This longitudinal field study uncovers the emotional meaning that defines personal Web usage (PWU) at work. To explore this emergent workplace phenomenon, the author conducted 67 semistructured interviews and collected archival documents at a local government municipality in the United States. After a phenomenological analysis of the informants' emotion-laden narratives, the findings suggest that users defined their PWU as a guilty pleasure. For some informants, this type of emotional ambivalence was resolved and manifested into continued PWU devoid of guilt. For others, however, they continued to define their PWU behaviors as a push-and-pull battle between self-control and short-term benefit. Nevertheless, PWU persisted. Based on the themes analyzed in the data, two models are presented that depict the characteristics of the ambivalence and the overarching emotion-behavior process, respectively. The author concludes by discussing the contributions to existing research and directions for further inquiry.

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Many instructors use experiential learning techniques to link students’ academic experience with the reality that awaits them professionally. Careful planning and reflecting on experiential activities usually take place prior to implementation to ensure that prescribed student learning outcomes are met. Hence, management educators’ confidence soars when outcomes meet or exceed their expectations, and there is the intrinsic reward of seeing students succeed. Subsequently, effective application of activities can lead to overconfidence in implementing routine as well as new activities. What happens, however, when an activity goes awry? Can it be salvaged? In this article, we explore overconfidence as the shadow that can disrupt a faculty’s well-meaning activity, leading to something unexpected with unintended learning consequences for the instructor and students. Then, we analyze several of our activities gone awry as a result of overconfidence. Finally, we suggest humility as a spotlight that can help us move out of the shadow cast by overconfidence, thus helping faculty deal with the dark side of experiential exercises.

This article features an innovative and engaging assignment to help students learn about labor history events. Labor history is more than just a collection of dates, facts, and figures. Rather, it is the study of the men, women, and children who fought for a workplace that many of today’s employees take for granted: paid leave, a 5-day workweek, potential legal representation of a union, and pensions. By imagining the key stakeholders with access to social media during the time of their chosen historical event, students develop a deeper understanding of the event’s impact and relationship to current practices. Educators seeking an alternate way of tasking students to examine stakeholder theory may also find this assignment useful. We leverage social media to counter the perception among some management students that history is boring with little to no connection to their lives.