Why do so many social innovations fail to have a broad impact? Successful social entrepreneurs and nonprofit organizations often “scale out” innovative solutions to local problems in order to affect more communities or numbers of individuals. When faced with institutional barriers, they are motivated to “scale up” their efforts to challenge the broader institutional rules that created the problem. In doing so, they must reorient their own and their organizations’ strategies, becoming institutional entrepreneurs in the process. This article proposes a contextual model of pathways for system change consisting of five different configurations of key variables and informed by qualitative interview data from selected nonprofit organizations. The authors argue that the journey from social to institutional entrepreneurship takes different configurations depending on the initial conditions of the innovative initiatives. Despite an expressed desire to engage in system change, efforts are often handicapped by the variables encountered during implementation.
In the present study, the authors examined 53 female athletes drawn from 4 different sports and 55 female nonathletes. The athletes were divided into 2 groups: speed focused and technique focused. The nonathlete control group consisted of college women who had not participated in any varsity sports at the university level. Participants were measured on scales of body dissatisfaction, preoccupation with weight, and self-perceptions of body type and weight. Analyses revealed that (a) speed-focused athletes and technique-focused athletes did not differ significantly in their concerns about weight and body image, and (b) nonathletes expressed more dissatisfaction with their bodies than both of the athlete groups. Results are discussed with regard to associations between female sports participation and body image.
Abstract-This paper presents a study on human performance in recognizing affective expressions conveyed through movements of hand-like structures. One movement sequence, closing and opening the hand, was performed by a demonstrator in 3 sets of 5 repeated trials, each set intending to convey a different affective expression. Three different expressions, sadness, happiness and anger, were considered. Expressive movement animations were replicated with a human-like hand model, a stick hand model and with a model resembling a palm frond structure. The structures tested have identical kinematics but different physical appearance. The ability of a human to correctly identify the intended expressive movements performed on these different structures was tested with 66 users viewing videos of the animated structures and reporting via an online questionnaire. Results show that anger is reliably perceived by observers from animated movements on different structures, while the other emotions are easily misperceived. The physical appearance of the structure has some impact on perception performance, but was not found to be statistically significant in this study. Furthermore, analyzing the participants' responses in the context of the valence-arousal model of emotion shows that the subjects were able to recognize the arousal component of the affective hand movements across all structures.
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