A Case for Developing Spiritual Intelligence in Leaders through Equine Facilitated Learning

Unpredictable circumstances, growing stresses in an ever-increasing global market, and ubiquitous ennui have left organizations and today’s leaders in government, industry, and academia without the necessary tools to transition to change in a principled manner. The authors explain that the development and maintenance of genuine leadership skills — adaptive to the dictates of the modern world — must be borne from one’s inner self, a retreat to spirituality. One available method of achieving this is through Equine Facilitated Experiential Learning (EFEL), a technique whereby leaders develop critical management skills by working with horses

Translating Quechua Multilingualism and European Multilingual Intertextuality in the Short Stories of Edgardo Rivera Martínez

Quechua multilingualism is a significant feature of Andean literature written in Spanish, playing a key role as a marker of Indigeneity interacting with mestizo culture and the Spanish language. In the short stories of Peruvian author Edgardo Rivera Martínez (1933-2018), a mestizo, non-Indigenous writer, Quechua multilingualism is conveyed in different forms and has different functions. It interacts with European-language multilingual intertextuality to portray the tensions and convergences of languages and cultures in the Peruvian Central Andes. When tasked with translating Rivera Martínez’s multilingual short stories from Spanish to English, key questions arise, including the ways Quechua, as a multilingual element the author’s texts, interacts with Spanish and other European languages; what the different multilingualisms convey; and how we might render them into English for a diverse readership. In this essay, I discuss Quechua multilingualism and European multilingual intertextuality in Rivera Martínez’s narrative, and the translation approaches he uses to craft his stories in Spanish. I turn to translation approaches to rendering multilingualism in his work in English translation and suggest that reading and translating his fiction must consider the work Quechua multilingualism performs as an expression of Andean Indigeneity in Spanish-language Andean literature

Employee satisfaction factors in administrative and executive assistants in the United States

This mixed methods research was designed to explore the factors that most impact the job satisfaction of contemporary Administrative and Executive Assistants in the United States. As part of a convergent parallel analysis, quantitative survey data and qualitative interviews were collected to correlate cognitive and affective results for an in-depth analysis. The Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) was used to examine 20 different factors of job satisfaction. Three sets of data were collected: current levels of job satisfaction for each factor, self-ranked lists of the factors indicating which factors are most-to-least important to respondents, and frequency with which factors were discussed by participants in the interviews. Anecdotal information from the interviews provided context to the data sets. The most impactful factors for this employee group were intrinsic factors, identified to be: Co-Workers, Ability Utilization, Achievement, and Responsibility. It was also reported that Responsibility acts as an antecedent factor to both Ability Utilization and Achievement. The least impactful factor was an extrinsic one: Working Conditions, while other factors that were identified to be low-impact require more research to validate. Three actionable recommendations were proposed for organizations as they seek to hire and retain administrative talent, and several related research topics were proposed

Developing Presencing Leadership Acumen through Five Negative Capability Informed Practices

In the face of myriad local and global challenges that humanity is currently facing, it is becoming clear that the future of leadership depends increasingly on a leader’s capacity to make effective discernments and interventions that confront these deeper complex issues at their very root source. To advance progress towards this aim, this article makes the case for cultivating presencing leadership which involves connecting with, and leading from, the hidden source of optimal and sustainable forms of action

The Realist Challenge to Conceptual Pragmatism

Although commonly cited as one of the philosophers responsible for the resurgence of interest in pragmatism, Wilfrid Sellars was also the son of Roy Wood Sellars, one of the most dedicated critical realists of the early 20th century. Given his father’s realism and his own ‘scientific realism,’ one might assume that the history of realism – and, despite contemporary interest, not pragmatism – would best serve as the historical background for Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy. I argue that Wilfrid Sellars, far from being the adherent to classical pragmatism assumed by some, holds more in common with critical realism - specifically, a realism that was framed in opposition to pragmatism – than one finds amongst the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, or John Dewey. I support this claim by examining Wilfrid Sellars’ adoption of his father’s criticisms of C.I. Lewis, and offer various arguments and historical considerations against thematic accounts that insist on a strong connection between Wilfrid Sellars and pragmatis

Discourse and identity in Guatemala: imaginaries of indigeneity and Luis de Lión’s decolonial grito/llanto

This dissertation examines Guatemalan discourses of identity and indigeneity from the colonial period to the mid-1980s. Through the theoretical lens of the coloniality of power and by means of a genealogical approach to discourse, I argue that Maya Guatemalan writer Luis de Lión’s (1939-1984) literary project decolonizes Guatemalan discursivities regarding Mayas in the nation. His work does so by problematizing the violence of the social myths and discursive “truths” about indigeneity circulating in Guatemalan society and literature, such as the “glorious Indian of the past” and the “miserable Indian of the present” binary. Additionally, Luis de Lión’s literary work articulates a discursive, emancipatory decolonial project for Mayas in the nation that moves beyond “clasista” and “culturalista” approaches to Guatemalan revolution during the armed conflict period by underlining both the coloniality of spirituality and gender racializing Indigenous subjectivities. I begin with an analysis of the political conceptualizations and policy debates regarding national identity and Mayas’ place within it from Criollo, Ladino (mixed Spanish-Indigenous), and Maya perspectives to evidence the construction and contestation of the notion of Mayas in the nation as a “problem”. Next, I trace how the social myths of indigeneity developed in the political sphere are articulated in literature from the colonial period to the mid-20th century in order to understand how literary discourses normalize social myths into imaginaries asserting discursive “truths” about Mayas. Finally, I consider a sample of Luis de Lión’s narrative production to argue that his work commences a veritable decolonial turn in Guatemalan discourses of Indigenous identity through the creation of a counter-discourse complicating the racial and gendered framing of Mayas in the nation, what I call his decolonial “grito/llanto”. I further evidence the different, “other” versions of Maya identity de Lión offers in his “rewriting” of a Maya cosmovision and his intertextual plays with the Popol Wuj, the Maya classical book. For his contestation of “truths” of indigeneity, de Lión’s work emerges as a complex, multifaceted, discursive emancipatory project for Mayas in Guatemalan textualities.Spanish and Portugues

Analysis Identifies Need to Educate Wine Grape Growers on Crop Insurance Issues

A spatial analysis of variation in return on investment for crop insurance showed that West Coast wine grape growers are more inclined to use insurance to maximize short-term net returns than to protect against cash flow shortages. Growers would benefit from knowing that even if crop insurance does not maximize short-term net returns, it increases the revenue floor, thereby helping prevent cash flow shortages and vineyard failure. With crop insurance as the backbone of the U.S. agricultural safety net, an understanding of factors that drive variation in crop insurance participation can improve agricultural Extension agents\u27 ability to offer programming on crop insurance issues. Additionally, agents can use publicly available data to replicate the analysis described in this article for other insured crops

The Dominant Water Estate

The United States and other common law countries have a rich tradition of protecting property rights in land. In fact in earlier times these land rights included water as part of the right. Remnants of this are still visible in the riparian rights doctrine for surface water and in some ground water doctrines. Traditionally land use practices were protected even when they interfered with water usage. But in dry areas the dominance of land rights over water rights does not make sense. Water is more valuable than land in arid locations. Shouldn’t water be protected from land use practices that interfere with water uses? If water rights were dominate over land rights, would more water be conserved or would water be put to more efficient uses? Mineral rights can be severed from other land rights, and when they are the right to develop the mineral is included with the mineral right. This makes the mineral estate dominant. If water rights were dominant over land rights, land uses that impacted water would only be allowed if there was also an accompanying water right. The basis for this already exists in many western states where the state or the public is considered the original possessor of all water rights. Individual uses and rights are allowed but only under a state permit system. My paper examines the concept of the dominant water estate and explores what this would mean for increasing water supplies