trigger them. Established theory and examples provide several generic mechanisms for triggering tipping points. From these we identify specific enabling conditions, reinforcing feedbacks, actors and interventions that can contribute to triggering positive tipping points in the adoption of sustainable behaviours and technologies. Actions that can create enabling conditions for positive tipping include targeting smaller populations, altering social network structure, providing relevant information, reducing price, improving performance, desirability and accessibility, and coordinating complementary technologies. Actions that can trigger positive tipping include social, technological and ecological innovations, policy interventions, public investment, private investment, broadcasting public information, and behavioural nudges. Positive tipping points can help counter widespread feelings of disempowerment in the face of global challenges and help unlock ‘paralysis by complexity’. A key research agenda is to consider how different agents and interventions can most effectively work together to create system-wide positive tipping points whilst ensuring a just transformation.Social media summaryWe identify key actors and actions that can enable and trigger positive tipping points towards global sustainability.
Journal Article
Widespread genomic divergence during sympatric speciation
Speciation with gene flow is expected to generate a heterogeneous pattern of genomic differentiation. The few genes under or physically linked to loci experiencing strong disruptive selection can diverge, whereas gene flow will homogenize the remainder of the genome, resulting in isolated \"genomic islands of speciation.\" We conducted an experimental test of this hypothesis in Rhagoletis pomonella, a model for sympatric ecological speciation. Contrary to expectations, we found widespread divergence throughout the Rhagoletis genome, with the majority of loci displaying host differences, latitudinal clines, associations with adult eclosion time, and within-generation responses to selection in a manipulative overwintering experiment. The latter two results, coupled with linkage disequilibrium analyses, provide experimental evidence that divergence was driven by selection on numerous independent genomic regions rather than by genome-wide genetic drift. \"Continents\" of multiple differentiated loci, rather than isolated islands of divergence, may characterize even the early stages of speciation. Our results also illustrate how these continents can exhibit variable topography, depending on selection strength, availability of preexisting genetic variation, linkage relationships, and genomic features that reduce recombination. For example, the divergence observed throughout the Rhagoletis genome was clearly accentuated in some regions, such as those harboring chromosomal inversions. These results highlight how the individual genes driving speciation can be embedded within an actively diverging genome.
Journal Article
Can Quantitative Research Solve Social Problems? Pragmatism and the Ethics of Social Research
Journal of Business Ethics recently published a critique of ethical practices in quantitative research by Zyphur and Pierides (J Bus Ethics 143:1-16, 2017). The authors argued that quantitative research prevents researchers from addressing urgent problems facing humanity today, such as poverty, racial inequality, and climate change. I offer comments and observations on the authors' critique. I agree with the authors in many areas of philosophy, ethics, and social research, while making suggestions for clarification and development. Interpreting the paper through the pragmatism of William James, I suggest that the authors' arguments are unlikely to change attitudes in traditional quantitative research, though they may point the way to a new worldview, or Jamesian \"sub-world,\" in social research.
Journal Article