Current Research at WSU Vancouver
Employee Fighting - Why Does It Happen and How can Managers Control It?
Most businesses wish their employees all got along with each other, but that usually is not the case. Rather, conflict seems to be an unavoidable fact of organizational life. Must it be this way? No. Much of the personal, emotional, gut-wrenching conflict can be avoided. And the more cerebral conflict - conflict that arises from different perspectives and different interests - can be resolved to most parties' satisfaction, if they know how. Unfortunately, too may business people don't know how.
Dr. Tom Tripp, Professor of Management and Operations, is doing something about it. Tom studies conflict in organizations. He and his colleagues have surveyed and interviewed over a thousand working employees and managers about their conflicts at work. In particular, he has investigated the varied ways in which ordinary employees get even with each other, the perceived injustices that push them to get even, and the psychology of their emotions, perceptions and judgments that make these employees feel like seeking revenge is the morally right thing to do. He has found that workplace revenge (not workplace violence) is caused, not so much by the personality traits of the employees-cum-avengers, but is caused more by the managerial practices of the organization.
Tom takes what he and his colleagues learn about conflict, and immediately brings it to future organizational leaders. In Tom's Leadership Skills course, he teaches students how to treat employees fairly so as not to provoke conflict. In his Negotiations Skills course, Tom teaches students how to create satisfactory resolutions to conflict that erupts anyway.
Representations of Gender and Sexuality
Concepts of gender and sexuality are tightly intertwined to determine the construction of identity in most cultures. Biological sex is far less important to people's development of a sense of self than the way their society and culture believe they should enact gender and express sexuality in accordance with the maleness or femaleness they were assigned at birth. Although many people believe that norms for gender and sexual identities remain the same throughout time and across the globe, they actually differ greatly from one cultural group or time period to another. Judgments by others that their performance of gender roles or expressions of sexuality are wrong cause tremendous suffering for large numbers of people. And despite the belief of some that to tolerate differences would mean the end of social stability and cultural coherence, diversity in expressions of gender and sexually can be proven to have a beneficial effect on everyday life for the majority. Professor Carol Siegel has devoted twenty-odd years of her academic life to studying and writing about representations of gender and sexuality in literature, visual media, and music in order to help foster understanding of how these important aspects of identity construction play out in various times and places, cultures and subcultures. As the co-editor of two online interdisciplinary critical journals, Rhizomes and Genders, Siegel tries to advance understanding of how specific cultures and societies represent norms and deviations from them. In all this work, her goal is to increase tolerance of differences between people through increasing knowledge.
In her first book, Lawrence Among the Women, Wavering Boundaries in Women's Literary Traditions (1991), Siegel explains why D. H. Lawrence, a writer hated by the vast majority of feminist critics, should really be considered an important contributor to the development of British and American women's literature. The book challenges popular notions of how feminists in the past viewed their movement and how women writers understood their position in society. Her next book, Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the Story of Love (1995), explores how attitudes and behaviors once valorized in men as pure expressions of romantic love are now denigrated as masochism in literature, film, and popular media, due to the popularization of specific psychoanalytic theories. Taking a slightly different direction, her next book, New Millennial Sexstyles (2000), combines an ethnographic approach with close study of rock and roll cultures to look at end of the twentieth-century changes in cultural concepts of gender identity and sexuality, and their impact on the feminist movement. The Columbine school massacre and the response to it in the press and by law enforcement agencies pushed Siegel's research deeper into examination of popular culture and subcultural self-representations, resulting in her 2005 book, Goth's Dark Empire, in which she attempts to set the record straight about Goths, who she knows as predominately gentle people. Currently, Siegel's work concentrates on film representations of gender and sexual expression, contrasting those that advance a liberal political agenda with those that advocate radical change.
Examining Gender Equality in the Workplace
John Becker-Blease is an assistant professor of finance who studies gender equality in business. His research examines women’s experience at both large public firms and small private entrepreneurial ventures. In particular, Becker-Blease examines the extent to which successful businesswomen face discrimination.
One line of his research examines turnover among women executives at 1,500 major U.S. firms. Although there are many similarities between successful men and women executives, he finds that women executives are more likely to leave their positions both voluntarily and involuntarily compared to men. This pattern is more pronounced the higher is the proportion of male directors at the firm.
Becker-Blease is also interested in women’s access to early-stage funding for entrepreneurial ventures through venture capital markets. He notes that although women entrepreneurs are currently launching businesses at a higher rate than are men, there are relatively few who start high-tech ventures. His research investigates whether the scarcity of women in this area is due to structural barriers or choice.
This research is not just of academic interest. There are important legal and public policy implications of inequitable treatment of women in business. Professor Becker-Blease’s research has garnered both local and national attention, appearing in U.S. News & World Report and BusinessWeek among other online and print publications.
Investigating the History of Race and Slavery in the French Atlantic
Most Americans use categories of race casually: a person is "black" or "white," "Asian" or "Indian." History teaches us that racial categories are fluid, changing according to time and place, and political, invested with relations of power. Dr. Peabody's research shows us how French racial attitudes are both similar to and different from Americans', reflecting the specific social relations of a given context.
Two famous lawsuits in English and American history tested the idea of the
Free Soil principle, the idea that crossing national boundaries made slaves
free: the abolitionists' Somerset case (1772) and the Dred Scott case
(1857). Peabody's research uncovers the long forgotten antecedents and
ramifications of the Free Soil principle, from medieval cities like
Toulouse, to France's second general emancipation of slaves in 1848. She
shows how slaves migrating from state to state participated in creating new
notions of citizenship and race in the Age of Revolution, national
independence and the antislavery movement.
Sue Peabody has published three books, many articles and given dozens of lectures, including those at Harvard, Stanford, Yale and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris, France) and the Université Cheikh Ante Diop (Dakar, Senegal). She is (soon to be) past president of the French Colonial Historical Society (www.frenchcolonial.org).
Helping Children with Special Healthcare Needs and their Families
The struggle to walk, the struggle to breathe, and the struggle to meet basic needs may leave little energy for just being kids. Experiences of children with a variety of physical and development challenges and the families of those children is the research focus for Linda Eddy, assistant professor in the College of Nursing. Eddy’s current work focuses on developing items and scales that measure pain and fatigue in children with physical disabilities and examining family effects of caring for a child with special needs. Through an NIH-supported administrative supplement grant, Eddy joined a team of interdisciplinary researchers at the University of Washington Center for Outcomes Research in Rehabilitation (UWCORR).
Through UWCORR, Eddy is helping to lead a study entitled “Pain and Fatigue in Children with Disabilities” that aims to provide clinical researchers with better tools or methods to measure patient-reported outcomes in children with chronic disease and disability by using modern measurement theory and other sophisticated approaches to improve instruments and approaches used to measure pain and fatigue, and by increasing scientific understanding of associations between pain and fatigue, and their impact on important outcome variables. To date, Eddy and graduate research assistant, Maria Cruz have published a systematic review of the relationship between pain and fatigue in children with special needs, and Eddy and a UWCORR colleague published a study examining the impact of specific child disability types on family functioning. This review and psychometric work is preparatory to developing interventions designed to help alleviate pain and fatigue in this population and to ease the caregiving burden of their parents.
Working to Reduce Pain
Morphine and other opiates have been used to treat pain for thousands of years. Although opiates are the most effective treatment for pain, unpleasant side effects and the development of tolerance limit their use. Given that tolerance requires an increase in dose to maintain an effect, manipulations that limit tolerance will allow effective treatment with low doses and minimal side effects. Although the mechanism for tolerance to opiates is unknown, Dr. Michael Morgan’s research has revealed the brain structures and neurons that contribute to morphine tolerance.
Morphine produces analgesia by acting at multiple sites in the brain and spinal cord. Research with rats has shown that direct administration of small amounts of morphine to brain structures such as the periaqueductal gray or nucleus raphe magnus can inhibit pain throughout the body. Dr. Morgan has shown that tolerance to this analgesia occurs with as few as four injections into the periaqueductal gray (Figure 1), but not with injections into the nucleus raphe magnus. Moreover, the change underlying tolerance in the periaqueductal gray appears to be within neurons containing the neurotransmitter GABA. Current research is examining specific signaling mechanisms within these GABAergic neurons to determine the molecular change that leads to tolerance. If this stage of the research is successful, the development of treatments to reduce or eliminate tolerance could improve the treatment of pain by limiting the escalation of opiate dose to get adequate pain relief.
This research is done in close collaboration with Dr. Susan Ingram at WSU Vancouver and an excellent group of students and research assistants (see photo). Funding for this work is provided by grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the State of Washington Initiative Measure No. 171.
The Hutterites: Studying Social Change in Tightly Controlled Environments
Dr. Suzanne Smith, Associate Professor of Human Development, answers the following questions about her research:
What are the most important and compelling aspects of your research?
The Hutterites live life as most American's did during agricultural
times so they provide an opportunity to study the effects of social
change on a highly controlled environment. For example, they are curious
about what happens on the "outside" and ask questions about current
child rearing and teaching techniques. I have noticed some small changes
on colonies in these areas based on more current practices such as a
decreased used of spanking.
The most compelling aspect of my research is living among a group of people who place God and community above family and self. They are very giving people and truly put the needs of the colony above those of themselves, all in the name of what God would want.
How will any current projects (or past ones) advance your field?
Advancements include methodological strategies for a population that is
adverse to being studied, as well as a living model of the concept that"it takes a village to raise a child." On a colony children help take
care of other children, and it's not unusual to have someone who is not
that child's parent disciplining or taking care of the child. The
utility of social support is also shown.
What is the broader significance of the work?
There are only a few people in the world who are allowed to study the
Hutterites who are "outsiders" so it provides a glimpse of society close
to most people, but relatively unknown to them.
For more information on research in WSU Vancouver's Academic Units, please see the following links:
- Business
- Education
- Engineering & Computer Science
- Human Development
- Liberal Arts
- Social Science
- Sociology
- Nursing
- Science
To find a faculty member conducting research in a particular subject, refer to the WSU Vancouver Faculty Experts Guide.