We examine how executives’ ambivalent evaluation of a strategic issue relates to organizational actions taken in response. Ambivalence occurs when a decision maker evaluates an issue as simultaneously positive and negative, a state that has received scant attention in organizational research. We integrate findings in social psychology with the behavioral theory of the firm to suggest how execut...

When I began writing How We Became Posthuman (1999), I was drawn to the topic in part because of the intense ambivalence I felt toward the idea of the posthuman. I thought, no doubt naively, that writing would help me resolve it. Far from overcoming mixed feelings, the writing intensified my emotions by bringing the issues into sharper focus. As David Gary Shaw rightly observes, the book is dre...

What is the proper attitude toward what is expressed by a vague sentence in the face of borderline evidence? Many call this attitude “ambivalence” and distinguish it from uncertainty. It has been argued that Classical Epistemicism and classical probability theory fail to characterize this attitude, and that we must therefore abandon classical logic or classical probabilities in the presence of ...

Guinean hosts viewed Liberian refugees with the same ambivalence and fascination that many held for their own children, who were embracing the consumerist ethos of Guinea’s postsocialist 1990s. Loma-speaking farmers’ categories for evaluating historical change and refugee comportment grew out of metaphors of embodied agency and morality. These categories challenge some aspects of both Guinean e...

People's behaviors are often guided by valenced responses to objects in the environment. Beyond positive and negative evaluations, attitudes research has documented the importance of attitude strength--qualities of an attitude that enhance or attenuate its impact and durability. Although neuroscience research has extensively investigated valence, little work exists on other related variables li...

CONTEXT Although pregnancy ambivalence is consistently associated with poorer contraceptive use, little is known about the sexual, social and emotional dynamics at work in pregnancy ambivalence. METHODS During in-depth sexual and reproductive history interviews conducted in 2003, 36 women and men were asked about the relational and emotional circumstances surrounding each pregnancy, as well a...

It continues to be unclear what opportunities and challenges that lie in the activation encounter as a communicative relational situation. This study assumes ambivalence is present such encounters since common transitions, relationships, organisations. As response limited body of knowledge about situated aspects work, this examines handlings authentic between workers young adults experiencing h...