The Application of Chaos Theory to the Career‐Plateaued Worker

This article uses chaos theory as a way to conceptualize the career‐plateaued worker. After discussing the literature regarding both chaos theory and career plateau, it applies some of the principles of chaos theory to career‐plateaued workers on the basis of a case study. The article concludes that chaos theory provides career practitioners a useful application for working with this type of client.     

Creating Mr. Right and Ms. Right: Interpersonal ideals and personal change in newlyweds

Based on research on exchanging information during conflict (e.g., Levinger, 1983) and the energizing effects of negative feelings (e.g., Lewin, 1951; Gottman & Krokoff, 1989), this study explores circumstances in which individuals change, over the years, in fulfillment of their spouses’unmet ideals for them. In a longitudinal study of over 200 African American newlywed couples and White newlywed couples, respondents’ratings were combined to form an index of individuals’change in fulfillment of their partners’initially unmet ideals for them. Predictions were that individuals would change more when they listen and try to understand their partners’feelings during conflict or when they have negative feelings about the functioning of the relationship. Results were that high openness to information exchange during conflict predicted high change for White husbands, White wives, and African American wives, and negative feelings about relationship functioning predicted high change for White wives, African American wives, and African American husbands.     

A TRINITARIAN GRAMMAR OF SIN

This essay offers a critical reading of David Kelsey's hamartiology in Eccentric Existence. I elucidate Kelsey's “trinitarian grammar of sin,” which charts how human lives characteristically “miss the mark” of God's creating, consummating, and reconciling ways of relating to us. Kelsey uses this dynamic pattern of divine relating to illuminate the appropriate responses of the Christian life—faith, hope, and love—and their fundamental distortions. I commend three major contributions of Kelsey's hamartiology: his parsing of the relationship between sin and moral evil, his overturning of modernity's anthropocentric paradigm of sin, and his reconstruction of original sin. I conclude with three clusters of questions relating to: first, Kelsey's root paradigm of sin as idolatry, second, his use of impurity and stain language to describe original sin, and third, what is at stake in crafting theological anthropology in the analytical style of Eccentric Existence.     

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ERROR MANAGEMENT TRAINING WITH WORKING-AGED ADULTS

Low structure training that includes instructions about the benefits of errors typically enhances learning for college-student samples. Changes in abilities and skills that occur with age suggest that these findings may not necessarily generalize to working adults. Three training conditions, varying in structure and instructions, were examined in a sample of working-aged adults (N = 161, M_age= 39.7 years). Significant main effects of condition, cognitive ability, and age were found for training performance. An age × cognitive ability × error management instruction interaction indicated that error management instructions in high structure training were beneficial for older learners, especially when higher in ability. The importance of examining aptitude–treatment interactions in training research with working-aged adults is highlighted.     

Donna Haraway's Cyborg Touching (Up/On) Luce Irigaray's Ethics and the Interval Between: Poethics as Embodied Writing

In this article, I argue that Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg needs to be reassessed and extricated from the many misunderstandings that surround it. First, I suggest that we consider her cyborg as an ethical concept. I propose that her cyborg can be productively placed within the ethical framework developed by Luce Irigaray, especially in relationship to her concept of the “interval between.” Second, I consider how Haraway's “cyborg writing” can be understood as embodied ethical writing, that is, as a contemporary écriture feminine. I believe that this cyborgian “writing the body” offers us a way of both creating and understanding texts that think through ethics, bodies, aesthetics, and politics together as part of a vital and relevant contemporary feminist ethics of embodiment. I employ the term “poethics” as a useful way to describe such a practice.