In ecommerce, many market followers would like to have personalization systems in place to more effectively compete with market leaders. However, retailers face a significant challenge in forming initial trust with new customers, especially when the new customers are culturally diverse. Acknowledging this dilemma, this study examines the moderating cultural effects of espoused individualism/col...

Current work suggests that individualistic values are more likely to be invoked in judgments about welfare recipients when the latter are black. Nevertheless, this “racialization” hypothesis has yet to be directly tested by looking at whether generalized individualism is more strongly related to hostility toward welfare recipients among whites when the recipients are black. In this paper, I con...

The thesis of methodological individualism in social science is commonly divided into two different claims – explanatory individualism and ontological individualism. Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts. Initially taken to be a claim about the identity of groups with sets of individuals or their properties, ontological individu...

This article addresses the social and historical relation between Chicago School neo-liberalism and contemporary racism, and its connections with the formations of racism in classical liberalism and its colonial character. I show the pragmatic and discursive operations of neo-racism in the context of this shift to a neo-liberal discourse, drawing particularly on Michel Foucault’s seminars, Soci...

BACKGROUND The stepped wedge cluster randomised trial (SW-CRT) is increasingly being used to evaluate policy or service delivery interventions. However, there is a dearth of trials literature addressing analytical approaches to the SW-CRT. Perhaps as a result, a significant number of published trials have major methodological shortcomings, including failure to adjust for secular trends at the a...

Jeffrey Fagen (1993, this issue) has misunderstood our main point about reinforcement as a central principle of behavior change (Gewirtz & Pelaez-Nogueras, 1992, p. 1414) and the issue of description versus explanation in the use of the objective reinforcement term or of a subjective term such as contingency expectancy. He argued that reinforcement cannot explain some findings of his and his co...

Methodological dualism in linguistics occurs when its theories are subjected to standards that are inappropriate for them qua scientifi c theories. Despite much opposition, methodological dualism abounds in contemporary thinking. In this paper, I treat linguistics as a scientifi c activity and explore some instances of dualism. By extracting some ubiquitous aspects of scientifi c methodology fr...

This article asserts that traditionally dominant models of health promotion in the US are fairly characterized by methodological individualism. This schema produces a focus on the individual as the node of intervention. Such emphasis results in a number of scientific and ethical problems. I identify three principal ethical deficiencies: first, the health promotions used are generally ineffectiv...