Staff Development as a School Climate Intervention to Support Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students: An Integrated Research Partnership Model for School Counselors and Counselor Educators

ABSTRACT

This article posits that an integrative research partnership model can assist school counselors in addressing the marginalization of transgender students in schools through staff development. A methodological integration of action research and program evaluation through quantitative and qualitative data collection is explained, and a collaborative process is highlighted. A case example is provided to demonstrate the use of the design.     

Interactions among future study abroad students: exploring potential intercultural learning sequences

The study presented in this article aims to explore if and how intercultural learning may take place in students’ class interaction. It is grounded in the assumption that interculturality is not a clear-cut feature inherent to interactions occurring when individuals with presumed different linguistic and cultural/national backgrounds talk to each other, but that interculturality is co-constructed during interaction. In other words, every ‘interdiscourse interaction’ is potentially intercultural. We have assumed this perspective while investigating student–student class interactions that took place in an intercultural education course aimed at enhancing students’ intercultural learning in view of their sojourn abroad. Interactional data were analysed from the perspective of conversation analysis. Then, drawing on the notion of séquence potentiellement acquisitionelle as well as on a constructivist approach to intercultural learning, we conclude that, in interaction with their peers, learners can co-construct ‘potential intercultural learning sequences’ (PILS), which present recognisable interactional and discursive features.     

An Observational Analysis of the Impact of Board Dynamics and Directors' Participation on Perceived Board Effectiveness

This study addresses calls for closer examination of board dynamics by offering an inside view of director interactions. Video observations of three board meetings at each of two Australian corporations matched with director interviews and secondary data reveal distinct patterns of director interactions, their sources of variation and their impact on perceived board effectiveness. The data reveal that director interactions are multidimensional and dynamic: while group interactions across agenda items are similar, with a few directors leading the discussion, the contributing directors change across items. Moreover, directors' inclusiveness and evenness of participation are associated with higher perceptions of board effectiveness. Lastly, the study found that director interactions change with the nature of the items, board climate and board meeting arrangements. The study contributes to the literature by moving beyond the individual‐level analysis of directors' skills or independence, and offering a detailed view of how the joint group and individual dimensions of board dynamics affect board functioning.     

Credit Card Debt and the Provision of Financial Support to Kin in the US

Credit card debt stands at over $1 trillion in the US and grows continuously. Scholars have argued that high (and growing) levels of credit card debt are attributable in part to rising economic vulnerabilities, combined with a thinning public safety net, credit cards being increasingly employed to make ends meet in this context. This paper extends this line of work by stressing that individuals and households do not rely on their credit cards only to mitigate their own financial hardships, but also those experienced by their non-coresidential kin members. More specifically, building on the notion that kin networks can constitute a source of negative social capital, we argue that individuals often accumulate credit card debt as they attempt to provide monetary assistance to their relatives in need. We also show that this effect is particularly strong in lower-income groups and in African American communities, in which need levels are especially high. Based on random and fixed effects analyses of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, these insights extend scholarship on both kin networks of support and the sources of credit card debt.

     

Investors’ expectations around quantitative easing: does liquidity injection affect European banks equally?

Journal of Management and Governance - The role of liquidity in the banking industry is increasingly under the spotlight since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2007. Prior evidence offers...     

The New International Migrations and the Changes in the Labour Market

Abstract. The article intends to point out some of the main changes that are taking place in the structure of the labour market in Europe and the role played by the recent waves of immigration from Third World countries. The main features of these new migratory flows are that they involve a much larger number of states, both as sending and as receiving countries. Secondly the majority of the migrants workers tend to hold secondary labour market jobs or to work in the informal sector. These two aspects make today's international migrations very different from the intraeuropean migratory waves that concerned a much lower number of countries and were directed towards industrial areas.     

INSTRUMENTAL AND GRATUITOUS VIOLENCE

This essay examines the torture and death of Gul Rahman in the CIA secret prison/black site known as the Salt Pit, located in northern Kabul, Afghanistan. Virtually excised from the public record, his name and death are mentioned in footnote 28 of the Classified Response to the US Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility Classified Report. This report, prepared by Counsel for Jay S. Bybee, is a detailed and lengthy repost to the accusation made by the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) that Judge Bybee's memo (1 August 2002) to Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, authorized some forms of torture that contravened the US Torture Statute – 18 U.S.C. § 2340, which defines torture and declares it to be a federal crime. In its Report, the OPR concludes that Judge Bybee ‘committed professional misconduct’. In what follows, I proceed to discuss the details of Gul Rahman's torture and death in the CIA Salt Pit in the context of the Bybee memo and his Counsel's response to the OPR's condemnatory report in order to flesh out the relations of legal and governmental power that were instrumental in establishing US regimes of torture and death in the CIA secret prisons. In delineating the forces that were operative in the torture and death of Rahman, I proceed to identify two intersecting modalities of violence – instrumental and gratuitous. In the concluding section of this essay, my analysis of the torture and death of Rahman is framed by the literal and tropological dimensions of redaction, as that legal process that edits and censors a document of any secret or sensitive information. I argue that the process of redaction must be seen as producing, analogically, its own discursive black sites of silence, loss and death.     

Board members’ contribution to strategic decision-making in small firms

This article explores how the boards of small firms actually undertake to perform strategic tasks. Board strategic involvement has seldom been investigated in the context of small firms. We seek to make a contribution by investigating antecedents of board strategic involvement. The antecedents are “board working style” and “board quality attributes”, which go beyond the board composition features of board size, CEO duality, the ratio of non-executive to executive directors and ownership. Hypotheses were tested on a sample of 497 Norwegian firms (from 5 to 30 employees). Our results show that board working style and board quality attributes rather than board composition features enhance board strategic involvement. Moreover, board quality attributes outperform board working style in fostering board strategic involvement.