Anxiety and the Post-Modern Student

When I first started teaching at Loyola University Chicago over 26 years ago, the only times I heard the word anxietyhad to do with math or science anxiety. As educators, we felt equipped to fix any math and science anxiety that impeded our students’ learning. But what about general anxiety or depression that goes beyond impeding learning and affects all aspects of the students’ life? How do we help our students with something we are usually not trained to identify, much less “fix”

A Note on Post-Modern Monetary Policy

This paper surveys the roots of the modern literature on monetary policy, and illustrates the convergence that occurs between open-economy approaches and the micro foundations of monetary policy. From the Banking School versus Currency School debate to the “credibility versus flexibility” refinement, monetary policy has a long history of scholarly works. Although it may be hard to imagine that there is still room for innovations, the current developments of the literature on open-economy monetary policy seem to spawn a new and essential branch.: monetary policy, rules versus discretion, credibility versus flexibility, Banking School, Currency School

The challenges of culture to psychology and post-modern thinking

Someone at a workshop in the Waikato once said to us, “You know a Maori, if they want to, can always learn to be a psychologist, but a psychologist can’t learn to be a Maori”. Cultural knowledge may or may not be accompanied by social science knowledge. Cultural knowledge can stand on its own. Those who possess it, and choose to work in the institutions we are associated with, have gifts this country desperately needs. All our organisations require such people, and they need to be properly resourced, have employment security and control over their work. Their own work away from our organisations also requires adequate resourcing. They can heal their own in ways that we will never be able to. They will almost certainly offer the field rich alternative metaphors and meanings that can free us from the tired old medical, biological and social science ones. This also has implications for those in other branches of psychology, including research, experimental and industrial psychology. There is perhaps a unique opportunity for psychologists in this country of Aotearoa/New Zealand to recognise other ways of describing events, which will lead to creative practices and enable the health and welfare resources to get to those who most need them, on their own terms. It would also enable other people, other workers from other cultures to develop new paradigms, and new shifts in our field. This will not lead to the abandonment of social science, but it will enable that body of knowledge, to sit appropriately along side other realms of knowledge such as gender knowledge, and cultural knowledge, without dominating. A new experience for the social scientists, but I suspect a liberating one

Is Subjectivity Possible - the Post-Modern Subject in Legal Theory

This article puts forward a thesis and then attempts to prove (or at least to develop) that thesis in two related areas. The thesis is that legal theory in general, and critical legal theory in particular, has concentrated too much on critiques of objectivity, wrongly assuming that subjectivity was an unproblematic term. Subjectivity, like mortality, has seemed not only attainable but inevitable. It is objectivity which is presumed to be the problematic goal of our theories and our attempts at doctrinal interpretation. This article reverses the focus, concentrating on the construction of subjectivity in law and social theory... Having pointed out that critical theories focus mainly on the impossibility of reaching objectivity, I show that some of the same critiques can be turned on the construction of subjectivity as well. The parallelism is more than mere symmetry. Just as the concept of objectivity can be used to armour decisions or social practices, so theoretical results and ideological slant can be dictated by loading up the abstract subject of a political or economic theory with a particular set of drives, motivations, and ways of reasoning...I then turn to the legal subject around whom the law revolves and try to develop a sketchy history of the changing qualities which that subject has been believed to possess. I conclude that the ideas associated with postmodernism are a useful framework for understanding the subject in legal theory and in legal practice. In fact, bizarre as it may seem, the law already incorporates a more postmodern view of the subject than either economics or mainstream political theory

R&D-Based Growth in the Post-Modern Era.

Conventional R&D-based growth theory suggests that productivity growth is positively correlated with population size or population growth, an implication which is hard to see in the data. Here we integrate micro-founded fertility and schooling into an otherwise standard R&D-based growth model. We then show how a Beckerian child quality-quantity trade-off explains why higher growth of productivity and income per capita are associated with lower population growth. The medium-run prospects for future economic growth - when fertility is going to be below replacement level in virtually all fully developed countries - are thus much better than predicted by conventional R&D-based growth theory..Endogenous growth, R&D, declining population, fertility, schooling, human capital, postmodern society, post-transitional fertility.

Thoroughly Post-Modern Mary. [A Biographic Narrative Interview With Mary Gergen]

Method: The Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (Prue CHAMBERLAYNE, Joanna BORNAT & Tom WENGRAF, 2000; Tom WENGRAF 2001; Gabriele ROSENTHAL 2004; Kip JONES 2004) uses an interview technique in the form of a single, initial narrative-inducing question (minimalist-passive), for example, "Tell me the story of your life," to elicit an extensive, uninterrupted narration. This shift encompasses willingness on the part of the researcher to cede "control" of the interview scene to the interviewee and assume the posture of active listener/audience participant. A follow-up sub-session can then be used to ask additional questions, but based only on what the interviewee has said in the first interview and using her/his words and phrases in the same order. Through hypothesising how the lived life informs the told story, the case history is then finally constructed from the two separate threads of the "lived life" and the "told story." In this paper, the "lived life" and "told story" are presented in a "raw" form with the further involvement of the reader in mind. The story has not been "analysed" by the interviewer, but left open and transparent. Still, the production of the story becomes the creative output and social construction of both the storyteller and the interviewer (the performer and the audience) and, in this case particularly, one story of many stories that could have been told by the person interviewed. Routine facts are often back-grounded by the narrator through the use of this method in favour of spontaneity in the storytelling and the creation of meaningful life metaphors. In this way, the personal journey to "who the interviewee is today" is described, rather than merely a list of accomplishments. The Lived Life: Mary GERGEN (née McCANNEY) was born in 1938. The first part of her childhood was spent in the small town of Balaton, Minnesota. She subsequently moved with her family to Minneapolis when she was 12. She attended a suburban middle-class high school where she was popular. She went on to the University of Minnesota after graduating high school and continued to be both a gifted student, well-liked and social. In her final year she met an architecture student and married him shortly after graduation. The couple had a girl, Lisa, and a boy, Michael. Over the next seven years, Mary studied part-time for a Master's Degree in Counselling Psychology. Her husband was a fast track architect and they expected to move to Rome in the early 60s, but moved instead to Boston where he could continue his studies at MIT. At a Halloween party given at Harvard, Mary met Ken GERGEN for the first time. They had a long conversation and she discovered that he had an opening for a research assistant, a position for which she immediately applied. She got the job and Ken encouraged her to finish her Master's Degree. She worked for him for two years; he later accepted a position at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, leaving Harvard (and Mary) behind. Both of their marriages began to end. Ken received a fellowship to study in Rome and Mary and her two children left with him on a ship to Rome in 1968. They were married in October of 1969. Back at Swarthmore, they began to work together on experimental projects, antiwar protests, etc. Ken and Mary lived and worked in Japan in 1972-73. By the mid-70s, Mary realised that she wanted a PhD and became a graduate student at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1974 where she quickly became involved in teaching. In 1976-77 the couple spent a year in Paris. After receiving her PhD, Mary worked for a time at ATT doing longitudinal studies on managers' lives. Eventually, she got a teaching job at the Pennsylvania State University local campus, fifteen minutes drive from their house, where she went through the ranks from assistant professor to associate professor to full Professor of Psychology and of Women's Studies. In 1988-89 Ken and Mary went to Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, but Ken spent most of the year at Heidelberg in Germany, leaving Mary on her own in the Netherlands. She and Ken persist in teaching and are involved in the Taos Institute promoting social constructionist ideas, as well as co-editing The Positive Aging Newsletter. Mary continues to travel, teach, write and give papers and workshops. Recent publications include Social Construction: A Reader with Ken GERGEN and Feminist Reconstructions in Psychology Narrative, Gender, and Performance. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs040318

Tracing Cold War in Post-Modern Management's Hot Issues

Tracing Cold War in post-modern managerial science and ideology one encounters hot issues linking contemporary liberal dogmas and romanticized view of organizational leadership to the dismantling of a welfare state disguised as a liberation of an individual employee, empowerment of an individual consumer and a progressive, liberal and global development of a market/parliament mix. The concept of totalitarianism covers fearful symmetries between three modes of paying the bills for western modernization; liberal, communist and the emergent "egalibertarian"(1), while the ideologies of organisationalism and globalization testify to a search for a post-Cold War mission statement. Messiness of re-engineering the enlargement of the European Union testifies to the hidden injuries of Cold War, not all of them caused by a class and class struggle.empowerment;liberalism;Cold War;hidden costs of modernization;egaliberty;organizationalism;paradigm;romanticized view of leadership;Managerialist ideology;totalitarianism

R&D-based Growth in the Post-modern Era

Conventional R&D-based growth theory suggests that productivity growth is positively correlated with population size or population growth, an implication which is hard to see in the data. Here we integrate R&D-based growth into a unified growth setup with micro-founded fertility and schooling behavior. We then show how a Beckerian child quality-quantity trade-off explains why higher growth of productivity and income per capita are associated with lower population growth. The medium-run prospects for future economic growth - when fertility is going to be below replacement level in virtually all developed countries - are thus much better than predicted by conventional R&D-based growth theory.R&D, unified growth theory, declining population, fertility, schooling, human capital, post-modern society.

(Post)Modern Apocrypha as an Epiphany of Sense (on the Basis of Bulgarian Literary Biblical Paraphrases)

The paper is devoted to the author’s concept of modern apocrypha in the context of the two main tendencies of (Post)modernity: unmasking and paraphrasing. On the basis of the literary paraphrases of the Evangelical story, found in the Bulgarian (Post)Modern literary, there is shown a hermeneutic passage from “apocrypha as a literary mystification” (“literary apocrypha”), i.e. a concept often applied in literary studies, to “apocrypha as an epiphany of sense”, i.e. a concept which can be useful in cultural studies and in history of ideas. It is suggested that in the light of the postsecular thought, being an individual interpretation of the canon, the (Post)Modern apocrypha has a great epiphanic potential, which means that hiding minority truths, it reveals in fact some crucial, and crypto-theological, problems of the present. Drawing the axiological difference between “the unmasking apocrypha” (pseudo-gospel) and “the paraphrasing apocrypha” (epiphany of sense), the author claims that only the last one does actually incarnate Charles Taylor’s ideal of the authentic (and poetic) expression (of will), which helps in establishing an individual sense-making horizon as a positive response to the “heretical imperative” of (Post)Modernity