The More You Know … The More You Enjoy? Applying ‘Consumption Capital Theory’ To Motion Picture Franchises

In this article, we build on Stigler and Becker’s (1977) “consumption capital theory” and propose a novel conceptualization of film quality for the analysis of motion picture franchises. Generally, this theory predicts that the utility consumers derive from a particular good or service increases with prior consumption. We test our theoretical conjectures by drawing on the population of sequels that were running in the US between 1992 and 2011. The empirical results point to the explanatory power of the proposed framework. Film executives may use our findings to improve the profitability of their sequel productions. From a theoretical point of view, consumption capital theory allows for a more refined analysis of sequel performance along different dimensions. Moreover, it may provide a fruitful basis for the analysis of other serial media content, including books, TV, music, and games.     

Between school and working life: Vocational teachers’ agency in boundary-crossing settings

This paper investigates agency among vocational teachers with reference to boundary-crossing between school and working life. Our study utilised interviews with sixteen Finnish vocational teachers. Adopting a narrative analysis approach, we found that the teachers had a variety of forms of exercising agency in terms of decisions deliberately taken, and the discourse and actions following these decisions. These forms were: (i) restricted agency, (ii) extensive agency, (iii) multifaceted balancing agency, (iv) situationally diverse agency, and (v) relationally emergent agency. The exercising of agency was intertwined with the main resources and constraints emerging from the teachers’ sense of their professional self, their awareness of their relationships to workplace personnel, and their views of the professional tasks determined by the school. Depending on its nature and direction, agency appears to create diverse conditions for teachers’ productive work in boundary-crossing settings, for developing education and for remaking the work practices of workplaces.     

When ethnic minority students are judged as more suitable for the highest school track: a shifting standards experiment

When students are grouped into school tracks, this has lasting consequences for their learning and later careers. In Germany to date, some groups of students (boys, ethnic minority students) are underrepresented in the highest track. Stereotypes about these groups exist that entail negative expectations about their suitability for the highest track. Based on the shifting standards model, the present research examines if and how stereotypes influence tracking recommendations. According to this theory, members of negatively stereotyped groups will be judged more leniently or more strictly depending on the framing of the judgment situation (by inducing minimum or confirmatory standards). N = 280 teacher students participated in a vignette study in which they had to choose the amount of positive evidence for suitability they wanted to see before deciding to recommend a fictitious student to the highest track. A 2 (judgment standard: minimum vs. confirmatory) × 2 (target student’s gender: male vs. female) × 2 (target student’s ethnicity: no migration background vs. Turkish migration background) between-subjects design was used. No effects of target gender occurred, but the expected interaction of target’s ethnicity and judgment standard emerged. In the minimum standard condition, less evidence was required for the ethnic minority student to be recommended for the highest track compared to the majority student. In the confirmatory standards condition, however, participants tended to require less evidence for the ethnic majority student. Our experiment underlines the importance of the framing of the recommendation situation, resulting in a more lenient or stricter assessment of negatively stereotyped groups.

     

Effects of animation's speed of presentation on perceptual processing and learning

Animations presented at different speed are assumed to differentially interact with learners’ perception and cognition due to the constraints imposed by learners’ limited sensitivity to incoming dynamic information. To investigate the effects of high and low presentation speed of animation, two studies were conducted. In Study 1, participants were 55 students who learned about the functioning of a four-stroke engine from an animation with user-controlled presentation speed. In Study 2, eye movements of 19 students were analysed for different system-controlled presentation speeds of animation. Results indicated that high presentation speeds accentuated global events (i.e., macro-events), whereas low speeds accentuated local events (i.e., micro-events). However, eye movements were primarily affected by the content rather than the presentation speed of animation.