This article contributes to a growing conversation about the role of numbers in promoting gendered agendas in potentially contradictory ways. Drawing from interviews with gender advisors—the professionals tasked with mainstreaming gender in development projects—in an East African country, I begin from the paradox that gender advisors articulate a strong preference for qualitative data to best capture the lives of the women they aim to assist while voicing a need for quantitative metrics. I demonstrate that gender advisors come to imagine metrics (...) as expeditious bureaucratic tools able to inspire cooperation from otherwise reluctant coworkers. I argue that development organizations are gendered in ways—acutely seen in how advisors struggle, are sidelined, and attempt to advance their goals with numbers—that lead to the utility of valuing quantitative metrics over qualitative ones. I establish two theoretical contributions: Gendered organizations theory is essential to understanding the adoption and globalization of performance metrics, and in an age of evidence-based decision making, the utility of quantified data to garner resources is heightened, rewarding those who adopt quantified knowledge production. I coin the term “the paradox of quantified utility” to describe how these material advantages encourage even skeptics to value quantitative metrics. (shrink)

Examines the social aspect of moral agency, building an account of critical engagement that focuses on the transformation of moral attention through communicative exchange, rather than on matters of judgment or on behavioral outcomes.

Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) is a methodology that is well suited to inquiring into nursing knowledge and its organization. It is a critical analytic approach derived from Foucault's histories of science, madness, medicine, incarceration and sexuality, all of which serve to exteriorize or make visible the ‘positive unconscious of knowledge’ penetrating bodies and minds. Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) holds the potential to reveal who we are today as nurses and as a profession of nursing by facilitating our ability to identify (...) and trace the effects of the discourses that determine the conditions of possibility for nursing practice that are continuously shaping and (re)shaping the knowledge of nursing and the profession of nursing as we know it. In making visible the chain of knowledge that orders the spaces nurses occupy, no less than their subjectivities, FDA is a powerful methodology for inquiring into nursing knowledge based on its provocation of deep critical reflection on the normalizing power of discourse. (shrink)

Drawing on a comprehensive, pan-national analysis of the corporatization of Canadian universities, as well as the notions of ‘parrhesiastic’ mentorship and practice, the authors examine the effects of the corporatized university, its implications for graduate nursing education and nursing's relative silence on the subject. With the preponderance of business interests, the increasing dependence of universities on industry funding, cults of efficiency, research intensivity, and the pursuit of profit so prevalent in today's corporatized university, we argue that philosophical presuppositions so crucial (...) to critical teaching, research, and reflection on nursing as a discipline are troublingly losing ground. We lament the erosion and fragmentation of philosophy, politics, and ethics as foundations for graduate education, which are increasingly perceived as less valuable, problematic, and in some cases, even burdensome. The effect of corporatization is the suppression of the critical engagement required of faculty in the everyday workings of institutions. We argue that, when the ideals of intellectual freedom, academic responsibility, duty, and obligation, as supported by philosophical thought, are smothered by the normalizing power of corporatized research agendas, philosophical approaches to inquiry and knowledge development become marginalized as scholars find themselves floundering in the face of a seeming ‘philosophy lost’. (shrink)

This paper uses Schrag's framework to analyze an episode of pain and to discuss the phenomenological perspective of pain. The experience of pain is explicated through the metaphor of co-present, interwoven fields of consciousness, embodiment, attitudinal posture and custom, time, and space. Interventions based on the metaphor are discussed.

Accurately predicting other people's actions may involve two processes: internal real-time simulation (dynamic updating) and matching recently perceived action images (static matching). Using a priming of body parts, this study aimed to differentiate the two processes. Specifically, participants played a motion-controlled video game with either their arms or legs. They then observed arm movements of a point-light actor, which were briefly occluded from view, followed by a static test pose. Participants judged whether this test pose depicted a coherent continuation of (...) the previously seen action (i.e., “action prediction task”). Evidence of dynamic updating was obtained after compatible effector priming (i.e., arms), whereas incompatible effector priming (i.e., legs) indicated static matching. Together, the results support action prediction as engaging two distinct processes, dynamic simulation and static matching, and indicate that their relative contributions depend on contextual factors like compatibility of body parts involved in performed and observed action. (shrink)

Increasing pharmaceutical industry presence in health care research and practice has evoked critical social, political, economic, and ethical questions and concern among health care providers, ethicists, economists, and the general citizenry. The case example presented of the ‘marketization’ of nursing practice not only reveals the magnitude of the purview of the pharmaceutical industry, it demonstrates how that industry imparts effect upon the organization of nursing work, an area of health care professional practice where the ethical polemic of pharmaceutical industry involvement (...) and influence has been largely ignored, and the profession of nursing conspicuously silent. Drawing on a Foucauldian dispositive analysis that troubled the complex apparatus responsible for the production of knowledge and action in the neurology subspecialty of multiple sclerosis (MS), the case discloses how the pharmaceutical industry has created compliance and adherence as clinical imperatives in the practice of MS nursing. The case makes explicit the conscious transformative self‐action undertaken by MS nurses as a result of their subjectivation (marketization) and demonstrates how MS nurses have become pawns in pharmaceutical industry strategic games of power, truth, identity, and wealth creation by turning their clinical practice settings into heterodiscursive spaces of surveillance and persuasion. MS nurses have become instruments of the pharmaceutical industry, and their clinical practices ordered, organized, limited, constrained, and marketized as a result. (shrink)

Springer focuses on the nature and challenges of "leadership" in contemporary environmental diplomacy since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

If I choose two words in the book that I think have been most influential, I would choose "mutually exclusive." Sacks was scarcely the first critic to observe that the kinds of fiction are usually actions, apologues, or satires. But no other theoretician has insisted so cogently as he did that, as principles governing the interaction of parts in a coherent work, these principles are mutually exclusive, "mutually incompatible." The reason Sacks became a great journal editor was that the firmness (...) of his own principles never blinded him to the value of other and very different theoretical questions which might be addressed to a work of fiction. And his tone of voice was never brazen but always that of the eighteenth-century gentleman: Come, let us reason together. Yet he never blinked his adherence to the truths he saw: he stated them directly, and he taught us to strive equally to face the consequences of holistic recognition of forms: "One cannot create an action which is also a satire any more than he can write an active sentence which is also a passive sentence in English. To carry the analogy a step farther, the observation that the types are mutually incompatible is no more an attempt to dictate to writers what they may or may not do than is the observation that active sentences are not passive sentences" . Mary Doyle Springer, associate professor of English at Saint Mary's College of California, is the author of Forms of the Modern Novella and A Rhetoric of Literary Character: Some Women of Henry James. She is presently at work on a companion theoretical study dealing with the rhetoric of dramatic character in performance. (shrink)

Moral theories often take the guidance of individual conduct as their central task, and seek to provide grounds for confidence in deliberation. Yet they are inevitably also drawn into justifying our reactions to and interventions in one another's actions. This dissertation takes critical encounters to mark a central aspect of moral life. Yet standard deontological and consequentialist theories fall short of providing conceptual tools adequate for reflection on this aspect, and virtue theory is surprisingly undeveloped here. I develop a naturalistic (...) account of the capacities and virtues of critical engagement, and suggest some consequences in ethics and metaethics. ;Critical processes are often inarticulate, being experientially and historically prior to moral theory. For example, certain "thick" judgments , conceive a provocation immediately in terms of specific evaluative response-strategies whose fittingness is implicitly honored, but left opaque. Processes of critical response also function inarticulately on a much larger scale, sparking long-term projects, convictions, and identities of solidarity and resistance. A proper-function account of critical agency illuminates our intuitive attachments to critical response patterns, while suggesting some senses in which they can fail. ;Meanwhile, articulated moral judgments have a problematic role in critical engagement. They can be understood as signs with descriptive content, but such content cannot be interpreted without attention to how the thought or claim is historically poised to be put to use or "taken up" in subsequent attitudes and activity. I highlight the fragility of the historical, social, and psychological contexts in which moral verdicts engage effectively with their audiences. ;I argue against identifying the critical moral domain by way of its connection to any fixed set of reactive attitudes, such as resentment and guilt . Moral complexity and critical virtue emerge as critical agency acquires certain new formal dimensions. Subtleties of critical virtue include a capacity for engaged ambivalence, interest in the genealogy of our attitudes and norms, and an ability to apprehend and reconstruct strands of critical moral agency where we might otherwise have been tempted to diagnose brute moral error. (shrink)

Prior research suggests that midlife husbands have worse health when they earn less than their wives; however, the mechanism for this relationship have not been evaluated. In this study, the author analyzes 1,319 heterosexual married couples from the Health and Retirement Study to explore three theoretically grounded mechanisms. The author begins by assessing two well-established family relations theories to explore the mediating effect of marital power and relationship quality. The author then draws from gender relations theory, multiple masculinities literature, and (...) cognitive dissonance research to test the possibility of a male breadwinner mechanism. The results demonstrate that family relations theories are insufficient explanations but provide strong support for the male breadwinner mechanism. Specifically, being the secondary earner is harmful for the health of highest-income men—who historically have the strongest expectation of male breadwinning. These findings suggest that stereotypes about male breadwinning can be dangerous for men’s health. (shrink)

Sporulation in the mold Neurospora crussa can proceed along three very different pathways, leading to the production of three types of spores. Two asexual sporulation pathways that lead to the formation of macroconidia and microconidia involve budding from hyphae by two different mechanisms. A much more complex sexual reproductive pathway involves the formation of a fruiting body called a perithecium, in which meiosis takes place and ascospores are formed in sac‐like cells called asci. Numerous mutations exist that affect these developmental (...) pathways, and genes have been isolated that are expressed preferentially during sporulation. The Neurospora sporulation pathways offer a simple system with which to study mechanisms and regulation of development that are usually obscured by complex cell‐cell interactions involved in animal and plant development. (shrink)

Social psychologists have evidence that evaluative feedback on others’ choices sometimes has unwelcome negative effects on hearers’ motivation. Holroyd’s article (Holroyd J. Ethical Theory Moral Pract 10:267–278, 2007) draws attention to one such result, the undermining effect, that should help to challenge moral philosophers’ complacency about blame and praise. The cause for concern is actually greater than she indicates, both because there are multiple kinds of negative effect on hearer motivation, and because these are not, as she hopes, reliably counteracted (...) by implicit features of praise and blame. The communicative ideal that she articulates does point us in the right direction, but it requires further elaboration. Once it is spelled out, we find that realizing this ideal, in light of the empirical research, requires rethinking the role of verdict-like judgments within moral feedback. (shrink)

In his struggle to constitute sociology as a natural science, Durkheim fought against finalism, Gabriel Tarde’s general project, efforts at theoretical synthesis unconnected to specific empirical problems, and ideological analysis. The article dwells on these four "epistemological battles," especially on Durkheim’s (unfortunately failed) effort toward purging the social sciences from ideological analysis.

If we are to better understand and negotiate current and future problems in the food supply chain, it will be essential to pay more attention to the role and position of professionals involved. 'Professionals in food chains' addresses questions as: What are the main ethical challenges for professionals in the food supply chain? Who within this complex field holds responsibility for what? What does it mean for the food-related professions to operate in an atmosphere of immense social tension and high (...) expectations? Which virtues are required to do a 'good' job? In brief: What can be said about the roles, responsibilities, and ethics of professionals across this dynamic field? Topics covered include general issues on professional roles and responsibility, sustainable food supply chains, novel approaches in food production systems, current food politics, the ethics of consumption, veterinary ethics, pedagogical/educational and research ethics, as well as aquacultural, agricultural, animal, and food ethics. (shrink)

What does it mean to be human? This book explores that age-old question and provides a basis for rethinking the nature of all living beings. This book will leave you with a new understanding of yourself and your existence in the world as well as the nature of all beings.

Alongside the public and private, the sacred can represent a third social-political dispensation, as Raymond Geuss notes. The modern liberal public/private divide represents a historical anomaly, w...

Drawing upon selected literature from the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Canada we examine how Foucault's concepts of ‘episteme’, ‘rupture’ ‘parrhesia’ ‘care of the self’, and ‘problemitization’ have been applied to particular contexts of leadership development, pedagogy, nursing knowledge, and the relationship between caring and politics. Our aims are threefold: to give examples of how selected Foucauldian concepts have been taken up in practice; to clarify how we are positioned today as nurses; and to invite more nurses to engage critically with (...) historical inquiry and to engage in deep philosophical reflection about their relationship with nursing. We begin by examining the conditions and circumstances of Foucault's life, and conclude by posing the question in our subtitle to stimulate debate about the philosophical relevance of Foucauldian scholarship to nursing. (shrink)