continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , commonly (...) referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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Introduction Paul Boshears The following excerpt from Paul Amitai's In Between States: Field notes and speculations on postwar landscapes (2012) confounds its reader. Presenting an alternate history of the State of Israel as a space station orbiting Earth, the excitement of possibilities crackles across the texts and images. Like Chris Marker's La Jeteé , the accompanying static images distort the viewer's temporality: are these archaeological items, images from a past, or a future? Why isn't this our future? In Between States (...) can also be seen as complementing Larissa Sansour's provocative science fiction works, Space Exodus (2009) which "documents" the Palestinian space program, and her Nation Estate (2012), in which Palestine is relocated into a skyscraper. Amitai's vision opens onto an intergalactic diaspora, wherein the refugees of World War II are given the stars as Western Europe continues to fight over terrestial colonies. —PFB Auditorium, Hoechst AG headquarters, Industriepark-Höchst, 2011. In 1941 an investigation by the US Justice Department exposed a marriage cartel between John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil) and I.G. Farben. The two corporations had formed a joint operation in 1927 called Standard IG Farben. It was revealed that the two had shared patents in order to control prices and markets in their respective regions. Standard was accused of hiding patents from the US Navy and supplying fuel to German submarines, which lead to charges of criminal conspiracy. The Pentagon intervened, requesting that President Roosevelt stop the investigation in order to protect war production and oil supply. Roosevelt agreed, and the Senate committee investigating the matter, headed by Senator Harry Truman, was halted. Standard Oil paid a fine of $5000 and promised to stop supplying fuel to the enemies. Auditorium, Hoechst AG headquarters, Industriepark-Höchst, 2011. Furious at the decision to terminate the investigation of acts he considered treason, Truman initiated a new inquiry into Standard Oil’s war-time practices after succeeding Roosevelt as president in 1945. With the chief executives of I.G Farben simultaneously on trial at Nuremburg, Truman brokered a deal with the Allies that reduced or withdrew criminal charges leveled against both corporations in exchange for Standard Oil and I.G. Farben’s sponsorship of one of Truman’s most ambitious postwar projects—the relocation of the Jewish people. Detail, Sanofi-Aventis advertisement, 2011. The third critical player in this bold experiment was the nascent North Atlantic Space Agency. Formed by Allied forces using the seized assets and engineering expertise of Hitler’s hitherto classified space program (conquer Earth, then the stars), the North Atlantic Space Agency was a pre-NATO foray into interstellar nation building, with orbital occupation as the first point of order. By 1947, NASA was nearly ready to deploy the first manned space station. Standard Oil and I.G. Farben’s advanced fuel refinement capacities and deep, war-enriched financial resources allowed NASA to speed up their launch schedule significantly. Detail, Sanofi-Aventis advertisement, 2011. Diplomatic efforts to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine were failing to gain traction, while post-colonial England held its ground on immigration restrictions and bands of Jews and Arabs battled over territory on the ground. More immediate was the issue of temporarily housing Holocaust survivors and refugees across scorched Europe. Leaders of the continental nations demonstrated, at best, reluctance to accommodate the Jews, who in turn were, at the least, resistant to returning to the same bloody cocktail from which they had fled. Truman used the impasse to advance a plan for NASA’s space station to be put to use as a temporary Jewish outpost, an orbital displaced persons camp, to be operated by the US Army. Detail, Infaserv Höchst advertisement, 2011. Final preparations advanced rapidly. Viewing the orbital displaced persons (ODP) camp as a solution to their immigration problem both at home and abroad, England came on board as a willing partner. Spaceship Exodus was positioned for takeoff on German farmland 20 kilometers southwest of Frankfurt. On December 30, 1947, one month after the UN General Assembly voted down the separation plan for Palestine, Exodus rocketed into the atmosphere hauling the first module of barracks designed to house 1,500 refugees. Transport vehicles arrived shortly thereafter, loaded down with leftover wartime military rations and 3,000 Jews of Russian and Polish origin. Detail, Infaserv Höchst advertisement, 2011. "The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule."—Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 96. Detail, Infaserv Höchst advertisement, 2011. The ODP camp proved to be a longer-term solution than originally envisioned. Additional installations were positioned to form swollen clusters of interlocking units – sleeping quarters, schools, clinics, canteens. The UN was brought in to monitor the camp following two chaotic years of US Army control in which food shortages, pandemic diseases, and rampant black market trade had brought the camp to near total collapse. No less bureaucratic or ineffectual, the UN relief agency at least had prior experience facilitating contexts of a similar magnitude and could potentially predict outcomes. Detail, Infaserv Höchst advertisement, 2011. What had been unexpected was the degree to which the camp would evolve into its own self-regulated, hive-like ecosystem where previously accepted rules of conduct were not applicable. The ODP camp was an exceptional space, a riverboat casino, an offshore research lab of social experimentation and entrepreneurial innovation. No longer Earth-bound, touching soil knotted by prescripts of Talmudic law, the camp residents were able to rationalize loopholes and detonate barriers standing in the way of absolute production. The Jewish archipelago was renamed Israel after the ancient homeland. If the temple couldn’t be rebuilt in the motherland, a post-national rhizome would sprout up in its stead. Eyes everywhere, beyond all borders. More information on the project at the author's site. (shrink)

Racial earnings inequalities in the United States diminished significantly over the three decades following World War II, but since then have not changed very much. Meanwhile, black—white disparities in employment have become increasingly pronounced. What accounts for this historical pattern? Sociologists often understand the evolution of racial wage and employment inequality as the consequence of economic restructuring, resulting in narratives about black economic fortunes that emphasize changing skill demands related to the rise and fall of the industrial economy. Reviewing a (...) large body of work by economic historians and other researchers, this article contends that the historical evidence is not consistent with manufacturing- and skills-centered explanations of changes in relative black earnings and employment. Instead, data from the 1940s onward suggest that racial earnings inequalities have been significantly influenced by political and institutional factors—social movements, government policies, unionization efforts, and public-employment patterns—and that racial employment disparities have increased over the course of the postwar and post-1970s periods for reasons that are not reducible to skills. Taking a broader historical view suggests that black economic fortunes have long been powerfully shaped by nonmarket factors and recenters research on racial discrimination as well as the political and institutional forces that influence labor markets. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Isocrates' Use of doxaTakis PoulakosEven though Isocrates presents Antidosis as a thorough defense of his educational program, he says very little about it, choosing instead to offer lavish portraits of his own earlier writings, elaborate arguments in defense of his reputation, and painstaking attacks against his competitors. One of the few passages where he speaks directly and explicitly about his educational views concerns the type of teaching of which (...) he approved. "[T]eachers of philosophy," he remarks in an obvious reference to his own instruction, begin their students' training by acquainting them with "all the forms of discourse in which the mind expresses itself." Past this type of training, he goes on to say,when they have made them familiar and thoroughly conversant with these lessons, they set them at exercises, habituate them to work, and require them to combine in practice the particular things which they have learned, in order that they may grasp them more firmly and bring their theories into closer touch with the occasions for applying them —I say "theories," for no system of knowledge can possibly cover these occasions, since in all cases they elude our science. Yet those who most apply their minds to them and are able to discern the consequences which for the most part grow out of them, will most often meet these occasions in the right way. (184)The passage is important for a number of reasons. First, it makes clear that Isocrates conceives learning not so much in terms of possessing a specialized body of knowledge as in knowing how to apply principles to specific situations. Students will be educated in the art of logos, not only when they have become familiar with "all the forms of discourse,," but, more importantly, when they have learned how to apply principles of the art to practical situations. Second, the passage also makes clear that the proper site for applying the principles of the art of logos is the domain of politics. [End Page 61] Teachers of "philosophy" will guide students to apply their knowledge of the art of logos, not in every situation, but in those situations that deal with contingencies and that call for decisions about future courses of action, whose outcome is unknown and whose consequences are unforeseen. Along with many other sections throughout his writings, the passage above offers one more indication that Isocrates' educational program focuses principally on instruction in political or symbouleutic speaking, political discourse or logos politikos. Finally, as the passage states, the domain of situations addressed by his instruction is on the level of contingency and kairos, a domain belonging to the order of doxa, not the order of epistēmē. His teaching of political discourse relies on a method of adjusting opinions and conjectures to specific cases, on bringing doxa in closer proximity to kairos.The passage above, then, sets the conceptual stage for the type of civic education with which Isocrates associates his teaching throughout the Antidosis: the teaching of logos politicos, not for its own sake, but for the purpose of citizenship and statesmanship, an education in speaking well for the purposes of citizenship and statesmanship. By guiding students in how to apply rhetorical principles to practical situations, how to make choices about future courses of action with an eye to potential consequences, and how to adjust choices made to the demands of changing circumstances, he is in fact preparing students to participate in their city's deliberations as citizens. Should they rise to the occasion and be prepared to address the city's problems by submitting the judgments they formulate to the principles of contingency and timeliness, they may very well become leaders of the city one day, capable statesmen or celebrated citizens of the polis.But the passage also leaves several questions unanswered. To begin with, there is the question of the label "philosophy." Does Isocrates use the term philosophia to "denote his rhetoric" (Too 1995, 193) or to suggest an "implicit denial of rhetoric" (Cahn 1989, 134)? Is this label meant to be an act of "appropriating the term 'philosophy'" (Nehamas 1990, 5) or of positing "a contrasting definition of philosophy" (Timmerman 1998, 157)? Can the... (shrink)

The modern presidency emerged not from an effort to escape constitutional propriety, as Tulis argues, but, rather, to emancipate presidents from the localized political parties of the nineteenth century, which had come to be viewed as sites of provincial and corrupt forms of popular rule. As the troubled tenure of George W. Bush suggests, contemporary presidents are torn between the public expectation that they stand apart from party politics and act as the chief executive of the administrative state; and their (...) role as party leaders, which links them to political allies in Congress and loyalists in the electorate. In its contribution to the development of a “new” national programmatic party system, the Bush administration reveals the potential for a novel, disturbing meld of party and administration, in which presidents seek to exploit the powers of the modern executive office for partisan gain. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 239-240 [Access article in PDF] News and Views Korean Temple Burnings and Vandalism: The Response of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies Harry L. WellsHumboldt State UniversityOver the course of the last decade a fairly large number of Buddhist temples in South Korea have been destroyed or damaged by fire by misguided Christian fundamentalists. More recently, Buddhist statues have been identified as idols, and attacked and (...) decapitated in the name of Jesus. Arrests are hard to effect, as the arsonists and vandals work by stealth of night. In 1998, the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies announced its support for our Buddhist brothers and sisters and our disgust at such violent misuse of the name of Jesus. At the 1998 Board meeting, an ad hoc committee was set up to explore and develop strategies which would further address the situation. Below are some actions which have occurred during 1999. A Letter from Our President: The following letter of protest was sent on the Society's behalf on January 25, 1999 to the Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea and other governmental officials plus Korean church leaders and organizations. A second letter was sent to the U.S. State Department and the headquarters of various church bodies in the U.S. as well as the National Council of Churches. The Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies wishes to register its deepest sadness and most profound protest regarding the numerous acts of arson and malicious destruction done to Buddhist temples by misinformed and intolerant fundamentalist Christian groups throughout the Republic of South Korea. Professor Frank Tedesco of Sejong University first drew the attention of the Society to these incidents in an article he published in 1997 in Buddhist-Christian Studies, the journal of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. More recently, two more Buddhist temples have been burned by fundamentalist Christians, seven hundred Buddhist images have been decapitated, and the Roman Catholic Cathedral was also burned because it contained images. All members of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, both Christian and Buddhist, are embarrassed that such acts have been done in the name of [End Page 239] Jesus Christ, a name that demands that all persons should live in justice and peace, not sectarian stupidity and religious fanaticism. The small, but vocal, number of fundamentalist Christians in Korea who defend such actions as blows against pagan idolatry are simply wrong. Their actions are contrary to the core of Christian teaching and practice, which is that all persons are to be treated with love, justice, and respect. There is no excuse for intra-religious violence in Buddhist or Christian teaching and practice. Accordingly, the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies not only deplores fundamentalist Christian attacks against Korean Buddhist temples, images, and persons, we ask that the government of Korea actively seek out all groups and persons engaged in violent actions against our Buddhist brothers and sisters and bring them to justice according to the laws of the Republic of Korea. May the peace at the heart of the Christian tradition and the heart of the Buddha's Dharma heal the minds of the violent so that all human beings may one day live as brothers and sisters in accord and dialogue. Paul O. Ingram, President A Section on the International Association for Religious Freedom Website Robert Traer, General Secretary of the International Association for Religious Freedom, graciously agreed to allow the Society to post a section on their website about the Buddhist-Christian tensions in Korea. His hope reflects the hope of our Society, that incidents of vandalism will cease and dialogue efforts increase. This page presently includes the summary account written by a SBCS member, Dr. Frank Tedesco, photos, and an introductory statement by our Society. Visit the site! A Call for Monetary Contributions The Society initiated a contributions drive to collect funds to send to Korea as a symbolic gesture of support of our Buddhist brothers and sisters whose temples and images have been attacked by extremist Christian vandals... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface At a time when access to safe abortions is being curtailed in the United States under the pretext of a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this Feminist Studies issue focuses on abortion and women’s embodiment. The essays by Melissa Oliver-Powell, Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst, and Jennifer L. Holland each contribute new approaches to the stillvexed topic of abortion, positioning movements for abortion access in relation to historical and (...) ecological change. Two collaboratively written essays, by South American authors María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra and Tania Pérez-Bustos, and by North American and European authors Laura Bisaillon with six colleagues, both center the body within feminist labor, exploring how the embodied experience of work can also be a site of knowledge-making. Other authors push us to move beyond humanistic understandings of affect and the body in feminist work, as Nathan Snaza shows in a review essay of four recent books engaging “Biopolitics without Bodies.” Poems by Rosetta Marantz Cohen, Darlene Taylor, and Abby Minor also feature experiences of bodily violence and bodily pleasure, while Ellyn Weiss discusses the distinctive representations of bodies in the visual art of Swedish-American artist Anna U. Davis. To close the issue, two News and Views pieces by Pang Laikwan and Sealing Cheng on the recent protest movement in Hong Kong provide two complementary perspectives on living through tumultuous political times. Our next issue will include content directly focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first essay, Melissa Oliver-Powell’s “Beyond the Spectacle of Suffering: Agnès Varda’s L’Une chante, l’autre pas and Rewriting the Subject of Abortion in France” addresses the complexities of anti-​ abortion 8 rhetoric in France. Placing Varda’s 1977 film in the historical context of French nationalistic anxiety about low birthrates in the twentieth century, Oliver-Powell argues that the film deconstructs polarized narratives about abortion. While dominant cultural representations of abortion typically depicted it as the result of female irresponsibility or traumatic victimization, Varda’s film rejects the binary concepts of villain and victim and questions the presumption that women always suffer when exercising their reproductive choice. Oliver-Powell situates Varda alongside the 343 eminent French female cultural leaders who composed a famous 1971 Manifesto publicly declaring themselves criminals for having had illegal abortions and presents simultaneous histories of French feminism and French cinema. Varda’s film constructs a feminist representation of abortion that avoids foregrounding women ’s suffering and instead emphasizes empowerment and solidarity. Its narrative features two women friends, both treated unjustly by France’s abortion laws, who participate in the movement for reform over a fourteen -year span. Varda represents the interplay of motherhood with women ’s lives as a continuum, not a disruptive episode, and she blends documentary -style devices with imaginative musical interludes: she shows actual women seeking abortions in Holland and includes songs about abortion, pregnancy, and motherhood. Oliver-Powell claims that Varda dramatizes unprecedented representations “of female friendship without pathology, of abortion without guilt, death or persecution, of motherhood without objectification....” A second essay, Rachel Hurst’s “Abortion as a Feminist Pedagogy of Grief in Marianne Apostolides’s Deep Salt Water,” proposes that the championing of women’s reproductive rights could better account for the context of difficult emotions and an imperfect world. Hurst uses reproductive justice approaches to critique simplistic rights-based arguments for abortion, premised on liberal concepts of choice and autonomy, which fail to understand the material conditions of poor women and especially women of color. Such analyses emphasize the necessity of rights discourses that include the right to bear and parent one’s own children free from violence and economic hardship, and they advocate the transformative possibilities of acknowledging rather than suppressing women’s ambivalence about their own abortions as well as others’ choices. Hurst describes a collaboration between two contemporary Canadian feminists, writer Marianne Apostolides and visual artist  9 Catherine Mellinger, in their mixed-media text, Deep Salt Water, which is organized according to the weeks of a pregnancy and the aftermath of its termination. Rather than falling back into familiar polarizations for and against “choice,” they use the story of Apostolides’s abortion seventeen years earlier... (shrink)

Leader wisdom is crucial to effective organizations because it is one of the greatest human capacities. However, understanding what factors impact leader wisdom is still developing. In this paper, we rely on a fear-based view of wisdom and empirically examine through a quantitative study of 249 leaders if one of the primary regulators of human behavior (fear) is positively related to wisdom. We are specifically focused on the role of fear of failure and wisdom. Additionally, because we recognize (...) that fear has a negative connotation and has a tipping point regarding leader effectiveness, we propose that psychological empowerment serves as a coping mechanism for fear and mediates the relationship between fear of failure and wisdom. Through structural equation modeling (SEM), we demonstrate that fear of failure does positively impact leader wisdom and that this relationship is mediated by psychological empowerment. This study contributes to the literature by advancing the fear-based view of wisdom which unites two of the most powerful concepts in human history: fear and wisdom. Although wisdom has a resurgence of interest in business literature, fear is not given much attention. By theoretically and empirically linking fear of failure with wisdom, we shed light on how fear is an important motivating mechanism. The study also contributes to practice by suggesting leaders should fear failure and avoid minimizing fears to be wise. (shrink)

In the globalizing world, it is seen that life is more intertwined with different cultures. Therefore, intercultural sensitivity has vital importance for a peaceful harmonious common life. In order to ensure this sensitivity, societies must unite with common accepted values. In this regard, the adoption of universal values expressed by the UNESCO-UNICEF has particular importance. Therefore, schools have important responsibilities. Schools may prefer out-of-class activities in the development of positive sensitivity behaviors. In this study, the sensitivities developed by secondary-school students, (...) who are the target group, toward living universal values after participating in out-of-school socio-cultural short-term trip activities were examined. The research adopts the phenomenological approach, which is one of the qualitative research methods. Interview techniques were used in accordance with this model. In line with the purpose of this research, the school administrators, who have the ability to witness the changes in the behavior of the children during and after the socio-cultural planned trip activities and who can best interpret them by filtering, have been reached. According to this criterion, 51 school administrators were selected. The results of the research revealed that short-term socio-cultural trips abroad have effects on living-universal values. It was observed that the positive behaviors in the school environment continued after the trip. We can say that, the development of sensitivity toward living-universal values also positively affects students’ intercultural sensitivity. As a result, it is recommended that school administrators give importance to such activities. (shrink)

This article examines the consequences of globalization in the lives of women. The author explains the ways in which women, particularly poor women, are victims of globalization and shows how this process has its roots in more than 500 years of Western colonization. The article demonstrates how women’s groups have become important sites of resistance to globalization and how they have also developed different worldviews and ideas of the sacred.

In this essay, I focus on the controversy over privacy regarding Google Street View, a website created in the fall of 2008. I also discuss privacy and its role in technology, enumerating several ways in which privacy policy in these situations should be changed for the better.

American leaders in four realms were studied to assess their views on the helpfulness to workers with family obligations of employers' policies and services. The realms were corporate management, labor unions, the pro-family movement, and the feminist movement. The data were analyzed by leadership realm and gender in relation to policies of two types: scheduling and work arrangements and services and benefits. Gender accounted for the respondents' views better than class or social movement did. Except for feminist men, the (...) men held similar views regardless of leadership realm. The pro-family women differed from the other women in failing to view most services and benefits as particularly helpful to employees. Union and corporate women's favorable views on services and benefits suggest that fundamental change in workplace supports for workers' family obligations could develop if more women became leaders in unions and corporations. (shrink)

Although leader role expectations appear to have become relatively more compatible with stereotypically feminine attributes like empathy, women continue to be highly underrepresented in leadership roles. We posit that one reason for this disparity is that, whereas stereotypically feminine traits are appreciated as nice “add-ons” for leaders, it is stereotypically masculine attributes that are valued as the defining qualities of the leader role, especially by men (who are often the gatekeepers to these roles). We assessed men’s and women’s idea (...) of a great leader with a focus on gendered attributes in two studies using different methodologies. In Study 1, we employed a novel paradigm in which participants were asked to design their “ideal leader” to examine the potential trade-off between leadership characteristics that were more stereotypically masculine (i.e., agency) and feminine (i.e., communality). Results showed that communality was valued in leaders only after meeting the more stereotypically masculine requirements of the role (i.e., competence and assertiveness), and that men in particular preferred leaders who were more competent (vs. communal), whereas women desired leaders who kept negative stereotypically masculine traits in check (e.g., arrogance). In Study 2, we conducted an experiment to examine men’s and women’s beliefs about the traits that would be important to help them personally succeed in a randomly assigned leader (vs. assistant) role, allowing us to draw a causal link between roles and trait importance. We found that both men and women viewed agentic traits as more important than communal traits to be a successful leader. Together, both studies make a valuable contribution to the social psychological literature on gender stereotyping and bias against female leaders and may illuminate the continued scarcity of women at the very top of organizations, broadly construed. (shrink)

In the present research, we examine the relation between leader mindfulness and employee performance through the lenses of organizational justice and leader-member relations. We hypothesize that employees of more mindful leaders view their relations as being of higher leader-member exchange quality. We further hypothesize two mediating mechanisms of this relation: increased interpersonal justice and reduced employee stress. In other words, we posit that employees of more mindful leaders feel treated with greater respect and experience less stress. Finally, (...) we predict that LMX quality serves as a mediator linking leader mindfulness to employee performance—defined in terms of both in-role and extra-role performance. Across two field studies of triadic leader-employee-peer data and dyadic leader–employee data, we find support for this sequential mediation model. We discuss implications for theorizing on leadership, organizational justice, business ethics, LMX, and mindfulness, as well as practical implications. (shrink)

Recent literature suggests that ethical leadership helps to inhibit followers’ unethical behavior, largely built on the premise that followers view ethical leaders as ethical role models and socially learn from them, thereby engaging in more ethical conduct. This premise, however, has not been adequately tested, leaving insufficient understanding concerning the conditions under which this social learning process occurs. In this study, we revisit this premise, theorizing that not all followers will equally regard the same ethical leader as being (...) a personal ethical role model, thereby bounding the leader’s effects in reducing followers’ unethical behavior. We integrate the role of follower self-concepts into social learning theory, hypothesizing that the extent followers emulate their ethical leaders is contingent on how they identify with ethics as well as the particular leader. We test our hypotheses with three-wave survey data collected from 214 employees, finding that ethical leaders are viewed as being role models only amongst followers higher in moral identity and leader identification, and that followers’ perceptions that the leader is an ethical role model mediated the effect of ethical leadership on followers’ unethical behavior. Interestingly, results for the full-model tests show that ethical leadership evokes unethical behavior amongst followers lower in both moral identity and leader identification. These results suggest that ethical leadership is not a universally useful practice to decrease unethical behavior and that a more nuanced understanding of its contingent effects needs to be better understood. (shrink)

Embryonic Stem Cell Research raises ethical issues. In the process of research, embryos may be destroyed and, to some, such an act entails the ‘killing of human life’. Past studies have sought the views of scientists and the general public on the ethics of ESCR. This study, however, explores multi-faith ethical viewpoints, in particular, those of Buddhists, Hindus and Catholics in Malaysia, on ESCR. Responses were gathered via semi-structured, face-to-face interviews. Three main ethical quandaries emerged from the data: sanctity of (...) life, do no harm, and ‘intention’ of the research. Concerns regarding the sanctity of life are directed at particular research protocols which interfere with religious notions of human ensoulment and early consciousness. The principle of ‘do no harm’ which is closely related to ahimsa prohibits all acts of violence. Responses obtained indicate that respondents either discourage research that inflicts harm on living entities or allow ESCR with reservations. ‘Intention’ of the research seems to be an interesting and viable rationale that would permit ESCR for the Buddhists and Hindus. Research that is intended for the purpose of alleviating human suffering is seen as being ethical. This study also notes that Catholics oppose ESCR on the basis of the inviolability of human life. (shrink)

Biographical essays explore the careers of two major early photographers, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey and William James Stillman. in addition, portfolios with works by Maxime Du Camp, John Beasley Greene, Francis Frith, Robert Macpherson, Adolphe Braun and others testify to the strength and consistency of other early photographers who captured the antique worlds around the Mediterranean."--BOOK JACKET.

Universities have long played an important role in preparing thinkers and leaders who go on to have significant impact around the world. But if the world needs wise thinkers and good leaders, then how might modern universities educate leaders of character, particularly in a pluralistic context where many educators are reluctant to see the university as a site of moral formation? This article shares insights from one specific program, the Oxford Global Leadership Initiative, an extra-curricular program (...) that seeks to help diverse cohorts of graduate students develop the ethical qualities of character needed for leaders to serve the common good. Drawing upon qualitative data collected over three years of program activity to illuminate and illustrate our argument, we address three questions: Can virtues of character necessary for good leadership be cultivated in a university setting among a culturally diverse group of students? How can a character-based leadership program meet the particular developmental needs of “emerging adults”? and How might the program’s impact translate into society and culture? We conclude that a program integrating character and leadership can make valuable contributions to the ethical and professional development of postgraduate students. (shrink)

There is a revival of notions of leader democracy (LD) and plebiscitary leader democracy (PLD) both at the level of politics (e.g. the rhetoric of strong leadership) and in academic debate. This paper focuses largely on the latter, with occasional reference to real-world political developments. The paper (i) sketches changes in the nature of contemporary governance; (ii) argues that Weber’s and Schumpeter’s account of (plebiscitary) leader democracy ((P)LD) as a means of addressing the crisis of representation has marked affinities with (...) current debates; (iii) discusses the possible implications of the re-emergence of a political language of (P)LD. The paper takes a sceptical view, arguing that an appeal to leadership is a symptom of, and contributor towards, the problems it purports to address. Two contemporary defences of (P)LD are discussed: that of the political scientist András Körösényi and that of the political theorist Jeffery Green. (shrink)

Any attempt to justify war in the fashion of just war theories risks underestimating its morally problematic nature. This becomes clear if we ask how the individual soldier or citizen is supposed to use just war theory in his own thinking. Michael Walzer's recent book, Just and Unjust Wars, illustrates the problem nicely. Walzer's view is that whether a state is justified in going to war is not a matter for the citizen to judge, and with regard to the (...) way the war is conducted the individual soldier can have only minimal moral responsibility for what is done. Walzer's position is criticized in detail and the conclusion drawn that such an understanding of just war theory undermines the theory's significance as a moral outlook on war. It is also argued that a more pertinent version of just war theory must have strong implications for social change. (shrink)

Many viral and cellular mRNA species contain a leader sequence derived from a distant upstream site on the same gene by a process of RNA splicing. This process usually involves either nuclear functions or self‐splicing of RNA molecules. Coronavirus, a cytoplasmic RNA virus, unfolds yet another mechanism of joining RNA, which involves the use of a free leader RNA molecule. This molecule is synthesized and dissociates from the template RNA, and subsequently reassociates with the template RNA at down‐stream initiation (...) sites of subgenomic mRNAs to serve as the primer for transcription. This leader‐primed transcriptional process thus generates viral mRNAs with a fused leader sequence. A similar mechanism might also operate in the mRNA transcription of African trypanosomes. (shrink)

Background With an increasing older population, the pressure on home care resources is growing, which makes it important to ensure the maintenance of quality care. It is known that compassion and ethical sensitivity can improve the quality of care, but little is known about care leaders’ perceptions on ethical sensitivity and compassion in home care and how it is associated with staff competence and thus quality of care. Aim The aim of the study was to explore home care (...) class='Hi'>leaders’ perceptions of ethical sensitivity and compassion associated with care quality in home care. Research design, participants, and research context A hermeneutical approach with a qualitative explorative design was used. The data consists of texts from 10 in-depth interviews with home care leaders. Content analysis was used as a method. Ethical considerations The study was conducted following the ethical guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and the Finnish Advisory Board of Research Ethics. Research ethics permission was applied for from a Research Ethics Board. Findings One overall theme and four subthemes were found. The overall theme was: “Compassion provides deeper meaning and ethical sensitivity provides means for knowing how to act”. Discussion If nurses fail to be sensitive and compassionate with patients, good and high qualitative home care cannot be achieved. Ethical sensitivity and compassion can be seen as resources in home care but the organization and the care leaders need to provide the support for these to develop. Conclusion This study provides an understanding of the meaning of ethical sensitivity and compassion as sources of strength and their link to quality of care in a home care context. Further studies could focus on how to build compassion and ethical sensitivity into home-based care and how to ensure adequate support for healthcare professionals’ compassion and ethical sensitivity. (shrink)

This article will defend a very simple thesis. In a diverse globalized “flat” world with expanding economic opportunities and risks, we will need to revisit and revise our mindsets about free enterprise, corporate governance, and leadership. That we can change our mindsets and world view is illustrated by studies of primate behavior, and the kind of leadership necessary in a global economy is, interestingly, exemplified by women.

Following the landmark corporate scandals of the early 21st century, there appeared to be a tremendous increase in the U.S. business media's emphasis on issues of ethics in corporate leadership. The purpose of this research was to examine whether that apparent increase was reflected in an actual change in that media's portrayals of successful leaders. We content analyzed the text of a total of 180 articles in Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes magazine, 90 from the five years preceding the (...) landmark scandals and 90 from the five years following the scandals. We found no evidence that the landmark scandals had any impact on the media's incorporation of ethics in their portrayals of leaders. We attribute this substantially to the persistence of a world-view in the U.S. business press that emphasizes leader traits and actions that have a direct impact on corporate profits. Additionally, we found some interesting consistencies and differences in media portrayals across the two time periods, likely related to the rise and fall of dot-com businesses. We discuss the implications of these findings for researchers and corporate leaders. (shrink)

Recognizing gaps in our present understanding of leader apologies, this investigation examines how followers appraise leader apologies and how these perceptions impact work-related outcomes. Results indicate that followers who viewed their leader as trustworthy or caring before a leader wrongdoing were more likely to perceive their leader’s apology to be sincere, as compared to followers who previously doubted their leader’s trustworthiness and caring. Attributions of apology sincerity affected follower reactions, with followers perceiving sincere apologies reporting greater trust in leadership, satisfaction (...) with supervision, leader–member exchange quality, affective organizational commitment, and forgiveness than those reporting insincere or no apologies. A mediation model was supported, showing that attributions of apology sincerity fostered perceptions of humility, which enhanced perceptions of transformational leadership, and consequently garnered more positive follower reactions. (shrink)

This article examines how affect allows us to view the relational form of dialogue, as built upon the work of Derrida and Levinas, to be a site of transformative possibility for students as they encounter and address issues of social justice and difference in the classroom. The understanding of affect that attends this form of dialogue demands from educators a re-visioning of how their educational arrangements and pedagogies might facilitate the transformative capacities of their students. Accordingly, the relational (...) conception of dialogue cannot be viewed as providing educators with another strategy or method for addressing issues of social justice and difference or for tapping into the transformative capacity of their students. Instead, it would be better viewed as pointing educators towards a different orientation towards education which is not focused upon producing particular outputs or outcomes, but does still indicate the need for a responsible response from the educator. (shrink)

We introduce new leader humility scales capturing a theoretically rich conceptualization of leader-expressed humility aligned with traditional and ethically-grounded philosophies. These scales draw from recent inductive research (Oc et al., 2015) identifying nine dimensions of leader-expressed humility: (1) having an accurate view of self, (2) recognizing follower strengths and achievements, (3) modeling teachability and being correctable, (4) leading by example, (5) showing modesty, (6) working together for the collective good, (7) empathy and approachability, (8) showing mutual respect and fairness, (...) and (9) mentoring and coaching. The first three dimensions overlap with the most prominent conceptualization of leader-expressed humility in the literature (i.e., Owens et al., 2013). However, the latter six dimensions are unique and represent an expanded understanding of the humble behaviors of leaders, which have implications for leaders and their ethical behavior in organizations. We conducted three studies resulting in two versions of the leader-expressed humility measure: 1) a 27-item scale with the nine dimensions (i.e., the “Leader-Expressed Humility” [LEH] scale) and 2) a 9-item brief scale (i.e., the “Brief LEH” scale) comprised of one item from each of the nine dimensions. As an initial step, we generated a pool of items that reflected each dimension. Next, we validated the LEH and Brief LEH scales in Study 1 and cross-validated the Brief LEH scale in Study 2 with two samples of subordinates in Singapore. As a final step, in Study 3, we cross-validated the Brief LEH scale with a sample of subordinates in the United States. (shrink)

Several leadership and ethics scholars suggest that the transformational leadership process is predicated on a divergent set of ethical values compared to transactional leadership. Theoretical accounts declare that deontological ethics should be associated with transformational leadership while transactional leadership is likely related to teleological ethics. However, very little empirical research supports these claims. Furthermore, despite calls for increasing attention as to how leaders influence their followers’ perceptions of the importance of ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) for organizational effectiveness, (...) no empirical study to date has assessed the comparative impact of transformational and transactional leadership styles on follower CSR attitudes. Data from 122 organizational leaders and 458 of their followers indicated that leader deontological ethical values (altruism, universal rights, Kantian principles, etc.) were strongly associated with follower ratings of transformational leadership, while leader teleological ethical values (utilitarianism) were related to follower ratings of transactional leadership. As predicted, only transformational leadership was associated with follower beliefs in the stakeholder view of CSR. Implications for the study and practice of ethical leadership, future research directions, and management education are discussed. (shrink)

In recent years scholars from many disciplines have become interested in the "construction" of the human senses -- in how the human environment shapes both how and what we perceive. Taking a very different approach to the question of construction, Sites of Vision turns to language and explores the ways in which the rhetoric of philosophy has formed the nature of vision and how, in turn, the rhetoric of vision has helped to shape philosophical thought. The central role of vision (...) in relation to philosophy is evident in the vocabulary of the discipline -- in words such as "speculation," "observation," "insight," and "reflection"; in metaphors such as "mirroring," "perspective," and "point of view"; and in methodological concepts such as "reflective detachment" and "representation." Because the history of vision is so pervasively reflected in the history of philosophy, it is possible for both vision and thought to achieve a greater awareness of their genealogy through the history of philosophy. The fourteen contributors to _Sites of Vision_ explore the hypothesis that the nature of visual perception about which philosophers talk must be explicitly recognized as a discursive construction, indeed a historical construction, in philosophical discourse. (shrink)

Existing research on leader humility primarily demonstrates its positive effects. This study challenges this view by proposing the potential negative effects of leader humility on followers’ behaviors. Furthermore, this paper employs the person-situation interactionist perspective to extend the research on integrating followers’ personality traits and leader humility. Specifically, this study proposed that leader humility triggers their followers’ sense of power; moreover, this study wagers that whether followers’ sense of power encourages self-interested or prosocial behavior in followers depends on their (...) particular Machiavellian traits. The theoretical model was tested using the time-lagged supervisor–subordinate matched data obtained. Our findings revealed that follower Machiavellianism fosters the relationship between a sense of power and self-interested behavior but it weakens the relationship between a sense of power and prosocial behavior. Thus, this study provides a better understanding regarding the effect of follower personality and leader humility on follower behavioral reactions. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine Edmund Husserl’s theory of aesthetic consciousness and the possibility to apply it to site-specific art. The central focus will be on the idea of the limited synthetic unity of the aesthetic object that is introduced by Husserl in order to differentiate positional and aesthetic attitude towards the object. I claim that strongly site-specific art, which is a work of art about a place and in the place, challenges the view (...) that the synthetic unity of the aesthetic object is limited. Moreover, following Husserl’s theory, it becomes questionable whether strongly site-specific art is art at all. I try to answer these objections by explaining how the artist prescribes the appearances and boundaries of a strongly site-specific object of art, thereby satisfying the demand for the limitedness of the synthetic unity of the aesthetic object. (shrink)

Although it is an increasingly popular assumption that leader mindfulness may positively affect leader behaviors and, in turn, employee outcomes, to date, little empirical evidence supports this view. Against this backdrop, the present research seeks to develop and test a serial mediation model of leader mindfulness. Specifically, we propose that leader mindfulness enhances employee performance and that this relationship is explained by increased leader procedural justice enactment and, subsequently, reduced employees’ emotional exhaustion. We conducted three studies to test this (...) model. Study 1 involved employees from a wide range of organizations in the USA. Study 2 used a sample of leaders and employees from China and measured our model variables at three different points in time. Both studies provide consistent support for our hypotheses. Finally, Study 3 involved a laboratory experiment in which 62 senior executives were assigned to either a mindfulness induction or to a control condition. Again, results revealed a significant and positive link between leader mindfulness and leader procedural justice enactment. In sum, these findings expand our understanding of mindfulness to the domain of leadership, a key area of organizational research. Moreover, they complement prior studies by showing that mindfulness dynamics go beyond intrapersonal effects but also influence the attitudes and behaviors of others. We discuss our findings in light of their contributions to the mindfulness, ethics, and leadership literatures and point out implications for practice. (shrink)

The Supreme Court decided Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky in 2019. Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in the case claimed there was a direct connection between the legalization of abortion, in the late 20th Century, and the beginnings of the birth control movement a full three quarters of a century earlier. “Many eugenicists,” Thomas argued, “supported legalizing abortion.”Justice Samuel Alito highlighted similar claims in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, citing a brief entitled “The Eugenic Era Lives on through (...) the Abortion Movement.” That brief was an echo of Justice Thomas’ misguided attempt at history in the Box opinion. Similar claims reoccur in Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s opinion in the Texas mifepristone case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration.These false claims are the focus of this article. There is no evidence that early leaders of the eugenics movement supported abortion as part of the movement for birth control. It is accurate to describe those leaders as anti-abortion, and their followers as people who condemned abortion for moral, legal, and medical reasons. (shrink)

Corporate scandals have assumed epidemic proportions. All around the globe, even renowned organizations have been felled from their high pedestals by the misdeeds of their leaders. This raises an intriguing question: How do such resourceful organizations end up with crass ‹impostors’ as leaders in the first place? The answer perhaps lies in the misplaced emphasis on certain qualities we associate with leadership. True leadership requires a balance among three elemental pre-requisites: Energy, Expertise and Integrity. When they are synchronized, (...) they unleash the latent potential in any organization. Out of these three interacting gears of leadership, it is Integrity that ensures that an organization is run in the right direction – with a view towards collective good rather than selfish motives. Therefore, it is the most non-negotiable of the three elements. Henceforth, leaders ought not to be selected on the basis of the superficial qualities that have blinded us in the past. They must first pass the acid test of Integrity. This article suggests a ‹decision tree’ and a ‹checklist’ to help in the selection process. (shrink)

Background There is growing consensus in favor of returning individual specific research results that are clinically actionable, valid, and reliable. However, deciding what and how research results should be returned remains a challenge. Researchers are key stakeholders in return of results decision-making and implementation. Multi-omics data contains medically relevant findings that could be considered for return. We sought to understand researchers' views regarding the potential for return of results for multi-omics data from a large, national consortium generating multi-omics data. Methods (...) Researchers from the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC) were recruited for in-depth semi-structured interviews. To assess understanding of potential clinical utility for types of data collected and attitudes towards return of results in multi-omic clinical studies, we devised an interview guide focusing on types of results generated in the study for hypothetical return based on review of the literature and professional expertise of team members. The semi-structured interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim and co-coded. Thematic trends were identified for reporting. Results We interviewed a total of 16 individuals representative of 11 sites and 6 research roles across MoTrPAC. Many respondents expressed positive attitudes regarding hypothetical multi-omics results return, citing participant rights to their data and perception of minimal harm. Ethical and logistical concerns around the return of multi-omics results were raised, and they often mirrored those in the published literature for genomic return of results including: uncertain clinical validity, a lack of expertise to communicate results, and an unclear obligation regarding whether to return multi-omics results. With the exception of privacy concerns, respondents were able to give examples within multi-omics of how each point was relevant. Further, researchers called for more guidance from funding agencies and increased researcher education regarding return of results. Conclusion Overall, researchers expressed positive attitudes toward multi-omic return of results in principle, particularly if medically actionable. However, competing ethical considerations, logistical constraints, and need for more external guidance were raised as key implementation concerns. Future studies should consider views and experiences of other relevant stakeholders, specifically clinical genomics professionals and study participants, regarding the clinical utility of multi-omics information and multi-omics results return. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Despite sustained attention to ethical leadership in organizations, scholarship remains largely descriptive. This study employs an empirical approach to examine the consequences of ethical leadership on leader promotability. From a sample of ninety-six managers from two independent organizations, we found that ethical leaders were increasingly likely to be rated by their superior as exhibiting potential to reach senior leadership positions. However, leaders who displayed increased ethical leadership were no more likely to be viewed as promotable in the near-term (...) compared to those who displayed less ethical leadership. Our findings also show ethical culture and pressure to achieve results are important contextual factors that moderate the relationships between ethical leadership and leader promotability to senior leadership roles. (shrink)

How do work motivations and sector perceptions differ between graduate students at prestigious Business Schools and Public Policy in Asia? Where do Asia’s future business and government leaders want to work, and why? To answer these questions, we compare Asian Master of Business Administration students with Master of Public Policy and Master of Public Administration students from three leading Schools based in Singapore through a survey study and a series of seven focus groups. Our findings indicate that work motivations, (...) sector perceptions, and career preferences differ between both groups but slightly less so than between their Western counterparts. Moreover, future Asian leaders equally value being successful while many view government as bureaucratic and prone to cronyism regardless of degree program and employment preference. We discuss how our findings may advance a more robust management and leadership research agenda for Asia. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Despite sustained attention to ethical leadership in organizations, scholarship remains largely descriptive. This study employs an empirical approach to examine the consequences of ethical leadership on leader promotability. From a sample of ninety-six managers from two independent organizations, we found that ethical leaders were increasingly likely to be rated by their superior as exhibiting potential to reach senior leadership positions. However, leaders who displayed increased ethical leadership were no more likely to be viewed as promotable in the near-term (...) compared to those who displayed less ethical leadership. Our findings also show ethical culture and pressure to achieve results are important contextual factors that moderate the relationships between ethical leadership and leader promotability to senior leadership roles. (shrink)

Virtues and character strengths are often assumed to be universal, considered equally important to individuals across cultures, religions, racial-ethnic groups, and genders. The results of our surveys and laboratory studies, however, bring to light subtle yet consistent gender differences in the importance attributed to character in leadership: women considered character to be more important to successful leadership in business than did men, and women had higher expectations that individuals should demonstrate character in a new leadership role. Further, the gender of (...) the research participant affected character ratings such that male respondents viewed a female leader who exhibited agentic behaviors in a professionally challenging situation less positively than a male leader who displayed the same agentic behaviors. The data also showed that male participants rated almost every dimension of character displayed by the female leader lower than did female participants. Our findings suggest that the question as to what extent gender differences may bias the assessment of virtues and character strengths is an important one, and one for which the practical implications for individuals in organizations need to be studied in more detail. (shrink)

The Garden of Leaders explores two related questions: What is leadership? And what sort of education could prepare young people to be leaders? Paul Woodruff argues that higher education--particularly but not exclusively in the liberal arts--should set its main focus on cultivating leadership in students. Woodruff advances a new view of liberal arts education that places leadership at the root of everything it does, so that students will be prepared to lead in their lives and careers--and not (...) necessarily in management roles. Woodruff views the contemporary university as sorely lacking an emphasis on leadership, and presents three core sets of recommendations for how they can and should foster it. First, Woodruff posits co-curricular groups, activities, and projects as essential activities for students to gain confidence and leadership skills. Administrations should encourage students to engage in activities outside the classroom, convert coached sports teams into student-led clubs as far as possible, and discourage social organizations that are segregated by race or sex. Second, Woodruff advocates for a different curriculum for all undergraduates, no matter their major-arguing that they need to be taught leadership in the forms of key skills including communication, as well as exposure to key material in history literature, social science, and ethics. Students should be asked to consider the hardest ethical dilemmas that leaders face, toggling between Machiavelli and great ethical thinkers such as Confucius and Socrates. Third, Woodruff calls for the teaching methods used by instructors to re-orient themselves around the question of leadership, particularly by emphasizing teamwork. Professors should respect their students' independence, avoid tyrannical teaching, and remember that all teachers teach ethics simply by the examples they set in dealing with students. Whether in engineering, music, or classics, The Garden of Leaders advances leadership as a core value that should be at the heart of the educational enterprise-contending that while a college campus can be many things, it should at the very least be a ground upon which new leaders can grow. (shrink)

Although the dominant view in the literature suggests that work-related anxiety experienced by employees affects their behavior and performance, little research has focused on how and when leaders’ workplace anxiety affects their followers’ job performance. Drawing from Emotions as Social Information theory, we propose dual mechanisms of cognitive interference and emotional exhaustion to explain the relationship between leader workplace anxiety and subordinate job performance. Specifically, cognitive interference is the mechanism that best explains the link between leader workplace anxiety (...) and follower task performance, while emotional exhaustion is the mechanism that best explains the link between leader workplace anxiety and follower contextual performance. Additionally, we examine how follower epistemic motivation serves as a boundary condition for the effect of leader anxiety on follower performance outcomes. Results from a 2-wave study of 228 leader-follower dyads in a high-tech company mostly supported our theoretical model. We conclude the study with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of our findings. (shrink)

This paper examines G. W. F. Hegel’s interpretation of Plato from his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, situating his interpretation historically and noting features that resonate with contemporary Plato scholarship. Hegel forms his interpretation prior to stylometric studies of the dialogues, and distinguishes his Plato from Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher’s views. Hegel responds to important interpretive concerns: 1) the relationship between Socratic and Platonic thought, 2) the dialogue form, 3) Platonic Anonymity and 4) Platonic myth. (...) His treatment of these issues is illustrative with respect to understanding Hegelian philosophy and the history of Plato interpretation. (shrink)

Despite decades of struggle against the industrial food system, academics still question the impact of the alternative food movement. We consider what food movement leaders themselves say about their motivation to act and their capacity to scale up their impact. Based on semi-structured interviews with 27 food movement leaders in Michigan, our findings complicate the established academic narratives that revolve around notions of prefigurative and oppositional politics, and suggest pragmatic strategies that could scale up the pace and scope (...) of food movement impacts. In contrast to the apolitical perspective some scholars see guiding alternative food movements, local leaders we interviewed see the food system from a structural-political lens. Though some see strength in fragmentation, most are not under the illusion that they can work alone and aspire to build their collective strength further. Concerns about organizational survival and conflicting views about the goals of the food movement, however, present ongoing challenges. Ultimately, we argue that there is a middle ground food movement leaders can walk between prefigurative and oppositional politics, one that still attempts to intentionally change the state, while also maintaining the inventiveness that can come from autonomous, grassroots initiatives. Specifically, interviewees suggested that increased strategic capacity around policy advocacy, critical food systems education, and negotiation could help them extend cross-movement networks and mainstream more equitable food policies, while continuing to experiment with customized solutions. (shrink)

This paper explores mourning and forgiveness not simply as sources of existential, political, or emotional meaning, but primarily as possible sites of reconciliation pedagogies . Reconciliation pedagogies are public and school pedagogical practices that examine how certain ideas can enrich our thinking and action toward reconciliation—not through a moralistic agenda but through an approach that views such ideas both constructively and critically. Mourning and forgiveness may constitute valuable points of departure for reconciliation pedagogies, if common pain is acknowledged as an (...) important aspect of rehumanizing the “enemy-other.” This work is difficult and the wider society may be skeptical; however, such work is about assisting a “never again” mentality develop in schools and civil society. (shrink)

Social opposition to instituted policies and practices marks the sites of resistance that populate the contemporary political landscape. Animated by the prospects of a better and more just world, the emancipatory ambitions of social and political movements bring to the fore discrepancies between ideologically congealed power relations and habits of thought and the subversive function of utopian expectations. Paul Ricoeur reminds us that our participation in society is invariably punctuated by our experiences of reality’s noncongruence with imaginative alternatives we can (...) project and upon which we can act. After explaining how literary fictions open spaces for reworking reality, I set out the imagination’s analogous power on the political plane. The struggles with which social and political movements are engaged seek to transform established conventions. Hence, like literary works, these movements aim at refashioning the existing order of reality from within. Protest movements attest to how struggles for recognition combat systemic injustices by holding out the prospect of a different and better future. Consequently, these movements exemplify the power that springs from individuals acting in consort, as evidenced by recent protests against the Trump administration. Conversely, violence destroys power. In view of the way that future expectations animate the force of the present, I therefore argue that dystopic representations of authoritarian regimes in Margret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s 1984 fulfill a critical, social function as apocalyptic harbingers of political corruption and deceit. As such, these dystopian novels intensify the force that the present has as a time of crisis and decision. (shrink)

In this longitudinal study, we explore the co-evolution of the cognitive complexity of the CEO of Puma, Jochen Zeitz, and his view and initiatives on sustainability. Our purpose was to explore how the changes in a leader’s mindset relate to his/her views and actions on sustainability. In contrast to previous studies, we adopt an in-depth longitudinal case study approach to capture the role of leaders’ cognitive complexity in the context of corporate sustainability. By understanding the cognitive development of (...) Zeitz as leader of Puma, we provide an important step toward understanding the co-evolution of leaders’ cognitive complexity and proactive corporate sustainability initiatives over time. Our findings show that as he developed a more complex mindset that also included non-business lenses, Zeitz developed a more inclusive understanding of sustainability and adopted proactive initiatives that went beyond business-as-usual. Our study also demonstrates that a longitudinal perspective can offer valuable insights for a better understanding of how individuals and their interactions affect and are affected by an organization’s strategies and performance, in corporate sustainability and beyond. (shrink)