Serving as the national soothsayer for citizens and political elites alike, the President of the United States looks to and predicts the future. When presidents try to gain influence today, they predict tomorrow. Expectations, or future-oriented statements made by the president, are a prominent attribute of presidential communication. This dissertation engages “future talk” by examining how presidents construct expectation frames as well as how the public reacts to presidential discussions about the future. I answer two main questions in this research. First, how often and under what circumstances do presidents construct expectations? Second, how do expectations affect the citizens who encounter them? I employed a multi-methodological approach to analyze the content and effects of expectation frames. First, I content analyzed a sample of State of the Union addresses and signing statements from the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, as well as a sample of tweets from the White House Twitter feed in the Obama administration. The analytic approach captured patterns of expectation emphasis and de-emphasis within a communication as well as accounted for variation across presidential communications due to external political and communicative factors. Second, I conducted a between-subjects experiment to test the effects of expectation frames on individuals. I examined how the type of expectation frame influences perceptions about the future and the president. This research uncovers that presidents strategically construct expectations and can influence how individuals think about the future. Presidents engage in deliberate actions to target the settings where expectations are framed, the agents responsible for the future, and the policies associated with tomorrow. In turn, citizens attend to how presidents frame the future and are influenced as a result of encountering future frames. The results of this dissertation illuminate critical facets of presidential communicative leadership of public opinion as well as elite influence within government. The president’s prominence in American life should force our attention to how the chief executive divines and shapes the future for citizens and intergovernmental agents. / text

This project attempts to understand the role of expectations in cooperative behavior using the interdisciplinary approach of Decision Neuroscience. While cooperation provides the foundation for a successful society, the underlying bio-psycho-social mechanisms remain surprisingly poorly understood. This investigation deconstructs cooperation into the specific behaviors of trust, reciprocation, and norm enforcement using the Trust and Ultimatum Games from behavioral economics and combines formal modeling and functional magnetic resonance imaging to understand the neurocomputational role of expectations in these behaviors. The results indicate that people appear to use context specific shared expectations when making social decisions. These beliefs are malleable and appear to be dynamically updated after an interaction. Emotions such as guilt and anger can be formally operationalized in terms of others' expectations and appear to be processed by a specific neural system involving the anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and supplemental motor cortex. Importantly, these neural signals appear to motivate people to not only behave consistent with these expectations, but also to help others update their beliefs when these expectations are violated. Further, violations of social expectations appear to promote enhanced memory for norm violators. This work demonstrates the neural and computational basis of moral sentiments.

The continued growth of the UK dining out industry, and the unceasing trend in popularity for customers to spend time and money eating outside the home, has led to an increase in the number of dining out establishments, and competition between businesses. Although there have been studies examining aspects of the restaurant industry and food consumption outside the home, very little research has looked specifically at customer expectations. Therefore, this thesis examines customer expectations associated with the meal experience in relation to the varying costs of dining out opportunities. In addition, the study reflects on customers’ socio-economic characteristics combined with their perception of differing anticipated costs in order to provide customer typologies, each with varying expectations of the dining out experience. It is intended that by focussing on and amalgamating the areas of expectation, cost and socio-economic factors, the conclusions obtained will contribute to a new understanding relating to customer expectations. The study invited e-subscribers of Delicious Magazine’s national website, to participate in quantitative research regarding both expectations of dining out and social factors. By examining the data from a large cohort study (2200 participants) evidence of behavioural patterns and opinions has emerged. The research established that there are four types of customer that can be identified through their initial choice of restaurant owing to the restaurant’s perceived cost classification. Each customer group identified, not only has overarching expectations of the dining out experience, but through identifying socio-economic characteristics of each group, it is also possible to have insight into their collective behaviours. The original contribution outputs that have been generated from the research are a practical typology and a theoretical model. Although dining out establishments are facing pressure from the emergence of increasing numbers of competitors and the current economic climate, it has been established, through the research, that, in particular, restaurants often bestow little attention on customer requirements, instead ‘food’, ‘aesthetics’ and ‘staff’ often take precedence. However, aspects relating directly to customers, such as, ‘repeat business’ and ‘positive word of mouth’ are core components to a hospitality organisation’s success. Understanding customers further can only enhance and provide structure and direction for restaurant businesses. Therefore, implementing the practical customer typology could focus a restaurant business on considering their customer group and their anticipated requirements. This research is a foundation into an original combined study area and has induced further research concepts that may also encourage other academics to embark on this area of study. This research may then develop as a subject field and cascade into understandings that could be beneficial to the hospitality industry.

The world, including Sweden, is suffering from a shortage of nurses. The nurse shortage is caused by many factors, including an aging population causing a rise in demand, considerably fewer applicants for high school nursing programs, and a large wave of retirement as the baby boomers are leaving the work force. However, research has found that no single thing is more responsible for the nurse shortage than the inability to keep able nurses in the nurse force as they voluntarily terminate their employment. Research has also found that young nurses and newly graduated nurses are more likely to terminate their employment than nurses who have been working for a long time. One of the explanations for this problem is the special problems nurses face during the transition from student to practicing nurses. This thesis aims to help the health care institutions of Sweden, and the world, by further explaining the problems nurses face in the transition from nursing student to practicing nurse. This is done by examining the expectations nurses have on the profession before they start studying, and before they graduate, and examine how the nurses perceive that their expectations have been confirmed or disconfirmed. Further we examine how the nurses perceive that their confirmed or disconfirmed expectations affect their job satisfaction and in extension, their will to terminate their employment and leave the profession. In order to examine the subject, we conducted a qualitative study. Semistructured interviews were held with eight nurses in order to assess how their expectations had affected their current view on their job and what disappointments and positive surprises would infer. The data we gathered from the interviews were analyzed thematically. The main themes we derived from the data were: Emotions – Driver in Early Expectations, Expectations and Experiences in the Transition Period, Confirmation of Early Expectations, Expectations Role in Job Satisfaction, and Expectations as a Factor in Turnover Intentions. We could conclude that there were certain areas where nurses’ positive expectations were confirmed, e.g. meaningfulness of the job. There were also areas where nurses experienced a reality worse than what they expected, such as stress, work environment, responsibility, feedback, and emotional challenges. From subthemes of these general themes we crafted a conceptual model to illustrate how both early and later expectations affect the job satisfaction, opinions on the profession, and turnover intentions of the nurses.

The basic purpose of this study was to present an in-depth investigation of secondary school student teacher role expectations from a variety of perspectives.

Given the high rates of premature termination in training clinics, research aimed at understanding client attrition is urgently needed. Recent investigations in this area have implicated expectations of psychotherapy as a strong predictor of premature termination; however, this phenomenon has only been studied from the perspective of client expectations to date. There is reason to believe clinician expectations for the duration and effectiveness of psychotherapy may further impact the likelihood of their clients terminating prematurely. This study sought to address this gap in the literature by examining the association of clinicians' expectations to clients' psychotherapy outcomes and termination status in a training clinic setting. Clinicians were found to hold significantly higher expectations for client improvement than would be expected, and these high expectations were found to be positively correlated with clinically significant change in clients. Implications for improving client retention and treatment outcome in training clinics are discussed.

This study investigated demographic characteristics of 240 Chamber of Commerce members in terms of their expectations for customer service in hotels. Subjects reported their age, gender, marital status, race, educational level, income level and ethnicity, and completed a 26-item questionnaire which measured expectations for customer service. Principal components analysis was used to reduce the 26 items to five dimensions of service quality, and multivariate analysis of variance was used to evaluate the effect of the demographic variables on those dimensions. Gender of the customer was found to have a significant effect on the combined dimensions of service quality; other variables were not significant.

The effectiveness of an educational psychotherapy presentation on Asians' therapy expectations and help-seeking attitudes was investigated. Subjects were foreign-born Asian university students. Compared to a non-Asian American normative sample, the Asian group demonstrated significantly less accurate expectations about therapy and less positive attitudes about seeking help for psychological problems. A psychotherapy presentation was used to modify expectations and attitudes. It consisted of an audiotaped lecture on therapist and client roles and the types of problems discussed in therapy. It also included a written transcript of therapist-client dialogues for subjects to read. The experimental group, which received the presentation, was compared to placebo control and delayed-treatment control groups. The psychotherapy presentation did not modify Asians' expectations or attitudes more than the control groups. Instead, all three groups showed improvement at posttest. Because there is a clear need to assess further the therapy expectations and attitudes of Asians, future research was recommended.

This dissertation analyses the biofuel debate in the UK, focusing on how the UK Government has deployed expectations to legitimise its biofuel policy. The analysis builds on the sociology of expectations, integrated with insights from the multi-level perspective (MLP) on socio-technical transitions. By the end of the 1990s, a sustainable paradigm permeated UK road transport policy opening a space for biofuel policy to emerge. In the second half of the 2000s, disagreements among UK stakeholders over the translation of EU biofuel targets into UK biofuel policy prefigured later EU-wide discussions over limiting targets for first-generation biofuels. Biofuels critics disagreed with the UK Government and biofuels supporters over how to protect a space for future second-generation biofuels, which were expected to overcome the harm caused by currently available, but controversial, first-generation biofuels. The UK Government and biofuels supporters defended rising targets for available biofuels as a necessary stimulus for industry to help fulfil the UK’s EU obligations and eventually develop second-generation biofuels. By contrast, critics opposed biofuels targets on the grounds that these would instead lock-in first-generation biofuels, thus pre-empting second-generation biofuels. I argue that these disagreements can be explained in relation to the UK Government‘s responsibilities relating to “promise-requirement cycles”, whereby technological promises generate future requirements for the actors involved. Further, I claim that the UK Government’s stance reflects what I call a “policy-promise lock-in” – i.e. a situation in which previous policy commitments towards technology innovators of incumbent technologies (currently controversial and potentially driven by several imperatives) are officially justified as necessary for the development of preferable emerging technologies. Finally, my analysis expands the focus of the sociology of expectations, which has hitherto mostly been used to investigate expectations from technology innovators – i.e. scientists or industrialists – by investigating how other types of actor mediate expectations among different parties, in particular, public authorities, industry associations, consultancies, and non-governmental organisations.

The aim of this study was to examine how our way of doing gender affect female managers in the male-dominated IT organizations and how the female managers handle the consequences they entail. The study is based on a qualitative research approach where we gathered empirical data through semi-structured interviews. In this study, six respondents with varying experiences of management role within the IT organizations participated. The results are analyzed with the help of previous research and the theoretical framework which included Pierre Bourdieu's theory masculine domination and the West and Zimmerman's theory doing gender. In our study, we concluded that female managers in the male-dominated IT organizations feel the need to adapt to a greater degree than their male counterparts. As a result of the contradictions that exist in the female gender norms versus the role expectations placed on managers, who have a male character, women need to downplay their femininity, including  by adjusting their language.