Reason,Representation, and Participation

This paper argues that the contrast between direct and representative democracy is less important than that between simple majoritarianism and deliberative i.e., public reason centred, democracy, as only the latter is sufficiently sensitive to the problem of domination. Having explored a range of arguments in favour of direct democracy it is argued that moves in this direction are only warranted when the practice of public reasoning will be enhanced. Both symbolic representation and delegate democracy are rejected in favour of substantive measures to formalise communication between voters and representatives and permit the formal contestation of political decision on the ground that these will provide stronger defences against domination within the political system.     

“Born Black and Male”: Counseling leaders’ self-discovery of strengths

Africentric/Afrocentric psychology frames the interview findings on five African-American male leaders in a racial, ethnic, and culturally diverse counseling association. The consensual qualitative research method was used to extrapolate themes from the five interviews. Africentric cultural strengths suggested in the themes are (a) autogeny, (b) primacy of the person in the context of community, (c) consubstantiality of primordial substance, (d) perpetual evolution, and (e) living forever. Two themes related to counseling practice are (f) social justice and (g) cultural empathy. Common trends in statements across interviews are illustrated with rich quotations and summaries. Although the framework of continental African world view facilitated understanding a few African-American male counseling leaders, the study evidences a larger universal human dimension of individuals’ pain, resilience, self-discovery of strengths, and leadership bound to a collective self-concept by which leadership can take place both individually and collectively.     

The Structure of Domination Today: A Lacanian View

Two topics determine today's liberal tolerant attitude towards Others: the respect of Otherness and the obsessive fear of harassment: the Other is OK insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as the Other is not really Other. The central human right in late-capitalist society, namely the right to be free from all harassment by the Other including the violent imposition of ethical norms, contrasts sharply with the violent imposition of divine Mosaic law – the Decalogue – from which the idea of human rights ultimately derives. The underlying discursive shift can be analyzed with the help of Lacan: the discourse of the Master had been replaced by university discourse. While the Master's decision is per se violent, university discourse is enunciated from the position of neutral Knowledge. The truth of the university discourse is power: the constitutive lie of the university discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension, presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual state of things.     

International Immersion in Counselor Education: A Consensual Qualitative Research Investigation

This study used consensual qualitative research methodology to examine the phenomenon of international immersion on counselor education students' (N = 10) development and growth. Seven domains emerged from the data (cultural knowledge, empathy, personal and professional impact, process/reflection, relationships, personal characteristics, and structure). Implications for multicultural education and future research are discussed. Este estudio empleó metodología consensuada de investigación cualitativa para examinar el fenómeno de la inmersión internacional en el desarrollo y crecimiento de estudiantes de educación en consejería (N = 10). Los datos arrojaron siete dominios (conocimiento cultural, empatía, impacto personal y profesional, proceso/reflexión, relaciones, características personales, y estructura). Se discuten las implicaciones para la educación multicultural y futuras investigaciones.     

Consensual Assessment of Creativity in Teaching Design by Supportive Peers—Its Validity,Practicality, and Benefit

Creativity in teaching is a significant and complex construct. However, in the local educational context, creativity in teaching has received little attention. This study aimed to investigate the validity, practicality, and benefits of applying a modified consensual assessment technique (CAT) to assess creativity in teaching design. Four hundred and eighty‐five written teaching designs were collected from 167 in‐service and pre‐service primary school teachers in Hong Kong. Instead of expert teachers, “supportive” peers, who had shown support, interest, and initiative in creative teaching were recruited as judges. A warm‐up exercise, with no definition of creativity, was given to the judges before beginning their assessments. The results indicated overall consistency in the judges' assessments of creativity, and that creativity factor could be distinguished from pedagogical skills and other technical factors. Most of the peer judges reported personal gains in creative teaching by engaging in the assessment process. On average, each judge spent approximately only 2 minutes rating each written teaching design. The findings confirm that the modified CAT is a valid and economical assessment method with learning benefits for the judges. The special values and implications of using supportive peer judges in consensual assessment are further discussed.     

Evaluating Fund Performance by Compromise Programming with Linear‐Quadratic Composite Metric: An Actual Case on The CaixaBank in Spain

This paper proposes an additive measure on the basis of compromise programming to evaluate fund performance from multiple criteria, of which the most usual are profitability and risk. This proposal is motivated by the fact that compromise programming is a sound decision support model to obtain scores of alternatives by minimizing weighted distances to an ideal point, the weights reflecting the investor's preferences for the criteria. To define the distance objective function, the linear‐quadratic composite metric is used, which combines advantages of linear and non‐linear objective functions. A critical advantage of compromise programming for fund performance evaluation is that the model can be extended to more than two financial criteria while other measures currently used (either ratio‐based or leverage‐based measures) only consider two criteria, say, profitability and risk. In the application, three investor's profiles are defined, which involve different weighting systems and lead to different fund rankings. These rankings are compared with domination relationships, the latter formulating if a fund is dominated or non‐dominated by convex combinations of other funds. Numerical tables are provided with data, computational process and results, which are analysed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Impact of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election on Politically Divided Relationships

Political identity represents a salient component of counselor and client identity tied to one's values and beliefs. The 2016 U.S. presidential election has been viewed as an especially divisive political environment that may have heightened emotion and elevated personal and collective political identities to new levels of awareness. We present findings from a consensual qualitative research study exploring personal and relational impacts of the election and discuss participants' (N = 16) strategies for relationship maintenance.