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The purpose of this paper is to examine the career motivations of future counseling professionals.

Students completing their Masters of Counseling (n=174) responded to a 30 min survey about their career motivations, counseling career choice satisfaction, planned persistence in the counseling profession and perceptions of the demand and reward structure offered by counseling work. Motivational profiles were educed using hierarchical cluster analysis and compared via MANOVA.

Four distinct profiles were identified: “moderately engaged with family values,” “lower engaged,” “altruistic with family values” and “multiply motivated.” Clusters differed in their perceptions of the demand and reward structure offered by a counseling career, and their level of satisfaction with, and planned persistence in the profession. Cluster composition was unrelated to age, gender or pursuit of previous careers.

Implications for educators pertain to capitalizing on career motivations for different types of entrants, to tailor recruitment and professional preparation.

The authors add to existing literature by drawing on the theoretical lens of expectancy-value theory in a person-centered approach, to the study of counselor motivations, professional perceptions and career choice satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a professional self-efficacy scale for counsellors and psychologists encompassing identified competencies within professional standards from national and related international frameworks for psychologists and counsellors.

An initial opportune sample of postgraduate psychology and counselling students (n=199) completed a ten-minute self-report survey. A subsequent independent sample (n=213) was recruited for cross-validation.

A series of exploratory analyses, consolidated through confirmatory factor analyses and Rasch analysis, identified a well-functioning scale composed of 31 items and five factors (research, ethics, legal matters, assessment and measurement, intervention).

The Psychologist and Counsellor Self-Efficacy Scale (PCES) appears a promising measure, with potential applications for reflective learning and practice, clinical supervision and professional development, and research studies involving psychologists’ and counsellors’ self-perceived competencies. It is unique in being ecologically grounded in national competency frameworks, and extending previous work on self-efficacy for particular competencies to the set of specified attributes outlined in Australian national competency documents. The PCES has potential utility in a variety of applications, including research about training efficacy and clinical supervision, and could be used as one component of a multi-method approach to formative and summative competence assessment for psychologists and counsellors. The scale may be used to assess students’ perceived competencies relative to actual competency growth against national standards, and to identify trainees’ and practitioners’ self-perceived knowledge deficits and target areas for additional training.

Schooling in South Africa represents a history of gains and losses for sections of the society. The colonial, missionary, and apartheid political systems made schooling a weak instrument for mobility for the majority within society. Post-apartheid, although school reform has provided greater access to formal education, it continues to crystallize socioeconomic inequalities. A relatively small number of the previously disadvantaged receive education that facilitates economic and social mobility. The authors examine the new funding system and equity rhetoric that is employed to justify education access to different types of schools and argue that coupling the rhetoric of social transformation with the funding system for schools and thus class, continues the unequal historical education provision. School reform fails to compensate for the adverse effects of apartheid education and is largely reproductive rather than socially transformative. The conclusion is that unless South Africa overcomes the appeasing semantic trap in its policies, historical trends that make the constitutional ideal of equal rights unrealizable are likely to be entrenched.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the important issue of trust in senior management in the public sector. More specifically, the research aims to explore to what extent has there been a downward spiral of trust in public sector senior management in the eyes of their employees in recent years, and whether this trend spans the public sector as a whole.

This paper draws on both quantitative and qualitative methodologies from two public sector organisations, which are of very different character. The question being asking of the data is whether a relatively similar percentage of the workforce lacks trust in senior management and whether this is for essentially the same reasons. An attitude survey of the population of both case study organisations was conducted in conjunction with focus groups.

The findings in the paper revealed two important matters. First, longitudinal data indicates that relative distrust of senior management is enduring and cannot be explained or rationalised by merely a short‐term breakdown of communication. The second conclusion from the data is that although the two case study organisations had dramatically different structural characteristics, histories and workforce compositions, the degree of lack of trust in senior management was remarkably similar both as regards extent and leading cause of this.

The findings from two very different public sector organisations suggest that there is a persistent lack of trust in senior management. This finding has important implications for managing the workforce as a lack of trust has significant implications for employee attitudes and behaviour.

This paper raises some important concerns with regards to the quality of the employee‐employer relationship in the public sector.

Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library was featured in a 1994 Library Hi Tech issue as a prototype of the electronic library. Mann Library, the winner of the American Library Association's first Library of the Future award, presented its systematic approach to creating a new digital research library, an approach that employs modern methods rooted in classic principles to form a vibrant, organic whole by integrating the print and the digital library. Mann's approach is based on having a clear understanding of what our mission is and constantly rethinking what we are doing to achieve it. Consequently, a lot has happened at Mann since 1994. This article describes the library's new program of instructional technology support, while a series of short reports focus on some of the other Mann Library projects.

The reorganization of the Portuguese national healthcare system around networks of hospital centers was advanced for reasons promoted as those of effectiveness and efficiency and initially presented as an opportunity for organizational transcendence through synergy. The purpose of this paper is to study transcendence as felt by the authors’ participants to create knowledge about the process.

The paper consists of an inductive approach aimed at exploring the lived experience of transcendence. The authors collected data via interviews, observations, informal conversations and archival data, in order and followed the logic of grounded theory to build theory on transcendence as process.

Transcendence, however, failed to deliver its promise; consequently, the positive vision inscribed in it was subsequently re-inscribed in the system as another lost opportunity, contributing to an already unfolding vicious circle of mistrust and cynicism. The study contributes to the literature on organizational paradoxes and its effects on the reproduction of vicious circles.

The search for efficiency and effectiveness through strategies of transcendence often entails managing paradoxical tensions.

The case was researched during the global financial crisis, which as austerity gripped the southern Eurozone gave rise to governmental decisions aimed at improving the efficiency of organizational healthcare resources. There was a sequence of advances and retreats in decision making at the governmental level that gave rise to mistrust and cynicism at operational levels (organizations, teams and individuals). One consequence of increasing cynicism at lower levels was that as further direction for change came from higher levels it became interpreted in practice as just another turn in a vicious circle of failed reform.

The authors contribute to the organizational literature on paradoxes by empirically researching a themes that has been well theorized (Smith and Lewis, 2011) but less researched empirically. The authors followed the process in vivo, as it unfolded in the context of complex strategic change at multiple centers.

Family is a variable rarely included in organizational research (Dyer, 2003). Chua, Chrisman, and Sharma (1999) argued that one way researchers could bring clarity to the concept of family business would be to distinguish between operational and theoretical definitions. In this paper, we provide a theoretical definition for family business that is based on social capital theory (Coleman, 1988; Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998; Lesser, 2000; Portes, 1998; Putnam, 1993). A family business is one in which the social structure of the family overlaps with the social structure of the business. The result is that the social structure in the business takes on some of the characteristics of the family, especially in small businesses. In addition, and importantly, the social structure of the family takes on some characteristics of the business. In this paper, we focus on how the social structure that exists between marriage partners may influence the social structure in family firms.