Although research has emphasized the organizational and individual factors that influence employee voice and silence at work, it is less known how employee voice/silence is affected by the economic ...context, particularly when this context is one of intensive and long-term economic crisis in a country with weak institutional bases. In this study, we explore how employee silence is formulated in long-term turbulent economic environments and in more vulnerable organizational settings like those of small enterprises. The study draws on qualitative data gathered from 63 interviews with employees in a total of 48 small enterprises in Greece in two periods of time (2009 and 2015). This study suggests a new type of employee silence, social empathy silence, and offers a conceptual framework for understanding the development of silence over time in particular contexts of long-term turbulence and crisis.
Many journalists and other observers remember the 1960s as a watershed moment in American journalism. Do they remember correctly? This essay reviews relevant empirical studies on how US newspapers ...have changed since the 1950s. There is strong existing evidence that journalists have come to present themselves as more aggressive, that news stories have grown longer, and that journalists are less willing to have politicians and other government officials frame stories and more likely to advance analysis and context on their own. Based on content analysis of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, this study finds that the growth in ‘contextual reporting’ has been enormous – from under 10 percent in all three newspapers in 1955 to about 40 percent in 2003; ‘conventional’ news stories on the front page declined from 80–90 percent in all three papers to about 50 percent in all three papers in the same period. What this study calls ‘contextual reporting’ has not been widely recognized (unlike, say, investigative reporting) as a distinctive news genre or news style and this article urges that it receive more attention.
Narratives about STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education are strongly connected with conversations about developing learners' humanistic knowledge and their ability to ...listen with understanding and empathy. This is challenging because learners need to find resonance through first-hand contextual experiences with the issues at hand. In this paper, we describe and discuss an activity that was enacted to actively engage 74 teachers from Thailand in constructing a prototype cutting device for the blind to prepare food themselves. This activity underscores important considerations for inclusive design and offers affordances for teachers to develop their learners' inclusive mindsets. Findings were generated from voice recordings of reflections and written reflections collected after the activity. We highlight the importance of creating opportunities for learning to listen and resonate with others' experiences and argue that such STEM activities can offer a platform for learners to develop humanistic qualities such as social empathy.
Although COVID-19 pandemic has re-orientated humans to be more physically healthy and hygienic, it has also persuaded humans to create affiliations and experience a sense of belongingness through ...social networks and digital technologies. However, amidst these changes, experiences of COVID-19 patients and their perception of the outside world's attitudes toward them appears to be less attended in literature which formed the basis for the current study's objectives. Using qualitative methodology, the present study explored the experiences, perceptions and attitudes of patients and their care-givers' toward COVID-19. The thematic analysis emerged with four major themes. Psychological Experiences of People was generated prominently with sub-themes indicating the perceived experiences like fear of spreading diseases to others, and the need for psychological counseling. Attitude of others toward patients and caregivers revealed that family members and relatives played a major positive role on the patient's mental health, however, the neighbor's stigmatized attitude led to several undesired behaviors. Social Connectedness was another major theme derived from the study. Altruistic volunteers, a sub-theme of Social connectedness have indicated that amidst these negative factors, one can spread social harmony by motivating and supporting the victims with basic needs, financial support, hope and social empathy. Opinions of participants for digital technology through technological aids and preventive measures emphasized an overall positive attitude as it helped the society, in general to maintain social connections as well to curb the rate of COVID-19 cases.
This study investigated the minority-blaming phenomenon in South Korea during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic amplified fear, discrimination, and structural inequalities among minoritized groups ...during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study identified who was blamed for the spread of COVID-19 and the sociodemographic characteristics associated with this blame. Additionally, it examines the roles of individual and interpersonal fear and social empathy in minority blaming. We measured the fear of COVID-19 at both individual and interpersonal levels. Individual fear was assessed through personal health concerns, while the fear of transmitting the virus to others was measured as interpersonal fear. Social empathy was defined by macro perspective-taking, cognitive empathy, self-other awareness, and affective responses. The study was conducted through an online survey involving a quota sample of 1,500 South Korean participants aged 19–69 years, based on age, gender, and residential area. The response was collected in December 2020, when mass infections in specific communities received attention from mass and social media before the national spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Analytical strategies, including OLS and hierarchical regression models, were employed to examine the roles of socioeconomic factors, individual and interpersonal fear, and social empathy in minority blaming. This study found varying correlations between sociodemographic factors and attitudes toward ethnic, religious, sexual, economic, and age-minority groups. Individual fear of contracting COVID-19 was associated with increased blame across all minority groups. In contrast, interpersonal fear was associated with increased blame only for ethnic and religious minority groups. Similarly, social empathy presented mixed associations, as it displayed a buffering role on blaming ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities when considered alongside interpersonal fear, yet mildly intensified blame for economic and age minorities. These findings provide an understanding on fear-induced minority blaming during the pandemic and the potential role of social empathy in mitigating blame.
•Individual fear increases the blame on all minority groups.•The role of interpersonal fear and social empathy on blame varied across groups.•Social empathy is a potential buffer against minority blaming during a pandemic.•Social empathy may be crucial in counterbalancing fear during public health crises.
Previous studies have found that subjective well-being is associated with social trust, self-compassion, and social empathy. Based on online fieldwork with 662 first-generation college students ...(54.7% male) in China, this study aimed to investigate the serial mediation effects of self-compassion and social empathy on the relationship between social trust and subjective well-being. The results showed that subjective well-being was significantly positively correlated with social trust, trust in people, self-compassion, and social empathy. Both self-compassion and social empathy partially mediated the relationship between social trust and subjective well-being, and fully mediated the association between trust in people and subjective well-being. We used a serial mediation model to estimate the effect of general social trust, including trust in people, on subjective well-being. The findings that self-compassion and social empathy mediated the relationship between trusting attitudes toward society, especially people, and subjective well-being expand the literature on social trust and the mechanism of social trust on subjective well-being. The results also highlight the significance of improving mental health education and intervention among first-generation college students in China.
This article deals with the dynamics of personality changes in people serving a prison sentence whereas these changes are as result of the social work performed in prisons. Analyzed are some ...personality characteristics displayed in the context of emotional intelligence and social empathy in people with delinquent behavior of different age and of different social, educational, psychosomatic and family status.
From parenting to health and wellness, the number of virtual support communities (VSCs) keeps growing. The interactive marketing discipline has primarily documented the positive social dynamics of ...VSCs: communities provide informational and socio-emotional support that helps members achieve their goals. Yet evidence is mounting that VSCs also exhibit judgment and pressure that ultimately hurt community relationships and engagement. We adopted a mixed-methods approach: a qualitative phase, comprised of netnography and interviews, to explore members’ experiences of a VSC and its complex social dynamics, followed by a quantitative phase to test the emerging model with cross-sectional survey data collected from members of a large number of health- and wellness-related VSCs. The two studies provide empirical evidence of many paradoxical social dynamics of VSCs and their relational and engagement consequences. We find that positive group perceptions can generate the social empathy that ensures the group's informational value is helpful to members’ goals; however, we also find that negative group perceptions create social pressure that can be helpful to relational and engagement outcomes if it increases social empathy but can also be detrimental if it turns into angst. Our findings contribute to research on VSCs, inform interactive marketing practices, and suggest further research opportunities on the social dynamics of VSCs.
In this paper, we use the Empathic Policy Framework to explore the concept of vulnerability in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that vulnerability is not a state of being, but rather an ...effect produced by emotional policy discourse. As a result, people are not inherently 'vulnerable', but rather 'vulnerabilized'. We make this claim by exploring the potential of the EPF to illuminate the process of vulnerabilization in the context of migrant agricultural workers in Canada, exposing the emotional policy discourses that constitute vulnerability and enabling policy analysts to engage empathically with policy subjects. We aim to show that, when viewed this way, following philosopher Shelley Tremain, vulnerability is an 'apparatus of power that differentially produces subjects, materially, socially, politically, and relationally'. The EPF can help attune policy analysts to these processes and the effects produced by them.
A model of social empathy is described where social empathy is defined as the ability to more deeply understand people by perceiving or experiencing their life situations and as a result gain insight ...into structural inequalities and disparities. The three components of the model-individual empathy, contextual understanding, and social responsibility-are explored and explained. Social empathy provides a framework for more effective social policies that address disparities and support social and economic justice for all people. Social workers are well positioned to enhance social empathy, and application and suggestions for further enhancement and research are provided.
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