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The "new materialism" and "new empiricism" have recently emerged as an important movement in qualitative inquiry. In discussions of the new materialism and new empiricism in the qualitative literature, Deleuze's work is regularly presented alongside that of theorists who are directly associated with the movement. I focus on the work of Barad, who is arguably the most prominent figure in the new materialism, and examine the extent to which her philosophy is compatible with that of Deleuze. I show that their ontologies differ fundamentally and are therefore incommensurable: Deleuze's is a philosophy of immanence and difference, whereas Barad's is a philosophy of transcendence and identity. Both theorists also use some of the same terms, but the meaning that they assign to each of these terms differs fundamentally. Deleuze's immanence-based conception of matter is incommensurable with Barad's transcendence-based conception of matter. Their ontologies/philosophies also have distinctly different implications for qualitative inquiry.

The literature indicates that small and medium scale firms are quite different with respect to their utilization of business practices. Thus, the study endeavours to address the relationships between the market and entrepreneurial orientation, and organizational performance. The study derived two hypotheses in relation to the relationship between market orientation and entrepreneurial orientation, and organisational performance in the attempt to examine how both the orientations contribute to the organizational performance of small and medium entrepreneurs in garment industry at Southern province, Sri Lanka. The sample of the study consisted of 175 respondents representing small and medium scale entrepreneurs in the Southern Province Sri Lanka. A structured questionnaire was administered to the sample respondents to collect data. The data were analyzed with Partial Least Squares path modeling (PLS) to test the hypotheses of the study. The results indicated that the hypotheses were statistically significant and all effects were in the expected direction.

Since the 1992 cod fishing moratorium, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador has redefined social-environmental relationships with coastal landscapes in pursuit of tourism development. We explore how coastal landscapes are defi ned for tourists through traditional and digital media produced by Newfoundland-based tourism operators and the provincial government. We examine how these discourses are then translated by "outsider" mass media in Canada, the US, and the UK, thereby connecting local environments to global flows of tourism. To understand this process of translation and circulation we analyze television ads, websites, and newspaper articles. Additional insight is provided through interviews with tourism operators and promoters about their media work. Drawing on a co-constructionist approach and tourism mobilities literature, we argue that the post-moratorium shift toward tourism has resulted in the packaging and insertion of Newfoundland landscapes into global tourist/travel discourses in multiple ways that depend on medium of circulation and target audience.

This article explores the epistemological roots and paradigmatic boundaries of research into employee trust, a growing field in human resource management. Drawing on Burrell and Morgan's well‐known sociological paradigms and their epistemological foundations, we identify the dominant approaches to employee trust research to examine its strengths and limitations. Our review of the literature on employee trust revealed that the majority of the most cited papers were written from a psychological perspective, characterised by positivistic methodologies, variance theory explanations and quantitative data collection methods. We also found that most of the studies can be located in the functionalist paradigm, and while accepting that functionalism and psychological positivism have their merits, we argue that research in these traditions sometimes constrains our understanding of employee trust in their organisations. We conclude that trust researchers would benefit from a better understanding of the ontological, epistemological and axiological assumptions underlying of HRM research and should embrace greater epistemic reflexivity.

Presidents increasingly engage in public diplomacy, especially traveling to other nations. Often presidents target the public in the visited nation, with the aim of improving the opinion climate there and then using that improved opinion climate to further U.S. policy goals in the visited nation. To a degree, then, foreign travel resembles presidential domestic going public. This article tests one important linkage in the process from a presidential trip to foreign public opinion, whether trips can focus public opinion in the visited nation on the president. Analysis uses a pooled cross‐sectional time series analysis of weekly Google Trends data for forty‐two nations during Barack Obama's first term in office. Results suggest that presidential trips lead to impressive increases in searches on the president, an indication of increased attention to the president. The conclusion places the findings into two literatures, presidential going public and public diplomacy, and suggests directions for future research.

AbstractSome literature depicts refugees as more passive than active when selecting a destination country. We draw on surveys of over 35,000 people in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Australia, to show that most potential asylum seekers and refugees of Hazara, Rohingya, Muslim and Tamil backgrounds prefer some destination countries over others and that many refugees from these groups surveyed in Australia specifically had Australia in mind as a destination country. We show how Australia's asylum seeker policy was a key reason why many refugees chose Australia in 2011 and 2012 and that subsequent restrictive asylum seeker policy changes appear to be reflected in potential asylum seeker considerations in 2014. We find that despite the restrictive asylum seeker policy changes, perceptions of Australia as a highly functioning civil society, relative to other potential destination countries, may explain why Australia remains a country of choice for asylum seekers from west and south Asia.

This paper presents a preparation strategy for ethnographic field stays that seeks to speed up the process of gaining social access (after physical access) to the participants in the field by a thematic preparation for the stay. We build on our experiences of an ethnographic inquiry as well as on autopoietic systems theory by Niklas Luhmann. We shall argue that so far, little attention has been given to possibilities of preparation of topics of communication with field participants in the foregoing of a stay. However, the existing methodological literature in this respect so far focuses mainly on the preparation of professional topics for communication. We want to add to these strategies and propose to gain knowledge about possibly acceptable topics for sociable communication in the field by conducting ex ante interviews with existing gatekeepers. Researchers can therefore prepare those topics to quickly gain social access in the field. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Complementing the research on immigrants' exclusion from most U.S. service institutions as well as their "bureaucratic incorporation," this study examines how and why immigrants' negotiations with informal barriers vary across institutional contexts. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews, I compare low-income, monolingual Mexican immigrant mothers' caretaking experiences across two settings: at schools and in health care facilities. My analysis suggests that different institutional settings place different demands for cultural capital on these women while offering varying opportunities for their usage of "motherhood capital," resulting in diverse patterns of institutional negotiations. These mothers' interactions with school personnel feature the experiences of "emergent alliance." When advocating for their children at healthcare facilities, they report a mixture of "successful confrontations" and "blocked negotiations." These findings contribute to discussions of immigrant inclusion/exclusion. More broadly speaking, by developing the concept of motherhood capital, the study dialogues with the literatures on cultural capital and political mothering.

AbstractRecent developments in EU (European Union) support literature confirm that citizen attitudes towards the EU are shaped by both input‐oriented factors relating to the procedural fairness of the system (e.g. political representation and identity) and output‐oriented factors based on the EU's capacity to yield economic benefits. This article builds on these models by suggesting a theoretical framework of support that is driven by both perceptions of the economy and political efficacy. Using data from the 2013 Eurobarometer 80.1, I find that political efficacy is a key predictor of public opinion towards the EU and that citizens who feel their voice is represented in the EU are more likely to maintain support for the EU even when their perceptions of the economy are poor. The findings in this article have particular significance to the puzzle of declining support for the EU following the onset of the 'great recession' in 2008.

This paper focuses on competing explanations of childbearing behaviour among Jews in Israel. Despite evidence of the second demographic transition in Israel, total fertility has not declined during the last three decades, unlike in most western high-income democracies. Two alternative explanations in the literature address this phenomenon. One is religiosity and the other is a nationalist sentiment at the aggregate level – both driving the high fertility rates. Using structural equation modelling, the current study tests the association of each of these two factors with fertility. Religiosity and nationalism were constructed as latent variables based on individual-level observed measures. Supporting previous studies at the aggregate level, the current analysis confirms that religiosity is the main determinant of fertility at the individual level, whereas nationalism has an effect on fertility only due to its high connection with religiosity. Parsimonious and comprehensive models of Jewish fertility in Israel and further research directions are suggested.

AbstractDespite the large number of migrants at both international and internal scales in developing countries, literature on building the links between the two migration processes is still lacking. Using survey data from China's Fujian Province, we elaborate a novel link between international and internal migration processes by examining the response of internal migration to international migration in the migrant origins. Our findings suggest that emigration of one individual initially deterred the internal migration of other family members. Yet, over time individuals from emigrant‐related households had an increasing propensity to migrate internally. During the internal migration process, emigrants' family members received greater financial returns and had reached farther destinations than other internal migrants. Those emigrant‐related internal migrants with enhanced economic profiles would benefit their domestic destinations in a variety of ways. These benefits support a more optimistic view on the impact of international migration on the development of migrant‐sending countries.

The challenges of engaging social work students in the research curriculum are well-documented, and the literature supports the use of service learning to increase engagement. This study explores self-efficacy as one measure of learning outcomes. Changes in students' (N=88) assessment of their ability to perform research and program evaluation tasks skillfully were measured by administering the Evaluation Self-Efficacy Scale (ESE) on the first and last days of a graduate-level advanced research class that included a service learning project. ESE scores on the last day of class were significantly higher than on the first day of class. The effect size was larger than in prior similar studies, suggesting that service learning contributed to students' sense of mastery of course content. These results support the use of an engaged-learning model such as a service learning project in advanced social work research courses to improve students' evaluation self-efficacy.

AbstractThe establishment of autonomous agencies has been a strong trend in the public sector across countries for about 25 years. In line with the official rhetoric accompanying such reforms, almost all reform evaluations have focused on various kinds of performance improvements. This article investigates a set of behavioural consequences of such reforms, which have been claimed by the blame avoidance literature, but have never been subjected to systematic empirical analysis. In particular, the article examines how a reform of agencification influences the propensity of agency managers to blame the political principals when the agency is subject to public criticism. Furthermore, it examines how the reform influences the blaming rhetoric of ministers and MPs. To evaluate such reform effects systematically, the article introduces a new empirical approach and illustrates the utility of the approach in a case study of the transformation of the national Danish railway company from 1995 to 2007.