__Learning for Careers_ provides a comprehensive account of the Pathways to Prosperity Network, a national initiative focused on helping more young people successfully complete high school, attain a first postsecondary credential with value in the labor market, and get started on a career without foreclosing the opportunity for further education._ It takes as its starting point the influential 2011 _Pathways to Prosperity_ report, which challenged the prevailing idea that the core mission of high schools was to prepare all students for (...) college. In response, the Pathways Network was founded in 2012 to promote cooperative arrangements between educational and business institutions in order to fashion pathways for young people to acquire twenty-first-century skills and achieve professional success. This book traces the evolution of the Pathways Network over the past five years, focusing on the efforts of a diverse set of states and regions to build systems that span high school and the first two years of postsecondary education. States such as Delaware and Tennessee have been highly effective in establishing systems designed to equip students with credentials valued in the contemporary labor market. At the same time, the authors acknowledge the technical, political, and cultural challenges in redesigning career-focused education to produce satisfactory outcomes for young people throughout the country. _Learning for Careers_ offers a way forward for the millions of young people and employers that face a rapidly evolving and ever more competitive globalized workplace. This book will be essential reading for all who have a stake in educational and economic opportunity in the United States. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

In this review essay, K. Peter Kuchinke uses three recent publications to consider the question of how to educate young people for work and career. Historically, this question has been central to vocational education, and it is receiving renewed attention in the context of concerns over the ability of schools to provide adequate preparation for occupational roles and career success in a rapidly changing economic landscape. Philip Gonon's Quest for Modern Vocational Education provides a historical account of Georg Kerschensteiner's vision (...) of the role of work as a central subject matter for all students. His approach served as the foundation for the dual system in present-day Germany. Nancy Hoffman's Schooling in the Workplace contrasts the U.S. system of career preparation for non-college-bound students with that of five other OECD nations where workforce and academic preparation are more strongly connected to learning in the workplace. Christopher Winch's Dimensions of Expertise, finally, offers a conceptual analysis of central ideas of vocational knowledge and underscores the important role of learning in the context of practice. The three texts offer historical, comparative, and philosophical analyses of the complex task of preparation for work and challenge education scholars to move the subject matter into the center of contemporary educational theory. (shrink)

Rosenblum argues that we should judge associations not only by what they do for civic virtue, but also by what they do for individual members.

Political Thought and Political Thinkers. By Judith Shklar, edited by Stanley Hoffman (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998) xxvi + 402 pp. £47.95, $60.00 cloth, £16.75, $21.00 paper. Thoreau: Political Writings. Edited by Nancy L. Rosenblum, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xxxv + 178 pp. £30.00, $39.95 hardcover, £10.95, $14.95 paper.

Many, if not most, of our highly prized ‘laws’ of physics cannot be adequately rendered as statements of regular association among the values of ‘categorical’ quantities, I have argued.63 This is true even if we do not balk at the concept of natural necessity and are willing to add that the associations hold ‘by law’. They are rather ascriptions of capacities. They tell us what capacities a system will have by virtue of having a given property. The law of gravity (...) is one example. A system of mass M has the capacity of strength GMm/r2 to move another object of mass m a distance r away towards itself. I call this the gravitational capacity. My second thesis is a commonly shared one. Ascriptions of capacities do not reduce to conditionals involving only categorical properties. I shall here discuss two questions about these theses: 1) Why think of capacities as akin to dispositions or powers; and 2) Why allow them in science? Before tackling the first question, I shall first try to figure out what features we expect to be characteristic of dispositions and powers themselves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Rivalry?Rethinking Community in View of Apocalyptical ViolenceAndreas Oberprantacher (bio)But the republic of crime must also be the republic of the suicide of criminals, and down to the last among them—the sacrifice of the sacrificers unleashed in passion.—Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative CommunityThe Crisis and Apocalyptic Intensification of RivalryAt first it seemed as if the "rivalry between two rates of speed"1 set at the center of Derrida's essay "No (...) Apocalypse, Not Now," published more than twenty years ago in Diacritics, had finally come to an end, at least in the form of a general and unmistakable division of the world into two competing geopolitical units. Following the breakdown of the USSR, the former super-enemy of the industrialized Northwest, that part of the world that claimed and still claims to be the sole referent of the adjective free, the dynamics of ideological rivalry had, at first, lost considerable momentum. After half a century of mostly symmetrical even if undeclared wars, the period from 1989 to 1991 was truly significant, [End Page 175] for it marked a moment of epistemological crisis, a moment when political fractions that derived their identity from a binary tension were all of a sudden stunned: no visible enemy anymore to deter, no willing scapegoat to blame, just eschatological abandonment.The aftershocks of this historical event can be traced in today's commentaries on and analyses of the political situation: It is certainly no coincidence that two of the most influential US-American political analysts, Samuel Huntington and Bruce Hoffman, both at the same time direct their attention toward questions about the conditions of social identity and cohesion, though from inverted perspectives. In his recent book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (2004), Huntington bemoans the "deconstruction of the American identity,"2 as it challenges—along with certain political developments—"the substance, and the desirability of this concept of America."3 Huntington's fervent interest in US-American identity and his call for its renewal become readily comprehensible when read against the background of his concern that an existential threat might again be imminent, possibly in the form of jihadist terrorism. In Huntington's argument, however, the United States's potential confrontation with militant Islamist movements—the explicit subtext of his book—is not assessed only in terms of political risks and military expenditures; for Huntington, this confrontation also holds out a unique chance of rediscovering one's own (lost, forgotten) identity. Revealing himself as an attentive reader of Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political, Huntington argues that "the absence of an ideological threat produced an absence of purpose.... The ideal enemy for America would be ideologically hostile, racially and culturally different, and militarily strong enough to pose a credible threat to American security."4While Huntington is concerned with reaffirming and securing a phantasmagoric vision of the United States's past glory, Hoffman, on the other hand, may be mentioned as a political analyst deeply worried about the inverse aspect of the epistemological crisis, i.e., worried by the fact that "the United States has utterly failed to fulfill the timeless admonition to 'know your enemy'"5 by declaring an all too abstract global war on terrorism. In his commentary, published in March 2007 under the title "Fighting Blind: We Can't Win if We Don't Know the Enemy" in the Washington Post, he argues that a long-term strategy is desperately needed to identify "our adversaries, who are much too elusive and complicated to be vanquished by mere decapitation."6Taking Huntington's and Hoffman's positions seriously as paradigmatic examples of a wider and well-established discursive strategy that calls for a renewed need for binary-opposed collective identities—us/them; the coalition [End Page 176] of the willing/the axis of evil—in order to affirm a state of potentially ubiquitous and highly moralized rivalry, one may well argue with Schmitt that "a new nomos of the earth" is immanent.7 In Schmitt's understanding, such a new paradigm of warfare will no longer be characterized by relative understandings of enmity, but by enemies declared "totally criminal... (shrink)

What are causal powers and why should we believe in them? Causal powers are now a central topic in metaphysics but my defence of them does not begin there, but rather in studies of the practices of the sciences, especially in my case, of physics and economics. Both of these use the analytic method: they ascertain the behaviour that would result from the operation of a cause ‘in isolation’; then take this behaviour to provide the ‘contribution’ that that cause makes (...) to the behaviour that occurs even when the cause is not in isolation. What counts as ‘isolation’? And how is the notion of ‘contribution’ to be understood? (shrink)

This paper examines the role of the straight-commissioned salesperson in the context of agency theory and asserts that because the agent acts to benefit two principals, potential conflicts of interest arise. Temporal differences in receipt of rewards create a major conflict, while the firm's exhibition of both espoused and actual behaviors and information asymmetries intensify this conflict. Finally, in light of these inconsistencies, the ethical implications of the straight-commission compensation system are examined.

What is commonly called Reichenbach’s “Principle of the Common Cause” is not a general criterion for a common cause, as many philosophers nowadays suppose. Examples include W. Salmon in his accounts of causal processes and Bas van Fraassen in his new book on quantum mechanics, in which he argues that the quantum world has no causal structure. This does not matter for Reichenbach’s purposes. Indeed it should not be surprising from his point of view that in different situations we need (...) different criteria or different methods for testing for the same phenomenon. The third thesis begins from a question: Where do probabilistic criteria for causality come from? (shrink)

Informed consent in clinical research is widely regarded as broken, but essential nonetheless. The most recent attempt to reform it comes as part of the first revisions to the Common Rule since it became truly “common” in 1991. This change, the addition of a “key information” requirement for most consent forms, is intended to support and promote a reasoned decision-making process by potential subjects. The key information requirement is both promising and problematic. It is promising because it encourages clarity and (...) honesty about research participation, creativity in information disclosure, and mutual learning through the investigator-subject relationship. It is problematic because those goals — which have remained aspirational since the beginning — may be difficult to achieve in what has become an excessively compliance-oriented regulatory regime. (shrink)

Scholars have proposed that incarceration rates might be reduced by a requirement that judges justify incarceration decisions with respect to their operational costs (e.g., prison capacity). In an Internet-based vignette experiment (N = 214), we tested this prediction by examining whether criminal punishment judgments (prison vs. probation) among university undergraduates would be influenced by a prompt to provide a justification for one's judgment, and by a brief message describing prison capacity costs. We found that (1) the justification prompt alone was (...) sufficient to reduce incarceration rates, (2) the prison capacity message also independently reduced incarceration rates, and (3) incarceration rates were most strongly reduced (by about 25%) when decision makers were asked to justify their sentences with respect to the expected capacity costs. These effects survived a test of robustness and occurred regardless of whether participants reported that prison costs should influence judgments of incarceration. At the individual crime level, the least serious crimes were most amenable to reconsideration for probation. These findings are important for policymakers attempting to manage high incarceration rates. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between the bonds of practitioner/patient trust and the notion of a justified lie. The intersection of moral theories on lying which prioritize right action with institutional discretionary power allows practitioners to dismiss, or at least not take seriously enough, the harm done when a patient's trust is betrayed. Even when a lie can be shown to be justified, the trustworthiness of the practitioner may be called into question in ways that neither theories of right action (...) nor contemporary discourse in health care attends to adequately. I set out features of full trustworthiness along Aristotelian lines. (shrink)

Giving up the increasingly troubled distinction between “experiment” and “treatment” would make it easier to focus on informed consent and harder to beg questions about uncertainty and shared decisionmaking in medicine.

(1997). Introduction Domains, Paradigms, and Methods in the Study of Expertise. Thinking & Reasoning: Vol. 3, Expert Thinking, pp. 241-246.

Authors James Wilson and David Hunter (2010) take on the critics of research “overregulation,” defending institutional review boards (IRBs) and their role in research in three ways. According to Wi...

Approximately 20% of adult cancer patients are eligible to participate in a clinical trial, but only 2.5-9% do so. Accrual is even less for minority and medically underserved populations. As a result, critical life-saving treatments and quality of life services developed from research studies may not address their needs. This study questions the utility of the bioethical concern with therapeutic misconception (TM), a misconception that occurs when research subjects fail to distinguish between clinical research and ordinary treatment, and therefore attribute (...) therapeutic intent to research procedures in the safety net setting. This paper provides ethnographic insight into the ways in which research is discussed and related to standard treatment. (shrink)

Work by social constructionists over the past decade and a half has reenforced the epistemological pessimist's despair that our system of science could ever be a mirror of nature. Realists argue that the amazing success of modern science at precise prediction and control indicates just the contrary. In response, social constructionists often point out that these successes seldom apply to the world as it comes naturally, but only as it is reconstructed in the scientist's laboratory. But this does not explain (...) how scientific accounts, which are as wide of the mark as constructionists suppose in their general descriptions of the natural world, could be so effective in a limited environment, even if that environment is as benignly constructed as possible. This paper suggests that a more wholistic view of nature than modern science usually presupposes may provide an answer. (shrink)

Efforts to decrease errors in health care are directed at prevention rather than at managing a situation when a mistake has occurred. Consequently, nurses and other health care providers may not know how to respond properly and may lack sufficient support to make a healthy recovery from the mental anguish and emotional suffering that often accompany making mistakes. This article explores the conceptualization of mistakes and the ethical response to making a mistake. There are three parts to an ethical response (...) to error: disclosure, apology and amends. Honesty and humility are discussed as important virtues that facilitate coping and personal growth for the health care provider who is involved in mistakes. In conclusion, a healthy view of nursing practice and mistake making is one that prevents error but, when prevention is not possible, accepts fallibility as part of the human condition and achieves the best possible outcome for all. (shrink)

Elements of the relation between religion and politics are standard themes in political theory: toleration and free exercise rights; the parameters of separation of church and state; arguments for and against constraints imposed on religious discourse by philosophic norms of public reason. But religious parties and partisanship are no part of political theory, despite contemporary interest in value pluralism and in liberal democratic theory's capacity to address multicultural, religious, and ethnic group claims. This essay argues that religious parties are missing (...) elements in discussions of identity politics. They play an important role not just in expressing but also in constructing and mobilizing religious political identity. Political activity linked to parties is a principal way of bringing diffuse, politically unorganized groups, whose leaders are self-appointed and not regularly accountable for the way they represent co-religionists in political life, into the democratic mainstream. With political organization and especially partisanship, the fact of pluralism is made concrete for democratic purposes. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAnalyzing the function of song as a genre can clarify debates over how Shelley’s more visionary mode of poetry might intervene in politics and whether his overtly political popular songs betray the philosophical claim to a revolution in subjectivity made by those visionary works. Because the genre of song originates in communal, oral performance, yet is also a subgenre of the larger category of lyric, its intrinsic oppositions or tensions mediate between political action and lyric subjectivity. Tracing two streams of (...) song, the “urbane” and the “marginal,” that offer models for Shelley’s experiments in song, the essay then conducts a census of songs in the volumes that Shelley published or intended to publish. Applying a description of oral song performances as representing a “bodily economy,” it examines Shelley’s three revisionary Greek dramas, especially the two published in 1820, to interpret the drafts of songs intended for his “little volume of popular songs, wholly political.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe introduce a special issue of articles that emerged from teams of interdisciplinary researchers, social scientists and philosophers, who were funded under the auspices of the Self, Motivation and Virtue Project. The articles in the special issue demonstrate nuance and complexity in the structure of virtuous motivations. Several articles examine the nature of virtue, specific virtues such as humility, perceptions of moral virtues and how they are shaped. Two articles address well-being or flourishing whereas two articles address aspects of life (...) that limit or undermine virtue expression. (shrink)

Editorial peer reviewers play an important role in shaping the direction of knowledge growth of their discipline. Recent concern over reports of peer review misconduct has led some to advocate the establishment of a code of ethics for peer reviewers. Such a code should include guidelines for the discipline and for society at large, but it should also contain guidelines for the authors whose manuscripts are reviewed. Peer reviewers have a special obligation to show beneficence and fairness or impartiality towards (...) the authors for whom they review. The practical application of these two ethical concepts is discussed. (shrink)