Actual and ideal work tasks of careers officers

Actual and ideal functions of careers officers as seen by professional workers in the Youth Employment Service and by students in training were investigated. An instrument - based on an American counsellor task inventory and subsequently named the Careers Officers Task Inventory (COTI) - was administered by mail to a nationally representative total sample, consisting of a random sample of careers officers (stratified by geographical region and office size), all careers officers with special responsibilities for the handicapped, and the total intake of student careers officers in Britain at the time of the survey. Negligible disparity was found between perceptions of the job as it is and as it should be. Differences between sub-samples included differing perceptions of the role of counselling. Some contrasts with parallel American findings are indicated, and questions for future research are raised.     

Finishing the Story: Aging,Spirituality, and the Work of Culture

ABSTRACT

Society projects its death anxiety onto old age and the aging, who are isolated from generative human contact, with no conversation expected. Any shared, common language atrophies. Broken connection becomes a cultural expectation. Society and the aging lose sight of developmental tasks appropriate to old age. We do not seek or foster last careers devoted to finishing the human story, to completing a sense of meaning about life. Such a last career would raise questions about soul-making and invite awe and wonder at life and death. But no one is called to do such work today, so unfinished cultural business accumulates. We should anoint or commission the aging for their last career because of its significance for them and for culture. When the aging take up such last careers and find themselves immediately confronted with the task of life review, they may discover opportunities for repenting, mythologizing, and sacralizing. The work of culture gets done, and gifts to the future are offered by the aging. The broken circle of conversation is closed, re-connections are made, and human communities, including the worlds of the living and the dead, are made whole.     

Military Service and the Life-Course Perspective: A Turning Point for Military Personnel Research

The political and scientific climate is ready for a change in perspective in the field of military personnel psychology. Although more than 200,000 of America's most fit young men and women pass through the military establishment each year, we know very little about the effects of their early military experiences on their life choices or on their subsequent military or civilian careers. Recent interest in these issues shown by Congress, the press, and the Department of Defense (DoD) strongly suggests that psychologists need to address research questions that can evaluate the real lifetime costs and benefits of military service. Current military personnel research approaches are inadequate for this task. Life-course theory is presented as a viable and vigorous conceptual and analytic framework for accomplishing this mission.     

Social constructionism in the study of career: Accessing the parts that other approaches cannot reach

In this article we consider the contribution of a social constructionist perspective to our understandings of career. We examine this approach in relation to two studies: a study of women's career transition from organizational employment to portfolio work, and a study of the careers of research scientists. Within the career literature a dichotomy has emerged between what are seen as “traditional” and “new” careers. On the face of it these studies seem to neatly illustrate this dichotomy. However, when examined from a social constructionist perspective, questions are raised about the viability of this binarism. In this article we argue this approach enables us to transcend dualisms which have prevailed in career theory, facilitates analyses of the relationship between careers and the social contexts in which they are embedded, and illuminates issues of power and ideology which are often eclipsed by more positivistic research approaches.     

The Value Question in Metaphysics

Much seems to be at stake in metaphysical questions about, for example, God, free will or morality. One thing that could be at stake is the value of the universe we inhabit—how good or bad it is. We can think of competing philosophical positions as describing possibilities, ways the world might turn out to be, and to which value can be assigned. When, for example, people hope that God exists, or fear that we do not possess free will, they express attitudes towards these possibilities, attitudes that presuppose answers to questions about their comparative value. My aim in this paper is to distinguish these evaluative questions from related questions with which they can be confused, to identify structural constraints on their proper pursuit, and to address objections to their very coherence. Answers to such evaluative questions offer one measure of the importance of philosophical disputes.     

Managerial career patterns: A review of the empirical evidence

Despite the ubiquitous presence of the term “career patterns” in the discourse about careers, the existing empirical evidence on (managerial) career patterns is rather limited. From this literature review of 33 published empirical studies of managerial and similar professional career patterns found in electronic bibliographic databases, it is clear that upward mobility is still the norm, even when contrasting traditional to “new” careers. We argue that the nature and number of unique career patterns identified is strongly influenced by where and when the data were collected (i.e. empirical access), and how career patterns are measured. Our review further shows organizations clearly still act as containing social structures for the patterning of managerial careers, and that contemporary managerial careers, despite some evidence of increasing inter-organizational mobility, have new boundaries which induce linearity. We provide insights for further conceptualization of managerial career patterns and for advancing methodological approaches, including the use of optimal matching analysis and narratives. By expanding the scope of career pattern dimensions beyond time and direction, this review provides ground for further research on managerial career patterns.     

Restricting health worker migration in the name of solidarity

This paper explores and adds to Gillian Brock and Michael Blake’s debate on health worker migration. Brock argues for a limited right of states to restrict the migration of health workers beyond their borders. She offers a range of reasons to support this argument based broadly on her account of global justice. In the context of health worker migration, she supports her argument more specifically by linking health workers’ obligations to duties of reciprocity and not imposing costs on their compatriots. In this paper, I seek to support her argument by offering solidarity, as developed in the literature on public health ethics, as a ground for the obligations of health workers to their compatriots and a limited right of states to restrict their movements. On a narrow view of reciprocity, health workers are obligated to repay their communities for the benefits that they have received during their childhoods and training. Solidarity augments this view by arguing that all persons also have positive obligations to take public actions to address injustices. This complementary ground for restrictions on the movements of health workers helps to address Blake’s critiques of communitarianism and reciprocity as justifying state restrictions.     

The Fear of Death

Taking a somewhat indirect route that includes some autobiographical reflection, I address three questions. One is what it might mean to say, with Socrates, that philosophy is "studying for death". The second is why Christians should fear death at all, if the good of Heaven is really what they believe is beyond it. The third is the question what difference it makes to your philosophical view of death if you are a believer.     

Autonomy Within Subservient Careers

While there is much literature on autonomy and the conditions for its attainment, there is less on how those conditions reflect on agents’ ordinary careers. Most people’s careers involve a great deal of subservient activity that would prevent the kind of control over agents’ actions that autonomy would seem to require. Yet, it would seem strange to deny autonomy to every agent who regularly follows orders at work—to do so would make autonomy a futile ideal. Most contemporary autonomy accounts provide purely theoretical analysis without reference to any practical goal that autonomy could serve. These accounts are likely to resolve this issue in one direction: either almost entirely including or excluding subservient workers from autonomy. Either solution would fail to distinguish agents who sufficiently control their lives, in spite of limited subservience, according to their own standards, from agents for whom subservience precludes a fulfilling life. I suggest the solution lies in a return to goal-oriented autonomy accounts, which can use the goal to distinguish when subservience overwhelms autonomy from when subservience and autonomy can coexist. I present an account that anchors autonomy in the happiness that it provides for agents who sufficiently control their lives as determined by their more important prudential standards. On this account, agents in subservient careers can be autonomous if they determine how to make their careers consistent with their happiness.     

Creatures of habit: The problem and the practice of liberation

This paper begins by reflecting on the concept of habit and discussing its significance in various philosophical and non-philosophical contexts – for this helps to clarify the connections between habit and selfhood. I then attempt to sketch an account of the self as ”nothing but habit,“ and to address the questions this raises about how such a self must be constituted. Finally, I focus on the issue of freedom, or liberation, and consider the possibility of moving beyond habit. I emphasize the body since it is through the body that the un-doing of habit must take place. Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty are distinguished from the many philosophers who have recognized the importance of habit by their more radical claim that we not only have habits, but are habits – and for this reason I draw on their work in the first two sections of this paper.     

Explicitly modeling the effects of aging on response time

Research into the effects of aging on response time has focused on Brinley plots. Brinley plots are constructed by plotting mean response times for older subjects against those for young subjects for a set of experimental conditions. The typical result is a straight line with a slope greater than 1 and a negative intercept. This linear function has been interpreted as showing that aging leads to a general slowing of cognitive processes. In this article, we show that the slope of the Brinley plot is actually a measure of the relative standard deviations of older versus young subjects’ response times; it is not a measure of general slowing. We examine current models of the effects of aging on mean response time and show how they might be reinterpreted. We also show how a more comprehensive model, Ratcliff’s diffusion model (1978), can account for Brinley plot regularities and, at the same time, provide an account of accuracy rates, the shapes of response time distributions, and the relative speeds of error and correct response times, aspects of the data about which models designed to account for Brinley plots are mute. We conclude by endorsing a research approach that applies explicit models to response time data in aging in order to use the parameters of the model to interpret the effects of aging.     

职业生涯晚期工作重塑与工作中成功老龄化

随着人口快速老龄化, 劳动人口中老年人的比重持续扩大。工作中成功老龄化(successful aging at work)积极看待工作中的老龄化过程, 指出老年员工不仅能很好地适应自身与工作变化, 还能为组织持续创造价值、发挥“余热”, 进而有助于缓解劳动力老龄化和年轻劳动力短缺所带来的难题。工作重塑(job crafting)作为员工的一种主动性行为, 与个体和环境因素的交互作用, 能有效帮助老年员工实现可持续的人-环境匹配和资源有效管理, 适应年龄与工作环境的变化, 在职业生涯晚期带来积极的工作结果, 最终实现工作中成功老龄化。工作中成功老龄化、老年员工工作重塑的概念和测量皆须进一步研究, 进而深入开展老年员工工作重塑对工作中成功老龄化的作用机制及干预方法实证研究。     

Xunzi on Moral Expertise

This paper is about two proposals endorsed by Xunzi. The first is that there is such a thing as a moral expert, whose moral advice we should adopt even when we cannot appreciate for ourselves the considerations in favor of it. The second is that certain political authorities should be treated as moral experts. I identify three fundamental questions about moral expertise that contemporary philosophy has yet to address in depth, explicate Xunzi??s answers to them, and then give an account of politically authorized moral expertise as Xunzi understands it. The three questions at the heart of this study are these: how should we distinguish between knowing the correct course of action on another??s authority and knowing it for oneself? What exactly are the underlying considerations that the expert grasps and the novice does not? Who are the experts and in what spheres of life can they legitimately claim expertise?     

A life without a plan? Freelance musicians in pandemic limbo

The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the already precarious conditions of freelance workers. The aim of this study is to understand what it means for freelance musicians to be in pandemic limbo. Thirteen Swedish professional freelance musicians in the classical genre were interviewed about their experiences in the midst of the pandemic. A theoretical frame of reference is offered with concepts from Bourdieu, sociology of emotions and emotional geographies. This enables an understanding of what it means as a freelancer to be dislocated and disrupted in relation to places and spaces of work and investments in time and emotions. The conclusions are about the ambivalent emotions and processes of emotional management that are caused by the pandemic. For freelance musicians, depending on their access to the live-settings of gigs, auditions and social venues, it is like being thrown back in time and place (back to where careers were slowly built). However, while at a distance from the normal run of careers, constructive processes of critical reflection and re-orientation have been initiated.     

Automatic Emotion Regulation

How do people effectively regulate their emotional reactions? Why are some people better at this than others? Most prior research has addressed these questions by focusing on deliberate forms of emotion regulation. We argue that this focus has left out an important aspect of emotion regulation, namely, automatic emotion regulation (AER). Our review of the behavioral literature suggests that AER is pervasive in everyday life, and has far‐reaching consequences for individuals’ emotions. However, the behavioral literature has yet to address the mechanisms underlying the observed effects. Because it is difficult to directly measure the processes involved in AER, evidence from neuroscientific studies is particularly helpful in addressing these questions. Our review of the neuroscientific literature suggests distinct neural bases for different types of AER, which provides important clues about the cognitive and behavioral processes that might be involved in AER.     

Memory illusions and consciousness: Examining the phenomenology of true and false memories

Several recent false memory studies have addressed the question of how false memories are experienced phenomenologically. In this article we argue that it is not only possible to address questions of this sort, but it is necessary for a full understanding of memory illusions. We define memory illusions as false beliefs about the past that are experienced as memories. We then review a corpus of evidence that addresses the phenomenological experience of false memories. None of this evidence is perfect, but taken in its totality it suggests that false memories are similar to true memories but are also subtly different. We conclude with several recommendations for how the phenomenology of false memories can be fruitfully explored.     

Enhancing learning and retarding forgetting: Choices and consequences

Our research on learning enhancement has been focusing on the consequences for learning and forgetting of some of the more obvious and concrete choices that arise in instruction, including questions such as these: How does spacing of practice affect retention of information over significant retention intervals (up to 1 year)? Do spacing effects generalize beyond recall of verbal materials? Is feedback needed to promote learning, and must it be immediate? Although retrieval practice has been found to enhance learning in comparison with additional study, does it actually reduce the rate of forgetting? Can retrieval practice effects be extended to nonverbal materials? We suggest that as we begin to find answers to these questions, it should become possible for cognitive psychology to offer nonobvious advice that can be applied in a variety of instructional contexts to facilitate learning and reduce forgetting.     

Should we reject the expertise hypothesis?

On the basis of a review of the literature and the results of three experiments with dog experts, Robbins and McKone [Robbins, R. A., & McKone, E. (2006). No face-like processing for objects-of-expertise in three behavioural tasks, Cognition] argue that there is little or no evidence supporting an expertise account of the differences in configural processing that are typically observed between faces and non-face objects. In the spirit of a debate that has become overly polarized, we believe that R&M often emphasized relatively unimportant controversial issues at the expense of bigger, more important questions. We also feel that some of R&M's arguments are rooted in methodological confusions that should be clarified because they have implications beyond this specific debate. In this commentary, we first clarify issues surrounding the proper statistical analysis of the composite paradigm, a methodology that is commonly used to assess configural and holistic effects in both face and non-face objects. We then discuss several theoretical issues that we feel are central to the debate regarding accounts of face-specificity. We also briefly review positive evidence for the correlation between measures of behavioral expertise and neural markers of face-selectivity. Unlike R&M, we believe the positive evidence for expertise effects, both behavioral and neural, greatly outweighs evidence stemming from null results and that it clearly motivates the importance of future work on the role of experience in the specialization of visual cortex.     

Naturalizing Myths of Aging: Reading Popular Culture

This essay blends distinct fields of study--namely semiotics, gerontology, geriatrics, and the critical analysis of dramatic and filmic comedy of the modern era--in a way that we hope sheds light on the perception of elders both in our cultural tradition and in our current society. By bringing to bear these disciplines on this issue, we attempt to expose one way that erroneous perceptions about the elderly--myths, if you will--are propagated. Why is it, for example, that the majority of Americans have generally negative attitudes towards elders and the aging process despite the fact that such stereotypes are all contradicted by reality (Palmore, 1990)? What is it that we fear--and perhaps loathe--when it comes to our aging ? And why are we so irrational about this topic? How do myths of aging originate? And whose agenda might they serve? Is there some effective way that these myths can be defused in the popular mind? The above are all problematic questions, some with potentially disturbing answers. Yet we believe that by beginning to understand the linguistic and perceptual mechanisms by which myths of aging come into existence, a crucial first step will be taken toward understanding the source and the scope of the myths themselves. Perhaps only then will we be, as a society, in a position to countermand these usually harmful and often destructive misconceptions about our elderly population.     

An Investigation of Abusive Supervision,Vicarious Abusive Supervision,and Their Joint Impacts

ABSTRACT

Recent work has begun to look at the impact of abusive supervision, a dysfunctional workplace behavior, on employee outcomes. This study extends this line of research by examining vicarious abusive supervision (abuse not directly experienced, but rumors about it or hearing about it, that is “experienced vicariously”). In particular, this research effort investigates whether vicarious abuse has effects above and beyond those accounted for by personally experienced abusive supervision on the outcomes of job frustration, coworker abuse, and perceived organizational support. Our sample is composed of 233 workers from a large variety of organizations. Results reveal that both personally experienced and vicarious abuse have negative impacts and these effects are heightened when both forms of abusive supervision are present. Practical and theoretical implications, as well as directions for future research, are offered.