Adopting the Power of Strengths Based Approaches

People with psychiatric and mental health conditions along with other disabilities have endured a long trajectory of inequalities and missed opportunities that have resulted in less than ideal conditions. This longstanding viewpoint has translated into and affected operations and treatment of students in the special education sector. A central factor that is significantly involved in this pervasive and prevalent issue is the mindset of deficit thinking which states that there is something inherently wrong with students who have exceptionalities. Such mindset leads to misaligned treatment and instruction and exacerbates developmental concerns. Key contributors in deficit thinking in the exceptional education arena involve a variety of methodologies that would benefit from changes in humanistic approaches. This chapter discusses key issues that comprise deficit thinking, principles and values that enhance the experience toward success in exceptional education. Discussion of potential solutions are also explored.

Length of stay and satisfaction shaping the competitiveness of international business tourism in São Paulo city, Brazil

The notion of competitiveness receives growing attention in the tourism literature as it is recognized as a central factor for success in the visitor economy. Despite the enthusiasm for the promised benefits of this approach, there are gaps in understanding the limits and possibilities of making the destination competitive by attracting visitors and expanding their spending, providing a satisfying experience. We study international business tourism in Sao Paulo city to empirically explore how length of stay determines different dimensions of tourist satisfaction. Estimates indicate that length of stay negatively affects the satisfaction dimensions studied. Likewise, there is no evidence of the existence of a curvilinear relationship between these variables. Implications for policy makers and business management are presented.

A discussion on the new critical convergences towards the centrality of knowledge in school: the theories of the relation to knowledge of Bernard Charlot and the return of Michael Young's powerful knowledge

In the late 1960s, driven by the increasing capacity of computational data processing, statistics that linked school success with students' social backgrounds became the main argument in favor of the idea that schools -even the public ones- did little more than reproduce class inequalities and legitimize them by attributing school failure to the poor intellectual abilities of subordinate class students. Both in England and France, critical theories about education questioned the curriculum, which they saw as arbitrary and related to the interests and tastes of the privileged classes, as well as the authority of the teacher, transmitter of these contents and legitimizer of educative but especially social failure, of children from low strata. This apparent consensus is explicitly broken with the turn of the century, and authors such as Bernard Charlot in France and Michael FD Young in England, converge on pointing to knowledge as the central factor in educational work. The objective of this article is to examine the approaches of the two authors on this point, to compare both perspectives, and to propose overcoming visions of some distances that separate them. It concludes with a theoretical critique of both perspectives, an attempt of an overcoming synthesis, underlining the value of knowledge as a central factor in educational activities.

Consistency in identity-related sequential decisions

Consumers often make decisions that reflect either personal or social identities. In many cases, such decisions are made along a sequence. Our research introduces a central factor that influences consumers’ likelihood of expressing a consistent identity type along a sequence of decisions: the extent to which their usage of the product involved in the first decision is expected to be observable by others (the product’s expected visibility). A field experiment, and four lab studies, coupled with an internal meta-analysis, show that when the product involved in the first decision has high (as opposed to low) expected visibility, consumers are more likely to make a subsequent decision that is consistent with the first. Results show that self-presentation mediates this effect, and suggest that low integration between the identities involved in the decisions might attenuate it. Our findings offer implications for identity research and practical implications for marketers seeking to develop products and design communications that encourage consistent (or inconsistent) behavior.

The concept of "conscience" as an ethical category

The concept of “conscience” is one of the oldest components in the axiosphere and the central factor in the moral self-awareness of the individual. This phenomenon is closely related to the features of a person’s existential position in the world. The study presents an associative model of the concept of “conscience” in the biblical cultural discourse. The semantic components of the concept are determined and its biblical meanings are considered.

Uneven geographies in the various language editions of Wikipedia: the case of Ukrainian cities

The paper tackles the issue of uneven geographical representations on Wikipedia, the most visible and powerful user-generated encyclopaedia. In particular, it addresses language imbalances on Wikipedia with regard to geographical information and uneven spatial patterns of territory coverage on the different language versions in an attempt to verify expectations about the cultural factors that influence these imbalances and uneven spatial patterns. Ukraine is a promising case for testing the formulated expectations, as it has a large number of neighbouring countries, and most of them had political and cultural influence on its territory in the past. The volumes (word counts) of articles about the Ukrainian cities were analysed for seven language versions of Wikipedia, including the Ukrainian version and the versions of all bordering countries. The results show that historical geography is the strongest and central factor, and most of the key relic borders (former boundaries) can be traced. Ethnic composition appears to be another important factor, although weaker than the previous one. The role of the border factor is often unclear, but in some cases it definitely makes an impact and therefore cannot be completely ignored. Thus, the geographies of Wikipedia are not indifferent to the issues of ethnicity and geopolitics. The research calls into question the ability of modern Wikipedia to be a reliable and balanced source of geographical knowledge, as the described imbalances may create lopsided and biased geographical representations in people from different countries and nations.

Beyond Gridlock: How Global Governance Continues to Shape our World

In 2013, Thomas Hale, the late David Held and Kevin Young published Gridlock. Their book made sense of a widely shared perception. The edifice of global governance, this perception suggested, had begun to crumble under a range of pressures. The empirical evidence that lay beneath this perception was puzzling not only in a normative, but also in an analytical sense. It did not seem to match the demand for international institutions, which was the most central factor scholars pointed to when they had to explain the emergence, changes and effects of international institutions. The subtitle of Hale, Held and Young’s neatly summarised what was at stake. What had to be explained was ‘why global cooperation is failing when we need it most’. The three titles reviewed in this essay challenge this view. They suggest that many international organisations continue to do their everyday work (Dolowitz et al.), that many informal global governance institutions have been added (Roger), and that various forms of ‘ebb and flow’ have been a constant in global governance since 1850 (Grigorescu).

A review on gut microbiota: a central factor in the pathophysiology of obesity

Obesity and its complications constitute a substantial burden. Considerable published research describes the novel relationships between obesity and gut microbiota communities. It is becoming evident that microbiota behave in a pivotal role in their ability to influence homeostatic mechanisms either to the benefit or detriment of host health, the extent of which is not fully understood. A greater understanding of the contribution of gut microbiota towards host pathophysiology is revealing new therapeutic avenues to tackle the global obesity epidemic. This review focuses on causal relationships and associations with obesity, proposed central mechanisms encouraging the development of obesity and promising prospective methods for microbiota manipulation.