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Most research has investigated the fear of missing out (FOMO) in the context of online activities, often associated with negative personal outcomes such as fatigue and stress. However, given the increased desire to be informed and included associated with FOMO, organizations that can effectively meet these needs may develop or strengthen social and structural bonds, thereby turning short-term customers with FOMO into lifelong patrons. This study aims to examine the relationship between FOMO and favorable organizational outcomes as mediated by several constructs associated with the desire for information and inclusion.

This research was conducted within the higher education sector of the service industry. FOMO served as the IV. The mediators represented context-specific aspects of campus involvement and inclusion. Organizational outcomes related to the long-term services relationship served as the DVs. The sample consisted of 435 students recruited from research pools at two southern universities in the USA. Exploratory factor analysis, OLS regression and the Hayes–Macro were used to examine the data.

The results demonstrate that FOMO is positively associated with students’ desires for information and inclusion (informal peer interaction, campus involvement, informal faculty interaction, campus information media use and a preference for in-person course scheduling), which are associated with the desirable university outcomes of satisfaction, connection and alumni donation/activity intentions.

If a university fosters unstructured time spent with faculty and peers, and promotes campus information media involvement, students with higher levels of FOMO are more likely to be satisfied, feel connected to the university and report intentions to donate time and money as alumni.

Prior research on FOMO is generally focused on internet and social media use; this study takes a broader perspective and identifies the effect of FOMO on a desire for information and inclusion within a novel context (a service environment). It also associates FOMO with favorable long-term service relationship outcomes that fortify social and structural bonds.

This will be an attempt to construct a pragmatist theory of the self, drawing on the four major classical pragmatists. From John Dewey, I will take the self as actor or agent; from George Herbert Mead the social self; from Charles Sanders Peirce the semiotic or significative self; and from William James the emotion of self feeling. The four fit together reasonably well, and the result is a highly egalitarian, democratic and humanistic idea of what it means to be a human being.

This chapter shows that Mead has a field theory and that the explanatory method of symbolic interaction is that of a field. A field, in this sense, is a systematic network of meanings. When someone or something enters that field such as a protest rally or a cocktail party they are given the meaning that is characteristic of the field. This explanation is not one of causation but one of context. I show that a major field theory of Mead’s concerns the agent and how decisions or actions are made. He also has a developmental field theory based on the play-game-generalized other relation. With Mead’s agency model I then show how it can be applied, in macro fashion, to the recent rise in American minorities, especially that of women, African Americans, and gays. This example shows the macro or social structural power of Mead’s idea.

In the past, critics have dismissed American Pragmatism as intellectually naïve and philosophically passé, but in this chapter we argue that it still has much to offer the field of organization studies. Pragmatism is especially relevant to those organizational scholars who are concerned with understanding the dynamic processes and practices of organizational life. This chapter lays out the historical development of Pragmatism, recognizing the originating contributions of Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead. Although each of these writers developed unique philosophical positions, their ideas are all permeated by four key themes: experience, inquiry, habit and transaction. The interplay between these themes informs a temporal view of social practice in which selves and situations are continuously constructed and reconstructed through experimental and reflexive processes of social engagement. We then use organizational learning theory as an example to illustrate the relevance of these four themes, contrasting the anti-dualistic stance of Pragmatism with the work of Argyris and Schön. Finally we turn to consider Weick's organizing and sensemaking, suggesting that Pragmatism offers three potential foci for further development of these theories, namely continuity of past and future in the present, the transactional nature of social agency and reflexivity in social practices. Similarly we see potential for Pragmatism to productively inform the theorizing of other organizational practices such as identity work, strategy work, emotion work and idea work.

Mead's notion of “reflexivity” is one of his key ideas. Our mind “bends” or “flexes” back to itself in this process. Mead argues that universal ideas were first attained reflexively when humans could understand their own communications; for example, when the primate mother could both indicate to her children where food was and also give herself the same message. These two cases, viewed together, constituted the first “universal” (for Mead). This contrasted with the traditional theory of universals, which had the knower abstracting the universal idea, i.e. the “essence,” from a group of particulars. Mead's universal is not essentialist but linguistic. It is syntactic and not ontological. This allowed him to sidestep the problem of essences (since no one could find any, anyway). Mead's version shows how reflexivity may have first originated, in the evolutionary process, though he does not actually prove this. I examine reflexivity itself here, singling out several varieties. I look at self-referencing pronouns (especially “I”) and show how Cooley's observations of his daughter's use of pronouns clarified this process. I also examine the reflexivity of recognizing one's own face in the mirror. Mead said the body could not be reflexive, but self-recognition in a mirror is a form of bodily reflexivity. And there are several others, for example the varieties of bodily meditation, that Mead missed. Recognizing this reflexivity introduces the body (and, therefore, gender) early in Mead's theory, rather than late, as he has it. This point also opens him to a badly needed infusion of feminist thought, such as that of Nancy Chodorow. The self-recognizing mirror face is, as Lacan points out, “all smiles.” This insight also introduces emotion early into Mead. As it is, he has emotion late, as a kind of afterthought. This paper then promotes a badly needed feminization of Mead.

George Herbert Mead is an exemplary figure in sociology, and is central to sociological conceptions of the self and social action. However, other important aspects of Mead's thought have been largely neglected, including his remarkably sophisticated and sociological theory of scientific knowledge. Traditional accounts of the sociology of science identify Thomas Kuhn, and his predecessor, Ludwig Fleck, as pioneers in the social analysis of scientific knowledge, allowing the modern constructionist school of science studies to emerge. This article challenges this history by showing Mead's awareness of the sociological aspects of scientific knowledge in papers that predate both Kuhn and Fleck. Finally, Mead's position attempts to avoid sociological relativism, and offers instead a pragmatist foundation to approach the study of science.

In this paper, I orchestrate an encounter between Mead and Ortega in which their notions of action, truth, self, society, and individual agency are systematically compared. Thus, I offer a critical comparison of Ortega's and Mead's positions on the above issues, pointing to the strengths and weaknesses in their respective theories. My comparison shows how an encounter between Mead and Ortega can lead to the refinement, extension, and ultimate improvement in Mead's ideas, especially his conception of the relation of the individual to society.

This article combines Mead's notion of sociality with his implicit theory of morality. Specifically, it uses Mead's emphasis on temporality to analyze decisions made by key characters in the cinematic adaptation (Amazon TV) of Philip Dick's novel, The Man in the High Castle. Using a selective and subversive method to read into this adaptation, I regard Mead's view of morality as complex and as distinguishing between a morality in the specious present and a morality grounded in sociality. The paper links Mead and Mead's pragmatic emphasis to varieties of characters representing immoral foils (e.g., Nazis) and everyday lives to show how morality can emerge from a variety of standpoints, locating Mead's position as distinct from moral absolutism and moral relativity.

Almost all historical accounts of psychological work related to the self-concept begin with the pioneering work of William James (e.g., Harter, 1996; Pajares & Schunk, 2002, 2005; Roeser et al., 2006). James' distinction between the self as knower and agent (the I-self) and the self as known and object (the Me-self), in the famous Chap. 10, on self-consciousness, in his Principles of Psychology (1890), undoubtedly informs much subsequent work on the self-concept (a term that James never used himself). In particular, the general idea that the self is made up of different constituents (e.g., the Me-self contains material, social, and spiritual selves) arranged hierarchically is still very much a basic structural assumption in many contemporary theories of the self-concept, just as James' assumption that the I-self can create and monitor a variety of Me-selves anchors much self-concept methodology and process theorizing. With respect to the general aims of self-concept research, James' framing of self-esteem (a term he did use) also has been extremely influential on subsequent generations of both self-esteem and self-concept researchers. For James, self-esteem is a feeling that “depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do” (James, 1981, p. 310), a feeling that depends on the success with which we achieve those things we set out to achieve.²

Mead was one of the first university professors of Finance in North America. The purpose of this article ia to document his career at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania from 1900 to 1944.

This research used traditional historical interpretation of rare archival documents, drew from the autobiography of Mead's more famous daughter, Margaret Mead, and includes an analysis of Mead's published work in Finance.

The findings are reported as an intellectual biography. The paper reports on Mead's life and career as a pioneer Finance scholar.

There has been almost nothing published about the history of the Finance discipline and nothing published about the contributions of Edward Sherwood Mead.