Division 5 public affairs symposium: Validation of certification and licensure tests--Legal, psychometric, and social issues

1989 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Orr

Relative to the problems we face, our politics are about the most miserable that can be imagined. Those who purport to represent us and who on rare occasions try to lead us have been unable to take even the smallest steps to promote energy efficiency to avoid possibly catastrophic climatic change a few decades from now. They have failed to stop the hemorrhaging of life and protect biological diversity, soils, and forests. They ignore problems of urban decay, suburban sprawl, the poisoning of our children by persistent toxins, the destruction of rural communities, and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. They cannot find the wherewithal to defend the public interest in matters of global trade or even in the financing of public elections. Indeed, the more potentially catastrophic the issue, the less likely it is to receive serious and sustained attention from political leaders at any level. Our public priorities, in other words, are upside down. Issues that will seem trivial or even nonsensical to our progeny are given great attention, while problems crucial to their well-being are ignored and allowed to grow into global catastrophes. At best they will regard us with pity, at worst as derelict and perhaps criminally so. The situation was not always this way. The leadership of this country was once capable of responding to threats to our security and health with alacrity and sometimes with intelligence. In light of the dismal performance of the U.S. political system relative to the large environmental and social issues looming ahead, we have, broadly speaking, three possible courses of action (assuming that we choose to act). The first is to turn the management of our environmental affairs over to a kind of permanent technocracy—a priesthood of global managers. The idea that experts ought to manage public affairs is at least as old as Plato. In its current incarnation, some propose to turn the management of the earth over to a group of global experts. Stripped to its essentials, this means smarter exploitation of nature culminating in the global administration of the planet with lots of satellites, remote sensing, and geographic information systems experts mapping one thing or another.


1968 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Fitzsimmons ◽  
Hobart G. Osburn

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-452
Author(s):  
VICTORIA BAZIN

Writing to Morton Zabel in 1932, Marianne Moore praised Zabel’s review of Emily Dickinson for Poetry magazine but also took the opportunity to remind her addressee that ‘‘Emily Dickinson cared about events that mattered to the nation.’’ In his review, Zabel had repeatedly insisted upon Dickinson’s ‘‘fast seclusion’’ from her community, locked as she was within an ‘‘asylum of the spirit.’’ This emphasis upon ‘‘isolation’’ and ‘‘introspection’’ represented the woman poet as being oddly detached from the ‘‘real’’ and implicitly masculine world of political and social change, a critical strategy Moore would have been all too familiar with, her own work having been repeatedly constructed in terms of aesthetic ‘‘purity.’’ Moore’s defence of Dickinson as a poet fully engaged with the political and social issues of her day is also, implicitly, a reminder to Zabel that women’s poetry need not be confined by critical interpretation to the private and feminized sphere of ‘‘introspection’’ but could be related to public affairs of national importance.


Author(s):  
Omran Aly El Awagy

For decades, Egypt -as many developing counties- suffers from various social issues as poverty, illiteracy and the decline of public service provision as healthcare, education, potable water and sewage. In spite of all the consecutive government efforts to confront such social dilemmas, the constituents of different locality in Egypt still feel the discrepancy and decay of quality for many social services proposed by the government.In fact, many challenges are hindering the government strategic path to overcome such social issues as the scarcity of financial and physical resources, deplorable bureaucracy crippled by red tapes, lack of competent human resources, escalated number of population and embedded corruption. Thereby, the people whined from social injustice due to the government failure in realizing a just national wealth distribution.    Hence, social entrepreneurship emerged -from the twentieth century endings- as an alternate option to resolve inadequate government performance and to improve the quality and the delivery of social services. Whereby, this can be realized by mobilizing personal properties to be allocated to public affairs in the context of people cooperation and voluntary participation values. Such process of social entrepreneurship had to take place within an entity/corporation -as non-governmental organizations NGOs- (social entrepreneur) able to manage its activities effectively realizing an adequate  model of  actions within the organization (intrapreneurship/internal entrepreneurship). This paper, therefore, explores, discusses and analyzes the role of waqf corporate as a good example for social entrepreneurs who have played a significant role of providing opportunities in sharing the government’s fiscal needs and improving the communities and nation welfare throughout history in many countries. Waqf corporate has a potential to become one of the effective tools regarding the socioeconomic realm in the Egyptian community; whereby it can benefit the community in term of education, health care, national security, social justice, transportation facilities, basic infrastructure, foods and job opportunities.   Keywords: Corporate waqf, Social entrepreneurship, Intrapreneurship, Egyptian community.


1971 ◽  
Vol 127 (3) ◽  
pp. 504-504
Author(s):  
J. C. Talbot
Keyword(s):  

1979 ◽  
Vol 24 (12) ◽  
pp. 1003-1003
Author(s):  
LISA A. SERBIN

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