Short-Term Effects of Social Exclusion at work and Worries on Sleep

The present study investigated short-term effects of daily social exclusion at work on various indicators of sleep quality and tested the mediating role of work-related worries using a time-based diary study with ambulatory assessments of sleep quality. Ninety full-time employees participated in a 2-week data collection. Multilevel analyses revealed that daily workplace social exclusion and work-related worries were positively related to sleep fragmentation in the following night. Daily social exclusion, however, was unrelated to sleep onset latency, sleep efficiency and self-reported sleep quality. Moreover, worries did not mediate the effect of social exclusion at work on sleep fragmentation. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

Immigrant Incorporation in Western Europe

Immigrant incorporation (or integration) is a subfield of migration studies, and it constitutes a genuinely interdisciplinary undertaking of sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, and historians. In none of these disciplines, however, has it carved out an established niche for itself. In contrast to the United States, where the study of immigrant integration (or “assimilation” as US researchers prefer to say) is more firmly grounded in sociology than in political science, a characteristic of the European scene is a larger prominence of political scientists, macro comparativists, and legal-institutional scholars. This reflects the fact that immigrant integration in Europe is, to a much larger degree than in the United States, framed by public policies, and it often goes along with major transformations of state institutions (most importantly citizenship) and national identities. European states (even France) are ethnic nation-states, where sedentariness and not moving is the norm, and they stand for countries that are much less attuned to, and constituted by, international migration than the classic immigrant nations of North America and Oceania. Overall, European scholarship is marked, on one side, by single-country studies by national experts, which are often solicited by their respective governments interested in policy advice (but increasingly also supported by supranational research bodies). On the other side, most agenda-setting work has grown out of qualitative single-person studies (often dissertations) by macro sociologists and political comparativists not (or only incidentally) rooted in national university systems and disconnected from policy contexts. The field is in need of further conceptual development and of theoretically reflected, genuinely comparative work of the second type, which is mostly off the public funding radar.

Consumer Behavior in Moral Markets. On the Relevance of Identity, Justice Beliefs, Social Norms, Status and Trust in Ethical Consumption

This article addresses ethical consumer behavior and uses the purchase of Fair Trade (FT) coffee to gain insights into determinants of ‘moral behavior’ in the marketplace. Our primary concern is to clarify which theoretical concepts and determinants are more useful than others in explaining FT consumption. We compare the explanatory power of consumer budget restrictions, consumer identity, social and personal norms, social status, justice beliefs, and trust. Our second aim is methodological; we contrast data on self-reported consumption of FT coffee with experimental data on hypothetical choices of different coffee products. To gain insights into the robustness of our measurement and findings, we test our propositions using two samples of undergraduate students from Germany and the United States. Our data show that consumer identity and personal norms are the major determinants of FT consumption in both samples, the results from survey-based data and from our experimental data are similar in this regard. Further, we demonstrate that studies based on a limited number of determinants might overestimate effects; the effect of justice beliefs for instance vanishes if other determinants are taken into account.