Employee engagement at a higher education institution in South Africa: Individual,team and organisational levels

We examined the levels of employee engagement among staff members at a higher education institution in South Africa at the individual, team, and organisational levels. The participants (N = 202) completed a validated measure of employee engagement (females = 62.4%; academic staff = 28.2%). Data analysis indicated that the highest level of employee engagement was at the team level. The lowest level of employee engagement was at the individual level. Findings suggest a need for interventions to increase employee engagement at the individual level, in order to allow for the comprehensive implementation of mission aligned strategies at higher education institutions.     

社会心理服务体系建设的应然与实然：基于全国12个试点地区的评估

社会心理服务体系建设是我国创新社会治理的重要举措,旨在解决社会心态培育和心理建设问题,并按心理规律开展社会治理。然而这一概念的“应然意涵”是否在全国各地的建设实践中得以贯彻,仍有待探讨。本研究收集了反映全国12个社会心理服务体系建设试点地区实际工作情况的网络文本资料,按照组织架构、工作模式等6个一级指标以及其下的23个二级指标,对资料进行编码以描述各地建设的“实然状况”。文本分析结果显示：（1）各试点地区社会心理服务体系建设的内容定位“心理健康”倾向严重;（2）社会心理服务整体上仅偏重“风险防控”工作;（3）社会心理服务与社会治理关系错位。总之,全国各地社会心理服务体系建设的“实然状况”与“应然意涵”之间存在较大差距。     

Three Models of Global Community

Debates about global justice tend to assume normative models of global community without justifying them explicitly. These models are divided between those that advocate a borderless world and those that emphasize the self-sufficiency of smaller political communities. In the first case, there are conceptions of a community of trade and a community of law. In the second case, there are ideas of a community of nation-states and of a community of autonomous communities. The nation-state model, however, is not easily justified and is one that has been criticized extensively elsewhere. The model of a community of trade underlies both advocates of market-oriented development and exponents of global schemes of redistribution of resources and incomes. I analyze the work of Charles Beitz, Peter Singer, and Thomas Pogge to show that the assumption that global interdependence is beneficial is poorly justified. The model of a community of law, as seen in the work of Henry Shue and others, is the basis for arguments against state sovereignty and in favor of international human rights regimes. I argue that this model suffers either from a problem of practicability or of hegemony. Finally, the model of a community of autonomous communities uses notions of patriotism and sovereignty to maintain that disengagement and independence are the best routes to global peace and justice.     

Against Global Egalitarianism

This article attacks the view that global justice should be understood in terms of a global principle of equality. The principle mainly discussed is global equality of opportunity – the idea that people of similar talent and motivation should have equivalent opportunity sets no matter to which society they belong. I argue first that in a culturally plural world we have no neutral way of measuring opportunity sets. I then suggest that the most commonly offered defences of global egalitarianism – the cosmopolitan claim that human lives have equal value, the argument that a persons nationality is a morally arbitrary characteristic, and the more empirical claim that relationships among fellow-nationals are no longer special in a way that matters for justice – are all defective. If we fall back on the idea of equality as a default principle, then we have to recognize that pursuing global equality of opportunity systematically would leave no space for national self-determination. Finally, I ask whether global inequality might be objectionable for reasons independent of justice, and argue that the main reason for concern is the inequalities of power that are likely to emerge in a radically unequal world.I am very grateful to Gillian Brock and Kok-Chor Tan for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.     

Reasonable Impartiality and Priority for Compatriots. A Criticism of Liberal Nationalism’s Main flaws

Distinguishing between reasonable partiality and reasonable impartiality makes a difference in resolving the serious clashes between priority for compatriots versus cosmopolitan global duties. Defenders of a priority for compatriots have to acknowledge two strong moral constraints: states have to fulfil all their special, domestic and trans-domestic duties, and associative duties are limited by distributive constraints resulting from the moral duty to fight poverty and gross global inequalities. In the recent global context, I see four main problems for liberal-nationalist defenders of priority for compatriots: (i) Reasonable particularists often forget that associative duties for compatriots compete with many sub-national and trans-domestic associative duties. (ii) They tend to forget that associative national duties compete with other, strong special (contractual, reparative) obligations regarding not only citizens and residents inside nation-states but also trans-domestic obligations across state borders. (iii) They do not properly discuss the problem of unallocated duties in addressing global poverty and insecurity. (iv) The design of supra-national and global mediating institutions, and the crafting of policies to remedy the misallocation of duties and to coordinate the required state activities is an urgent task neglected by liberal nationalists. In the recent context, reasonable partialitys bias towards partiality is most unwelcome and morally dubious. Reasonable impartialitys bias towards cosmopolitanism helps to stimulate a drastic shift in obligations and stimulates productive trans-national institutional design.     

Subjective Well-Being and Kahneman’s ‘Objective Happiness’

This paper is an attempt to clarify the relation between, on the one hand, the construct of ‘objective happiness’ recently proposed by Daniel Kahneman and, on the other hand, the principal focus of happiness studies, namely subjective well-being (SWB). I have two aims. The first, a critical one, is to give a theoretical explanation for why ‘objective happiness’ cannot be a general measure of SWB. Kahneman’s methodology precludes incorporation of relevant pieces of information that can become available to the subject only retrospectively. The second aim, a constructive one, is to clarify the exact connection between ‘objective happiness’ and the wider notion of SWB. Unlike Kahneman, who treats the notion as a useful first approximation, I propose that its applicability should be thought of as context-dependent: under some conditions it could be the right measure of SWB but what these conditions are involves both psychological and ethical considerations.