The nature of job termination and causal attribution for termination were examined for their association with psychological distress among a sample of working-class men in San Antonio, Texas who had recently become unemployed. Laid-off workers were found to experience significantly lower levels of distress than fired workers, largely because the former overwhelmingly defined job loss as a function of the economy. The fired typically attributed job loss to unfair treatment by employers, and they, like the laid off who made similar attributions, indicated significant distress. Psychological reactivity was by far the highest among fired and laid-off workers who reported having been unjustly terminated because of personal shortcomings or deficiencies. Contrary to conventional thought, job loss self-blame was not found to be associated with high levels of distress.
As termination has become common among high-status workers, an industry has evolved that purports to assist in their reemployment. Advocates of outplacement have emphasized to employers, however, that the industry's service primarily functions as a self-protective device, minimizing the problematic reactions of job losers and bystanders. The particular strategy articulated by advocates for orchestrating the emotions, energies, and goals of terminated workers is described, and is interpreted as being analogous to that used by confidence game operators in "cooling-out" those they defraud.
Given the massive volume of course-relevant videos now available on the Internet, this article outlines a pedagogy to facilitate the instructional employment of such materials. First, we describe special features of streaming media that have enabled their use in the classroom. Next, we introduce a typology comprised of six categories (conjuncture, testimony, infographic, pop fiction, propaganda, and détournement). We define properties of each video type and the strengths of each type in meeting specific learning goals common to sociology instruction. We conclude by discussing the importance of a video pedagogy for helping instructors to employ video more consciously and efficiently.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.