Sex Differences In Response To Evaluative Feedback: A Field Study

We investigated sex differences in response to evaluative feedback among bank employees who were going through the annual performance evaluation process. Questionnaires were mailed to employees before and after they had their face–to–face evaluation with their supervisor. Women and men received similar evaluation scores. Men's self–esteem was relatively unaffected by the nature of the feedback, whereas women's self–esteem slightly improved after positive feedback and substantially dropped after negative feedback. After the evaluations, women reported greater intentions to change their behavior based on the evaluation. However, this finding was accounted for by men's higher job status relative to women. The findings for self–esteem were partly explained by women's greater agreement with the feedback compared to men. Future research should explore how the nature of the supervisee–supervisor relationship influences how women and men respond to feedback.     

Response To Jason Springs

Jason Springs’s Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society is a masterful attempt to practice productive conflict and democratic dialogue in the face of static antagonisms and deep-seated divisions. In my response, I underscore Springs’s insistence on mediating between the moral imagination of Richard Rorty and the prophetic critique of Cornel West. For the author of Healthy Conflict, any hope in the survival of democracy relies on balancing critique of domination with constructive proposals for a more just and equitable world. On the one hand, Springs rejects any strong distinction between moral imagination and socio-political critique; in fact, he argues for their intertwinement, especially in the work of West. At the same time, there are moments when he suggests an opposition between expanding the moral imagination and engaging in the critical enterprise, especially as he identifies the limits in Foucault regarding normativity and democratic struggle. I respond to this slippage by arguing that Foucault, and critical theory more broadly, open up possibilities for rethinking ethics, politics, and our relationship to the violence that sustains the order of things.     

Poetry and Truth: A Response to Wilna Meijer A response to Professor Meijer

Studies in Philosophy and Education -     

In Gratitude: A Non-utopian Response to Roth and Santostefano

Roth and Santostefano have usefully expanded the dialogue about the environment's role in psychological functioning. Santostefano offers a clinical approach that utilizes landscapes in reworking trauma. Roth cautions that a utopian perspective falsely dichotomizes natural and cultivated into bifurcated categories of good and bad that were the underpinnings of Nazi purification. Further, such thinking neglects the role of desire in the conflicts of human nature. This reply builds on Santostefano and Roth to suggest that incorporating an environmental lens into psychoanalysis challenges the human condition to act willfully on behalf of its own survival.