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Pretty much everyone will sometimes struggle with anger at work. People fear the wrath of abusive supervisors, suppress anger to maintain a facade of professionalism, or vent anger toward coworkers who are, fairly or not, targets. Reactions to anger in the workplace can be strong, but theyre not always effective. As scholars who also fall prey to the pitfalls of anger ourselves, we are fascinated by anger. We have studied the causes, underlying processes, and consequences of anger from the perspectives of management, psychology, marketing, and negotiations. We recently reviewed more than 400 research articles across psychology, business, and related fields on topics ranging from brain activity to negotiation to race relations. Yet despite the ubiquity of anger in the workplace and the decades of anger research that exists across a number of fields, we found no straightforward way to understand the complexity of the life cycle of anger and how to manage it most effectively. As we dived more deeply into the research literature, though, we realized that simply reframing how we think about anger could provide a novel, flexible framework for how to deal with this emotion in daily life. Our suggestion: Think of anger as a flow of emotion, like water through a garden hose. By thinking of the flow of anger, you can unpack its key dimensions: its path and strength. Understanding whether the hose is pointed effectively and whether the strength of the stream is appropriate are critical for knowing when, how, and why to focus or redirect the anger and amplify or weaken its intensity. The direction of anger Imagine a coworker charges into your office, yelling, breathing heavily, face reddened, veins bulging. Even if you are simply an unsuspecting colleague who happened to have your door open, your attention is undoubtedly now fixed on your coworker. Are you the target of their anger for something you did, or merely an observer of their anger at someone else? If you are an undeserving target, do you try to reframe the issue so that the angry person will realize the anger is better directed elsewhere? If you are the observer, you also have a choice about whether to ignore your coworkers anger or help them redirect it to a more effective outlet. You might simply listen empathetically while they let off steam, perhaps pointing out the relative risks and benefits of their taking their complaints to the supervisor. You are deciding, in effect, what suggestions to make about the direction of this persons anger. The key to effectively managing the direction of anger is to manage the attention of those in the room. Reshaping how angry people attribute blame, for example, can help people take another persons perspective or understand the situation in a new way, directing the flow more productively. The intensity of anger When an angry coworker approaches you as the target, do you ignore the signal or offer to work with the person so a similar situation doesnt happen in the future? Both are ways to tamp down the intensity of the emotion coming at you. When you are angry, do you try to distract yourself from the anger, let it simmer, or embrace it? You are essentially deciding how you want to manage the intensity of your own angry feelings. It is important to recognize that managing the intensity of anger can go in both directions. Sometimes high-intensity anger should be turned down and sometimes subtle anger should be amplified. For example, consider an instance in which you feel anger at what you perceive to be an unfair change to a company policy. In this case, simply going for a walk outside to avoid expressing your frustration may result in the leadership not realizing that you and others on the team feel this way, leaving little opportunity to discuss and update the policy to more reasonable standards. Learning to self-regulate your thoughts and behaviors can help you manage the intensity of any anger you find yourself feeling. Rather than impulsively reacting, you can practice handling your emotions so you control whether you crank up your expressed anger or dial it down. Part of this process is thinking carefully about the cost-benefit trade-offs of expressing your anger. In these ways, you more effectively manage the strength of the flow without unnecessarily just turning it off. Controlling anger Knowing when, how, and why to shape the direction and intensity of anger is no small feat. Some of this decision is rightly based on the situation. For example, is it safe to step in? Do you feel personally skilled at intervening? But it is within everyones power to learn how to manage their own and others anger more effectively. To do so, you need to understand your role and whether the flow is a onetime situation or a persistent problem. Understanding whether youre holding the hose, standing in its path, or observing from a distance is the first step to effectively managing the direction and intensity of the flow. Second is deciding whether and how to intervene: Can you reframe the initial trigger so that the faucet is never turned on, or turned on more or less powerfully? If anger is already too strong and you cannot or do not want to avoid it, can you help the angry person regulate the direction and intensity of their anger to overcome the issue in some way? You can get better at controlling the flow of anger in ways that can improve rather than harm relationships and outcomes. Research supports working on your emotional intelligence and building belief in your own capability to handle anger. Manage factors that tend to wrest control of the hose away from you, including becoming defensive, feeling shame, or even suffering from a lack of sleep. Taking these steps and practicing controlling the hoses path and intensity can help address problems in the short term and prevent anger from becoming a destructive pattern in the long term. Laura Rees is an associate professor of organizational behavior at Oregon State University. Ray Friedman is a professor of management and professor of Asian studies at Vanderbilt University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Julian Baggini is a philosopher with a long and deep interest in food and where it comes from. His books include internationally bestselling How the World Thinks; How to Think Like a Philosopher; The Virtues of the Table; and The Pig That Wants to be Eaten. He is the Academic Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and a member of the Food Ethics Council. He is a regular columnist for The Guardian, Prospect magazine, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Whats the big idea? Food is such a big topic that few really grasp the whole of it. Using his philosophical skillset, Julian sketches a picture of how all the elements of food consumption and production fit together. Extracted from the complexity of foods impact on health, economy, wellbeing, nature, civil strife, and so on, there are common principles that characterize food systems that work for us and for the planet. Below, Julian shares five key insights from his new book, How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy. Listen to the audio versionread by Julian himselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. Debate about food and farming is too polarized Polarized debate about food and farming stands in the way of everyone coming together for the common good. Beneath the dichotomous rhetoric, the world is not nearly as divided as it seems. Take the apparent chasm between organic and non-organic agriculture. In one way, it is a sharp divide because you either tick the boxes and get certified organic or you dont. But in practice, the difference between the two camps is blurry. Some farms are in effect organic but cant say they are because they dont pay for certification. Nor can we separate them out based on which use fertilizers and pesticides and which dont. Organic farms use both, only they cant be syntheticin their definition of the term. But so-called natural inputs are not necessarily safer. Copper is allowed under the terms of certification as an organic fungicide (commonly used for tomato production), but copper is known to be toxic to humans. Some non-organic farms use chemical inputs with such care and in such limited amounts that they pose no threat to human health or wildlife. Or take the distinction between farmed and wild-caught fish. Whether one is better than the other all depends. There are some terrible practices on the open seas, including the use of huge trawlers to scrape the seabed, basically bulldozing habitats. There are also awful fish farms that pollute surrounding waters and nurture sick fish. But there are also good practices on both sides. Like most either/or questions about food, farmed or wild? is just the wrong question. Simplistic, polarized thinking has real consequences. Take the idea that plastic is bad and biodegradable packaging is good. An extra layer of plastic wrap in the packaging of Danish cold meats increases their shelf life and reduces waste, and for almost all food, the environmental impact of waste is higher than that of the packaging that prevents it. Or take the owner of a vegetable box delivery scheme who knows that the greenest option is to use reusable and recyclable hard plastic boxes but must use cardboard because his customer base is so convinced that plastic is always the enemy. 2. Plurality is key to how we feed ourselves There is no one right way to farm, make food, or eat. It depends on context, culture, and circumstance. Grazing cattle is sustainable and efficient on the Argentinian Pampas, but not so easily done at scale on the polders of the Netherlands. The Mediterranean diet may be very healthy, but the Japanese one is at least as good. There is a place for small artisan producers, but the big manufacturers of, say, pasta do a good job supplying reliable, tasty, nutritious food at a good price. What works on a wheat farm in one place may not work in another in the next valley, let alone in another country. Advocates of land sharing argue that farmland must be made more hospitable to wildlife so that we can share our productive land with nature. Land sparers argue that the best way to protect the environment is to make agriculture as efficient as possible so that it uses less land, leaving other habitats pristine. Both perspectives are right, and both are wrong. In some places, land sharing works best, while in others, land sparing is more appropriate. The right option in one place can be wrong elsewhere. Too often, people advocate for one-size-fits-all solutions: that the world needs to go organic, or that everyone should be using more synthetic inputs; that we should all go vegan; that we should bring down the big food and agri-businesses; that everything we eat should be prepared from fresh. We homo sapiens have been able to feed ourselves for millennia because we have been resourceful, adapting ourselves to variable and changing conditions. Plurality has been one of our greatest strengths, and we should continue to encourage and celebrate it. 3. The ground rules of nutrition are simple because it is so complicated It is hubris to think we can micro-manage our diets to make significant differences to our health and longevity. The focus should be on the big, obvious elements of a good diet. It is still difficult to beat Michael Pollans famous seven-word maxim: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. By foods, he, of course, means real, whole foods and not highly processed edible food-like substances, to use his memorable phrase. We keep getting seduced by hucksters and misguided diet guides who promise the ultimate health hacks. Right now, the big noise is about the gut microbiome, with many making millions by selling prebiotics and probiotics, gut shots, and the like. But the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania have a really healthy gut microbiome, and they dont eat anything like kimchi or kefir, let alone manufactured so-called gut-boosters. They only eat what they have gathered that day. Their guts are healthy because they eat a wide range of fibrous plants. The idea that we should focus on big factors gives us the license to relax a little. What matters is your dietary pattern, not any individual food you eat. If your diet is based on healthy foods, it doesnt matter if you have the odd twinkie or a triple-cheese pizza. There is a lot of justifiable concern about ultra-processed foods, but they are not poisonous in small doses. Purity in eating is seductive but unnecessary. Many of us have individual needs that demand more specific dietary advice. We have intolerances, allergies, or health conditions that can be triggered by certain foods. But unless you have a specific medical reason to avoid some foods and have more of others, you should stop worrying and eat a good variety of proper foods. 4. Around the world, there are huge injustices in the food system Cocoa farmers who earn less every day than it costs someone to buy a single bar of chocolate made from their beans; migrant workers exploited as farm laborers, sometimes not being paid at all; modern slavery, not just in economically developing nations but unde the noses of consumers in industrialized countries too; livestock kept in atrocious conditions, just so that we can enjoy cheap chicken, burgers, and sausages. We all know this, even if we choose to look away. These are not bugs in the food system; they are features of it. Our entire supply chain has been designed or evolved to make food as cheap for consumers as possible. However, it can only do this if humans and animals in the supply chain are exploited. This needs to change, even if it isnt easy. We have become so reliant on inexpensive food that when prices increased a few years ago, many people found they could no longer afford to eat. This is true even though, by historical standards, households were still spending a smaller portion of their income on food than at nearly any other time in history. Some say food cannot become more expensive because the poor can barely afford it now. But the solution to poverty is not to make food so cheap that even the poor can afford it. The solution is to ensure that even the poorest have enough money to feed themselves properly. Nor should it be verboten to consider food subsidies. After all, many countries, including the USA, already spend billions subsidizing agriculture and other industries. 5. There are seven principles for a humane, sustainable, nutritious food system If you were to skip to the end of my book and read these seven principles, you might think they sound obvious. That is what makes them so powerful. Everyone agrees with them, but hardly anyone is acting in accordance with them. Not only do we almost all agree about what a better food system should look like, but we also know most of what it will take to make it a reality. There are numerous levers we could pull. We could have much higher standards of animal welfare. The power of large businesses to shape the food world in their own interests rather than in those of humankind could be curbed. The costs placed on society and future generations of the food system could be properly measured and either paid for or not allowed to occur in the first place. Every country could have a proper land use framework to achieve the right balance between agricultural productivity, conservation, and regeneration. Our diets can shift away from highly processed foods toward ones based on whole foods. Farmers and farm laborers could receive a much fairer share of the price paid by consumers. Every citizen has the potential not only to have a voice in how the food world is shaped, but real power in using that voice. Too many calls for change are utopian, requiring a wholesale shift of values that is not going to happen. Fortunately, we do not need to tear the whole system down and start again. Positive change depends on people recognizing that the values we already hold are discordant with our food system. Values and practices can be brought into harmony by a series of adjustments, some radical, but all ad hoc and doable. The will for change and the possibility for change can converge, join forces, and transform how the world eats for the better. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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Canada has blocked imports from the biggest U.S. pork processing plant, a facility run by Smithfield Foods in Tar Heel, North Carolina, the company said on Friday. The suspension comes as Washington, D.C., and Ottawa have sparred in a heated dispute over trade tariffs. It is the latest blow for America’s farm sector, which has been roiled by concerns that U.S. tariffs will spark retaliation from top importers that reduces demand for American agricultural products. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the suspension was in line with standard protocols and unrelated to recent trade activity. The agency and Smithfield, the largest U.S. pork processor, did not specify what triggered Canada’s action. “Under Canada’s policy, three noncompliance issues within six months trigger a temporary suspension,” USDA said. Blocking shipments from the plant limits a market for U.S. pork products. USDA is working with Smithfield to address the issues and develop a corrective action plan that will be communicated to Canadian authorities, according to an agency statement. “Once reviewed and accepted, Canada may consider reinstating the plant’s export eligibility,” USDA said. Canada halted imports from the facility on Thursday, according to a USDA website. “The issue pertains to a limited number of certain offal shipments,” Smithfield spokesman Jim Monroe said. Smithfield shares were nearly flat on Friday. U.S. President Donald Trump exempted goods from Canada and Mexico on Thursday under a North American trade pact for a month from the 25% tariffs he imposed earlier this week. Canada was the fifth-largest export market for U.S. pork last year, according to U.S. government data. Though shipments slipped, they were valued at about $850 million. U.S. pork has a significant presence in the Canadian retail and foodservice sectors, said Joe Schuele, spokesman for the U.S. Meat Export Federation, an industry group. Smithfield, whose brands include Eckrich and Nathan’s Famous, returned to a U.S. exchange in January after more than a decade, in a spinoff by Hong Kong-based WH Group. Tom Polansek, Reuters
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