What does it mean to be “strengths-based” or to be a “strengths-based practitioner?” These are diffuse areas that are generic and ill-defined. Part of the confusion arises from the customary default of practitioners and leaders across many cultures to label anything positive or complimentary as “strengths-based,” whether that be an approach, a theoretical orientation, an intervention, or a company. Additional muddle is created by many researchers and practitioners not making distinctions between very different categories of “strength” in human beings – (...) strengths of character, of talent/ability, of interest/passion, of skill/competency, to name a few. To add clarity and unification across professions, we offer seven characteristics and a comprehensive definition for a character strengths-based practitioner. We center on the type of strength referred to as character strengths and explore six guiding principles for understanding character strengths (e.g., character is plural; character is being and doing) and their practical corollaries. Reflecting this foundation and based on character strengths research, our longstanding work with strengths, discussions with practitioners across the globe, and a practitioner survey asking about strength practices (N= 113), we point out several character strengths practices or approaches we describe as soaring (e.g., explore and encourage signature strengths; practice strengths-spotting), emerging (e.g., the integration of mindfulness and character strengths), or ripe with potential (e.g., phasic strengths; the tempering effect; the towing effect). We use the same framework for describing general research domains. Some areas of research in character strengths are soaring with more than 25 studies (e.g., workplace/organizations), some are emerging with a handful of studies (e.g., health/medicine), and others are ripe with potential that have none or few studies yet opportunity looms large for integrating character science (e.g., peace/conflict studies). Using this framework, we seek to advance the exchange and collaboration between researcher and practitioner, as well as to advance the science and practice of character strengths. (shrink)

Since the late 2000s trans pregnancy has received increasing public and academic attention, and stories of the ‘pregnant man’ have become a media staple. Existing research has critiqued such spectacularization and the supposed tension between maleness, masculinity, and pregnancy that underpins it. Extending that work, this article draws on interview data from an international study of trans reproductive practices and analyzes participants' experiences of being, and expecting themselves to be, perceived in public space not as spectacularly ‘pregnant men’, but as (...) fat men. As a starting point we take the experience of one participant whose heavily pregnant participation in a five-kilometer race prompted the question: ‘Why is the chubby guy running?’ Using Judith Butler's concept of the cultural intelligibility of gender, we ask why the question asked was not: ‘Why is the pregnant guy running?’ We further consider the degree to which pregnant trans people manage their unintelligibility within the matrix of pregnancy, fatness, and trans/gender and how this reveals the limits of gender intelligibility itself. (shrink)

Whitman was not one to be troubled about the solution of the problem of knowledge in particular, much less in general, nor for that matter was Emerson. Their way was to postulate solutions to problems just before they encountered them. My point, however, is that Whitman, with Emerson, did encounter a problem, the Diltheyan solution to which has tempted philosophers of history into our own time. If quoting Dilthey as a gloss on Emerson I would seem to want to involve (...) Whitman in philosophical issues beyond his ken, then instead I would recall an earlier, quite fundamental statement of the mood, rather than one of the mode: "That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past." The King James version of these words from Revelations 3:16 is perhaps clarified in the Revised Standard version: "That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been , and God seeks what has been driven away."Roy Harvey Pearce is a professor of American literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind; The Continuity of American Poetry; and Historicism Once More: Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar. (shrink)

Dr Noel Semple, Professor Russell Pearce and Professor Renee Knake combine to compare legal profession regulation in the US with that of the countries closest to it institutionally and culturally: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Ireland. This enables them to develop an illuminating taxonomy of legal professional regulation, and to describe the assumptions and objectives underlying the different approaches to regulation. The US and Canada provide a 'professionalist-independent framework' that centres on 'a unified, hegemonic occupation of lawyer' (...) which promotes self-regulation, and the exclusion of non-lawyers from partnership and investment in law practices. By contrast, in other countries that they examine, 'consumerist-competitive approaches' predominate, opening up the profession to co-regulation with executive government and allowing for different forms of legal occupations and non-lawyer influence and investment in law practices. Of course, as they show, in some countries there are combinations and hybrids of these two approaches. Unlike Rhode, who endorses England and Wales' consumerist-competitive approach to regulation in the Legal Services Act 2007, Semple, Pearce and Knake consciously avoid stating a preference for one approach over the other. (shrink)

This paper takes as its focus the adoption by the Co‐operative Wholesale Society of what appears to be a socially responsible stance on food labelling practice and policy through the publication of a public report and a proposed code of practice.The central issue in the debate surrounding labelling is the question of ‘asymmetric information’ (when one party knows more about a product than the other). In order to function, markets need perfect information. The existence of asymmetric information gives rise to (...) ‘market failure’ which prevents the ‘free market’ from functioning according to the laissez faire model. It can be argued that regulation will overcome this problem. However, this paper counters this argument on several grounds. In the first part of the paper labelling is examined as a textual construction, and ethical dimensions are revealed through an awareness of discourse and signification, which gives rise to a view of packaging as a version of reality partially built through connotation and association.The second part of the paper examines political and regulatory concerns. Marketing and economic theories are discussed in terms of their impact upon ethical issues in food labelling. Sense is made of various arguments about the policy and practice of food regulation – particularly in the wake of the James Report calling for the establishment of a Food Standards Agency. Tactics for resisting regulation are also examined. The paper analyses the role and motivation of the CWS in taking these steps.Consideration is given to the issue of where responsibility for information giving and public health education might lie, and what phenomena act as barriers to increased public awareness and action on dietary matters. Finally the debate over food labelling is used as an example of why it is problematic (and possibly unethical) to promote the free market model as the only sensible alternative to other modes of economic organisation. (shrink)