Unpacking Commitment

Commitment is one of the most researched concepts in organizational behavior. This edited book in the SIOP Organizational Frontiers series, with contributions from many scholars, attempts to summarize current research and suggests new directions for studies on commitment in organizations. Commitment is linked to other concepts ie. satisfaction, involvement, motivation, and identification and is studied across cultural lines. Both the individual and group levels of building and maintaining commitment are discussed.

Helps readers move beyond the wounds and baggage of bitterness, disagreements, and broken relationships. "True or false: most Christian pastors and counselors agree on what forgiveness is and how it should take place." This question is part of Chris Brauns's Forgiveness Quiz that draws readers into his book and gets them thinking about the subject of forgiveness. The truth is, pastors and counselors disagree profoundly on this subject. Unpacking Forgiveness combines sound theological thinking and honesty about the complicated questions many face to provide readers with a solid understanding of biblical forgiveness. Only God's Word can unpack forgiveness. The wounds are too deep for us to find healing on our own, and the questions are too complex to be unraveled by anything but the wisdom of God. This book goes beyond a feel-good doctrine of automatic forgiveness, balancing the beauty of God's grace and the necessity of forgiveness with the teaching that forgiveness must take place in a way that is consistent with justice.

From Aristotle to contemporary soap operas, friendship has always been a subject of fascination. But scholarly investigation of the broad social relevance of friendship has been neglected. Rethinking Friendship describes the varied nature of personal relationships today, and also locates friendship in contemporary debates about individualization and the supposed "collapse of community." Exploring friendships with partners and family as well as "friends," the book reveals ways in which friends and friendlike ties are an important and unacknowledged source of social glue. Using a rigorous analysis of in-depth interviews, the authors develop a set of innovative concepts--friendship repertoires (the range of friendships people have); friendship modes (the way people make and maintain friendships over time); and patterns of suffusion (the extent to which boundaries between friends and family become blurred). These concepts form the basis of a typology of personal communities that vary in the roles played by friends, family, partners, and neighbors. Combining scholarly depth and rich description, this absorbing and accessible book will appeal to all those interested in informal social relationships, including students of methodology and policymakers. With its challenge to pessimistic commentators, Rethinking Friendship urges us to resist sweeping generalizations and to acknowledge the sheer diversity of social life today.

Identity is defined in many different ways in various disciplines in the social sciences and sub-disciplines within psychology. The developmental psychological approach to identity is characterized by a focus on developing a sense of the self that is temporally continuous and unified across the different life spaces that individuals inhabit. Erikson proposed that the task of adolescence and young adulthood was to define the self by answering the question: Who Am I? There have been many advances in theory and research on identity development since Erikson's writing over fifty years ago, and the time has come to consolidate our knowledge and set an agenda for future research. The Oxford Handbook of Identity Development represents a turning point in the field of identity development research. Various, and disparate, groups of researchers are brought together to debate, extend, and apply Erikson's theory to contemporary problems and empirical issues. The result is a comprehensive and state-of-the-art examination of identity development that pushes the field in provocative new directions. Scholars of identity development, adolescent and adult development, and related fields, as well as graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and practitioners will find this to be an innovative, unique, and exciting look at identity development.

Examine the structure and context of identity development in a number of different countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Italy, China, and Japan. While some identity development proceeds in much the same way across national contexts, this issue suggests that there are important nuances in the ways in which identity unfolds in each country. Macrocultural forces, such as permissiveness in Sweden, collective guilt in Germany, and filial piety in China, direct the identity development process in important ways. Expectations regarding obligations and ties to family also direct the identity development process differently in many of the countries included in this volume—such as extended co-residence with parents in Italy, lifelong obligations to follow parents' wishes in China, and democratic independence in Sweden. The various countries are compared and contrasted against the United States, where much of the early identity research was conducted. The volume also reviews specific identity challenges facing immigrant and ethnic-minority individuals in countries that receive large numbers of immigrants—Germany, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy—and suggests many future directions for identity research in various parts of the world. This is the 138th volume in this series. Its mission is to provide scientific and scholarly presentations on cutting edge issues and concepts in child and adolescent development. Each volume focuses on a specific new direction or research topic and is edited by experts on that topic.

This milestone handbook brings together an impressive collection of international contributions on micro research in organizational behavior. Focusing on core micro organizational behaviour issues, chapters cover key themes such as individual and group behaviour. The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Behavior Volume One provides students and scholars with an insightful and wide reaching survey of the current state of the field and is an indespensible road map to the subject area. The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Behavior Volume Two edited by Stewart R Clegg and Cary L Cooper draws together contributions from leading macro organizational behaviour scholars.

While 'identity' is a key concept in psychology and the social sciences, researchers have used and understood this concept in diverse and often contradictory ways. The Cambridge Handbook of Identity presents the lively, multidisciplinary field of identity research as working around three central themes: (i) difference and sameness between people; (ii) people's agency in the world; and (iii) how identities can change or remain stable over time. The chapters in this collection explore approaches behind these themes, followed by a close look at their methodological implications, while examples from a number of applied domains demonstrate how identity research follows concrete analytical procedures. Featuring an international team of contributors who enrich psychological research with historical, cultural, and political perspectives, the handbook also explores contemporary issues of identity politics, diversity, intersectionality, and inclusion. It is an essential resource for all scholars and students working on identity theory and research.

This book is the vulnerable story of one woman's journey past marital expectations and toward godly truths. It uncovers her baggage of mind and heart as a young teen, new wife, and present day mother. Along her wedded road, she not only learns what it means to be committed to a man, but also discovers the reward of settling down and centering in on the lover of her soul.

The major challenges facing higher education are often framed in terms of preparing students for life-long learning. Society's 21st century needs require civic-minded individuals who have the intellectual and personal capabilities to constructively engage political, ethnic, and religious differences, work effectively, and live together with many different kinds of people in a more global society. In this volume, Robert J. Thompson aims to influence the current conversation about the purposes and practices of higher education. Beyond Reason and Tolerance adopts a developmental science basis to inform the transformations in undergraduate educational practices that are necessary to empower students to act globally and constructively engage difference. It synthesizes current scholarship regarding the nature and development of three core capacities deemed essential: A personal epistemology that reflects a sophisticated understanding of knowledge, beliefs, and ways of thinking; empathy and the capacity to understand the mental states of others; and an integrated identity that includes values, commitments, and a sense of agency for civic and social responsibility. Beyond Reason and Tolerance argues that to foster the development of these capabilities, colleges and universities must recommit to providing a formative liberal education and adopt a developmental model of undergraduate education as a process of intellectual and personal growth, involving empathy as well as reasoning, values as well as knowledge, and identity as well as competencies. Thompson focuses on emerging adulthood as an especially dynamic time of reorganization and development of the brain that both influences, and is influenced by, the undergraduate experience. Advances in our understanding of human development and learning are synthesized with regard to the direct implications for undergraduate education practices.

The concept of the Self has a long history that dates back from the ancient Greeks such as Aristotle to more contemporary thinkers such as Wundt, James, Mead, Cooley, Freud, Rogers, and Erikson (Tesser & Felson, 2000). Research on the Self relates to a range of phenomena including self-esteem, self-concept, self-protection, self-verification, self-awareness, identity, self-efficacy, self-determination etc. that could be sharply different or very similar. Despite this long tradition of thinkers and the numerous studies conducted on the Self, this concept is still not very well defined. More precisely, it is not a precise object of study, but rather a collection of loosely related subtopics (Baumesiter, 1998). Also, in the philosophical literature, the legitimacy of the concept of “self” has been brought into question. Some authors have argued that the self is not a psychological entity per se, but rather an illusion created by the complex interplay between cognitive and neurological subsystems (Zahavi, 2005). Although no definitive consensus has been reached regarding the Self, we emphasis in this volume that the Self and its related phenomena including self-concept, motivation, and identity are crucial for understanding consciousness and therefore important to understand human behavior. Self-concept, motivation and identity: Underpinning success with research and practice provides thus a unique insight into self-concept and its relationship to motivation and identity from varied theoretical and empirical perspectives. This volume is intended to develop both theoretical and methodological ideas and to present empirical evidence demonstrating the importance of theory and research to effective practice.