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Organizations are confronted with problems and political risks to which they have to respond, presenting a need to develop tools and frames of understanding requisite to do so. In this article, we argue for the necessity of cultivating “political judgment” with a “sense of reality,” especially in the upper echelons of organizations. This article has two objectives: First to highlight how a number of recent interlinked developments within organizational analysis and practice have contributed to weakening judgment and its accompanying “sense of reality.” Second, to (re)introduce some canonical works that, although less in vogue recently, provide both a source of wisdom and frames of understanding that are key to tackling today’s problems. We begin by mapping the context in which the need for the cultivation of political judgment within organizations has arisen: (i) increasing proliferation of political risks and “wicked problems” to which it is expected that organizations adapt and respond; (ii) a wider historical and contemporary context in which the exercise of judgment has been undermined – a result of a combination of economics-inspired styles of theorizing and an associated obsession with metrics. We also explore the nature of “political judgment” and its accompanying “sense of reality” through the work of authors such as Philip Selznick, Max Weber, Chester Barnard, and Isaiah Berlin. We suggest that these authors have a weighty “sense of reality”; are antithetical to “high,” “abstract,” or “axiomatic” theorizing; and have a profound sense of the burden from exercising political judgment in difficult organizational circumstances.

The purpose of this article is to investigate factors related to the time students spent on remote activities during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020. Specifically, it analyzes whether the school’s relationship with the family and the guardians’ support are associated with longer study times for children and youth.

This was performed using an ordered logit model on data from two waves of the survey Remote Education in the Perspective of Students and Their Families (PENP) with a nationally and regionally representative sample of Brazilian public school students.

Results show the importance of contact between the school and the family and, to a greater extent, the direct support of parents or guardians. The odds of learners spending more hours studying increase 36% when schools provide guidance for parents and guardians; in turn, when they provide support for students during activities, these odds increase 144%.

Moreover, students spend more time doing school activities in the later years of elementary school, high school and when they attend a state school.

Wrist orthoses are used by occupational therapists to decrease pain, support weak muscles and protect tissues during healing. However, use of wrist orthoses has been observed to produce compensatory movements in other upper extremity joints. This paper aims to determine whether wearing wrist orthoses produced compensatory movements of the elbow in addition to the shoulder when performing drinking and hammering tasks.

Two twin-axis electrogoniometers were positioned on the elbow and shoulder to track joint movement. The four conditions were drink with orthosis, hammer with orthosis, drink without orthosis and hammer without orthosis. Joint movement was defined as total angular excursion of the joint throughout the performance of the task. Separate 2 × 2 (joint × orthosis) repeated measures analyzes of variance (ANOVA) were used to evaluate differences in joint excursion of the elbow and shoulder joints between orthosis conditions for each task.

Wearing a wrist orthosis did not change the amount of joint excursion compared to not wearing an orthosis during the drinking and hammering tasks.

Findings suggest that wrist orthoses do not result in statistically significant changes in elbow and shoulder joint movements during simulated drinking and hammering tasks.

Awareness raising campaigns have been used to promote HIV prevention messages, including the expansion of HIV testing, but initiating such campaigns de novo can be costly. Both the Bronx, New York and Washington, DC have significant local HIV epidemics and a history of efforts to scale-up HIV testing. To build on prior HIV testing campaigns and create new messages based on consultation with diverse stakeholders, a partnership with a community-based clinical trial to enhance HIV testing and treatment was established. The purpose of this paper is to describe the history of HIV testing campaigns in the two jurisdictions, the awareness raising conducted in collaboration with the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) study (HPTN 065) and provide evidence of its effect in these two communities.

The foundation of prior campaigns allowed for expansion of social mobilization efforts to specific priority populations (gay men and other men who have sex with men), the most severely affected groups in both communities, and to expand the efforts to include clinical settings. New compelling and acceptable messages were shaped through engagement with community members and based on input from focus groups with target populations in each city.

By engaging the target population in the development of new messaging, HPTN 065 study successfully built on campaigns that were already underway in both jurisdictions and was able to use those messages and platforms to further normalize HIV testing.

Modifying and adapting existing messages saved time and resources, which can be important factors to consider in settings with limited resources or high media purchasing costs.

Efforts of this kind may ultimately help to decrease HIV transmission in large urban settings.

This study aims to investigate the motives of mobile payment adoption from both customers' and retailers' perspectives in Sri Lanka during the COVID-19 pandemic period. It also aims to compare the motives of mobile payment adoption across rural and urban contexts.

The study employs a mixed-method approach with a concurrent research design. Both a survey of customers and in-depth interviews of managers in retail companies are used.

The study discloses that performance expectancy and facilitating conditions (PEFC), Hedonic motivation (HM) and perceived technology security (PTS) as significant motives for customers to adopt mobile payment during this pandemic period. Such findings are confirmed by the four challenges disclose by the retailers. The unfamiliarity of customers, lack of employees' knowledge on mobile payment systems, poor management orientation and lack of computer literacy of customers are the main challenges from the retailers' perspectives. Further, it shows, though PEFC is a common motive, other motives are different across rural and urban.

The findings of the study are helpful for retailers and policymakers. Retailers can develop strategies to enhance mobile payment adoption through PEFC, HM and PTS by giving special attention to the rural community. The main motive possible to use in both rural and urban contexts is PEFC. Further, retailers should take the initiatives to uplift the technological know-how of their employees while inculcating supportive management orientation. Policymakers can use this study to develop policies to enhance the community's familiarity with mobile payment technology and computer literacy.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate motives for adopting mobile payments from both customers' and retailers' perspectives while being the first scrutiny to compare rural and urban scenarios. The use of mixed methods with concurrent research design also contributes to originality.