Cognitive Processes While Writing Poetry: An Expert-Novice Study

To identify expert poets’ cognitive processes as they compose poetry, we asked 10 expert poets and 10 novice writers of poetry to think aloud as they composed a poem. Compared to the novices, expert poets revealed an associative playfulness and surrendering of consciousness, similar to that shown in research on general creativity in domains such as art, music, and science. Experts also demonstrated significantly more evidence of deliberate procedures and active revision. Novices rarely revised their poems. With regard to meaning, experts made significantly more comments about how the text was meaningful, in particular how textual elements evoke and amplify meaning, than about what the text merely meant. The novices commented more on what the text meant than how the text was meaningful. In discussing the results, we propose a model of the cognitive processes involved in poetic composition, and explore implications for instruction in school and post-secondary educational settings.     

Moving beyond ethical decision-making: a practice-based view to study unethical sales behavior

Changes in the business environment are rapidly transforming sales practice and pressuring the integrity of key actors in sales. Given that unethical sales behavior is a social activity produced and reproduced by various actors in a complex sales task environment, we introduce a novel research perspective to the study of unethical sales behavior, namely a practice-based view. With knowledge from a systematic literature review and a practice-based view from organization research, we suggest that unethical behavior should be studied as a practice formed through socialization and interaction with relevant others. This view provides an important alternative as well as a complementary perspective to the ethical decision-making paradigm that has dominated the field for several decades. The study answers scholars’ recent calls to strengthen the theoretical foundation of sales ethics research and further extend its perspective toward the social context of sales. With a focus on dynamics, social relations, and the enactment of practices, the practice-based view produces new types of knowledge on unethical behavior and potential new means for addressing it. The article makes suggestions for future practice-based research and proposes several theories for use in studying unethical behavior in currently important sales contexts.     

“If I could burn the space”: on homelessness and the collapse of subjectivity in S.Y. Agnon’s A Guest for the Night*

A Guest for the Night, one of Agnon’s greatest novels, has long been considered to have dealt with the demise of Jewish Eastern Europe, Zionism and the art of the novel. This article offers a different reading, showing Agnon’s novel as a radical work that may have greatly exceeded its author’s intentions. Focusing on the irony directed at the novel’s narrator, I claim that A Guest for the Night calls on its readers to reconsider common premises regarding the history and politics of Eretz Israel/Palestine.     

Career proactivity: A bibliometric literature review and a future research agenda

Individuals often need to be proactive in order to successfully navigate their career development journeys. To what extent one is vocationally proactive has critical implications for his or her attitudes, behaviors, and other outcomes in career and work-related settings. However, research in career proactivity has been accumulating from divergent perspectives, resulting in a substantially fragmented literature that has not been comprehensively, objectively synthesized to guide the field to move forward. To advance the domain of career proactivity, this paper synthesizes theoretical and empirical literatures using two major bibliometric analyses. We first analyze the intellectual basis of the career proactivity literature by performing document citation analysis. We then review the developmental trends of main conceptual themes in career proactivity literature using a temporal co-word analysis. Informed by these bibliometric findings, we propose a roadmap for future research highlighting the need to clear up concepts, account for context, develop new meso-level theories, and bridge the domains of organizational behavior and vocational development.     

Greeting skills: A systematic review of the literature

Individuals with disabilities often demonstrate difficulty in social communication skills such as greetings. Studies have shown that deficits in greetings may negatively affect social interactions and vocational opportunities. Therefore, previous research has evaluated a variety of teaching procedures to increase greetings for individuals with disabilities with varying efficacy. This review of the literature provides an overview of studies to date in which greetings were taught to individuals with intellectual disabilities. A variety of teaching procedures were identified, and implications of those procedures are discussed. Results suggest that multiple teaching procedures may be effective; however, component analyses, further replication, and modified generalization procedures are necessary. Implications for future researchers include identifying a technological definition of greetings and evaluating effective teaching procedures and generalization strategies. Implications for practitioners include teaching one greeting type at a time, limiting the number of social skills taught simultaneously, identification of effective teaching procedures and generalization considerations.     

The Roman Catholic Church and Slavery in José Evaristo d'Almeida's O Escravo (The Slave)

This installment of Dialog's Theology in Film and Fiction series introduces the first Cape Verdean novel, The Slave, by José Evaristo d'Almeida (1856). This vivid story depicts a number of social and moral issues tied together within the tragic plot of the novel. The article discusses the historical relationship of the Roman Catholic Church to slavery, the colonial history of Portugal and Cape Verde, and the theological use of the Bible in this history. This discussion is applied to Almeida's novel, revealing the manifold nineteenth‐century varieties of the literary history and theology of colonialism.     

PSYCHOANALYSIS AS APPLIED AESTHETICS

The question of how to place psychoanalysis in relation to science has been debated since the beginning of psychoanalysis and continues to this day. The author argues that psychoanalysis is best viewed as a form of applied art (also termed applied aesthetics) in parallel to medicine as applied science. This postulate draws on a functional definition of modernity as involving the differentiation of the value spheres of science, art, and religion. The validity criteria for each of the value spheres are discussed. Freud is examined, drawing on Habermas, and seen to have erred by claiming that the psychoanalytic method is a form of science. Implications for clinical and metapsychological issues in psychoanalysis are discussed.     

Delving into psychoanalytic texts: the notion of the reading third

In this article I introduce the notion of the reading third, which evolves during the reading process. The idea came to my mind while studying Wolfgang Iser’s theory of the reading process, and already knowing about Thomas Ogden’s concept of the analytic third: What is experienced, shaped and understood while reading a text? The notion of the reading third is based on psychoanalytic theory and method like just Ogden’s concept, and on the aesthetic response theory of Iser. Elaborating the reading third, I combine two modes of reading: one understanding and interpreting, and one floating and experiencing mode. To these modes I add two different understandings of truth. The first mode is connected to a traditional, objective and visible truth. The latter mode relies on Wilfred Bion’s concept of O, a special kind of evasive, ephemeral truth. The reading third takes and loses form as one reads, accentuating reading as a highly creative activity, where each reading elicits different understandings, experiences and truths. I give examples of such a way of reading psychoanalytic texts like those of Bion and a work of fiction, Henry James’ short novel The Turn of the Screw.     

Reflection in asynchronous online postsecondary courses: a reflective review of the literature

Reflection is a term which appears often in the discourse of online postsecondary education, where it is typically offered as the key to ‘deep learning’. However, although researchers agree that reflection is a vital aspect of online learning, and even that new technologies can promote reflection, there is a surprising lack of clarity about what reflection actually means in e-learning contexts. This paper reports on a survey of the literature on reflection in online postsecondary learning for the years 2000–2015. Reading, rereading and reflecting on the 46 articles, papers and theses that met the search criteria, the author found that studies on the topic tend to be based on diverse, vague and questionable understandings about what reflection entails. A major implication is that, lacking a clear understanding of what is being studied, research can only yield inconclusive findings about the strategies that prompt and support students’ reflection in online postsecondary education.