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Do political connections buffer firms from or bind firms to the government? To examine this theoretical puzzle, we distinguish two types of managerial political connections, ascribed and achieved , and theorize that these different types of ties either buffer firms from or bind firms to government demands. Furthermore, we propose that these effects are contingent on both industrial and regional institutional conditions. We test our framework with a unique panel data set of privately controlled listed firms’ charitable donations in China from 2001 to 2012. We find that firms whose executives have ascribed bureaucratic connections are more likely to use their connections as a buffer from governmental donation pressure, particularly in competitive industries and less market-oriented regions, whereas in state-monopolized industries this buffering effect is reduced. In contrast, achieved political connections are more likely to serve a binding function that facilitates donation, particularly in state-monopolized industries and more market-oriented regions, but in less market-oriented regions, they buffer firms from the pressure to donate. Our research contributes to the literatures on the effects of political connections, the institutional contingencies of political connections, and the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate political activities (CPA).

A central argument in the literature on employee voice is that speaking up at work carries image risk. Challenging this assumption, we propose that voice can in fact positively affect how employees are viewed by others, thereby enhancing their social status. Using theory on status attainment and the fundamental social perception dimensions of agency and communion, we suggest that employee voice will result in higher status evaluations by increasing the extent to which an employee is judged as confident/competent (agency) and other-oriented/helpful (communion). We conducted a survey study and two experiments to test these hypotheses. The results supported our predictions. Employees who voiced were ascribed higher status than those who did not, and this effect was mediated by judgments of agency (in all three studies) and communion (in two studies). These results highlight the implications of voice behavior for status enhancement within organizations.

Can digital information and communication technology foster mass political mobilization? We use a novel georeferenced data set for the entire African continent between 1998 and 2012 on the coverage of mobile phone signal together with georeferenced data from multiple sources on the occurrence of protests and on individual participation in protests to bring this argument to empirical scrutiny. We find that while mobile phones are instrumental to mass mobilization, this only happens during economic downturns, when reasons for grievance emerge and the cost of participation falls. The results are in line with insights from a network model with imperfect information and strategic complementarities in protest occurrence. Mobile phones make individuals more responsive to both changes in economic conditions—a mechanism that we ascribe to enhanced information—and to their neighbors’ participation—a mechanism that we ascribe to enhanced coordination.

Recent literature on environmental governance in China frequently ascribes blame for China's environmental problems to sub-national governments' lax environmental enforcement. Such research implicitly assumes that more central control would lead to better results but, as yet, the role of the centre in environmental governance remains underresearched. In the context of the current phase of recentralization, this article studies central and local interests, capacities and interactions across policy issues and government agencies. By “bringing the centre back” into the study of central–local relations in China, we examine both where such recentralization has in fact occurred and whether such recentralization efforts have improved environmental outcomes. We argue that centralization does not improve outcomes in every case. Further, central and local levels of governance are not as different as they might seem. Indeed, there are significant areas of overlapping interests and similar patterns of behaviour, both positive (enforcement) and negative (shirking), between central and local administrations. The results draw an empirically and theoretically rich picture of central–local relations that highlights the innate complexity of China's environmental governance patterns during the current phase of recentralization. 近来关于中国环境治理的文献经常将中国的环境问题归咎于地方政府松懈的环保执法。这类研究其实是隐晦地假设越多的中央管控就能带来越好的结果, 但是对中央政府在环境治理中所扮演的角色, 至今仍缺乏足够的研究。在现阶段重新集权化的大背景下, 本文将梳理中央与地方的利益、能力以及在政策问题和政府机构上的相互作用。通过 “将中央重新带回” 关于中国中央–地方关系的研究中, 我们将检视这种重新集权化实际上在哪些地方发生, 以及这种重新集权化的努力是否改善了环保成效。我们认为集权化并不能在每种情况下都改善环保成效。而且, 中央和地方层次的治理并不像看上去那样迥然不同。事实上, 在中央与地方行政部门间, 不管是在积极 (即主动执法) 还是消极 (即推卸责任) 的方面, 都有很多重要领域存在利益重叠, 也有相似的行为模式。我们的研究结果也在实证和理论两方面, 为中央–地方关系勾画了一幅丰富充实的画面, 突出了当前重新集权化阶段下中国环境治理模式中固有的复杂性。

This article addresses the gap between what works in research and what works in practice. Currently, research in evidence-based education policy and practice focuses on randomized controlled trials. These can support causal ascriptions (“It worked”) but provide little basis for local effectiveness predictions (“It will work here”), which are what matter for practice. We argue that moving from ascription to prediction by way of causal generalization (“It works”) is unrealistic and urge focusing research efforts directly on how to build local effectiveness predictions. We outline various kinds of information that can improve predictions and encourage using methods better equipped for acquiring that information. We compare our proposal with others advocating a better mix of methods, like implementation science, improvement science, and practice-based evidence.

We investigate the impact of COVID-19 on 42,401 UK SMEs and how government intervention affects their capability to survive the pandemic. The results show that, without governmental mitigation schemes, 59% of UK SMEs report negative earnings and that their residual life is reduced from 164 to 139 days. The analysis shows that government support scheme reduces the number of SMEs with negative earnings to 49% and allows extending the residual life for SMEs with negative earnings to 194 days. In addition, the support scheme reduces the number of jobs at risk in our sample by around 20%. However, our results suggest that weaker firms benefit more than strong ones. Besides, industries that are worst hit by COVID-19 are not those that benefit most from the government support scheme. We ascribe this result to the fact that the schemes do not discriminate between those firms that deserve support and those that do not deserve it.

We propose that the propensity to think creatively tends to be associated with independence and self-direction— qualities generally ascribed to men—so that men are often perceived to be more creative than women. In two experiments, we found that \"outside the box\" creativity is more strongly associated with stereotypically masculine characteristics (e.g., daring and self-reliance) than with stereotypically feminine characteristics (e.g., cooperativeness and supportiveness; Study 1) and that a man is ascribed more creativity than a woman when they produce identical output (Study 2). Analyzing archival data, we found that men's ideas are evaluated as more ingenious than women's ideas (Study 3) and that female executives are stereotyped as less innovative than their male counterparts when evaluated by their supervisors (Study 4). Finally, we observed that stereotypically masculine behavior enhances a man's perceived creativity, whereas identical behavior does not enhance a woman's perceived creativity (Study 5). This boost in men's perceived creativity is mediated by attributions of agency, not competence, and predicts perceptions of reward deservingness.

Facial emotion recognition is crucial for social interaction. However, in times of a global pandemic, where wearing a face mask covering mouth and nose is widely encouraged to prevent the spread of disease, successful emotion recognition may be challenging. In the current study, we investigated whether emotion recognition, assessed by a validated emotion recognition task, is impaired for faces wearing a mask compared to uncovered faces, in a sample of 790 participants between 18 and 89 years (condition mask vs . original ). In two more samples of 395 and 388 participants between 18 and 70 years, we assessed emotion recognition performance for faces that are occluded by something other than a mask, i.e., a bubble as well as only showing the upper part of the faces (condition half vs . bubble ). Additionally, perception of threat for faces with and without occlusion was assessed. We found impaired emotion recognition for faces wearing a mask compared to faces without mask, for all emotions tested (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, neutral). Further, we observed that perception of threat was altered for faces wearing a mask. Upon comparison of the different types of occlusion, we found that, for most emotions and especially for disgust, there seems to be an effect that can be ascribed to the face mask specifically, both for emotion recognition performance and perception of threat. Methodological constraints as well as the importance of wearing a mask despite temporarily compromised social interaction are discussed.

Contention in the form of protests, riots, and direct action is a central political practice in contemporary democracies. It is also a staple of sociological analysis, after slowly crystallizing as a distinct object of analysis from the 1970s onward. Lately, however, it has become unclear what this distinctiveness consists of and how it may help guide studies of contention: What distinguishes contention from other practices? I argue that contention can be seen as an ontologically distinctive experience. What sets this experience apart is that it expresses a potential for conflict that underlies all social formations. We can take these expressions of conflict as objects of analysis. This means asking how the conflict expressed in contentious practices is ascribed meaning. I develop this perspective theoretically and show how it may facilitate new empirical analyses of contention’s boundaries, its relation to truth, and ethical relations in contention.

One explanation for the dearth of women in elected office is that voters stereotype candidates based on their gender. Research in this vein often assumes that female candidates will be stereotyped similarly to women (e.g., as compassionate) and measures stereotypes as such. We question this assumption, proposing instead that female politicians constitute a subtype—a new stereotypical category with its own qualities—of the broader group of women. We compare the content of female politician stereotypes to other relevant comparison groups including politicians, male politicians, and female professionals. Using a classic methodology to determine stereotype content (Katz & Braly, 1933), we find that female politicians do not share the qualities that are ascribed to women (e.g., warm, empathetic). Our results show that female politicians seem to be \"losing\" on male stereotypical qualities while also not having any advantage on qualities typical of women. The content of female politician stereotypes is nebulous and lacks clarity in comparison to all other groups examined. We discuss implications for the future measurement of politician stereotypes.