Care and Commitment is the first book to address the growing issue of foster parent adoption. Meezan and Shireman go directly to the source to find out why some foster parents, when given the opportunity, choose to adopt the children in their care while others do not. Differences between the two sets of families are explored in terms of family characteristics, child characteristics, family-child interaction, and child welfare agency service. The culmination of a two-year study, this book presents the perspectives of both families who have made the decision and their social workers. It affords also the first look at foster parent adoptions that have failed, highlighting the importance of agency service in such adoptions. The book's timely and original findings are crucial for child welfare practitioners and all those interested in permanency planning for children and in the processes of family formation.

In this book, Blustein presents the first study of an ethics of care, offering a detailed exploration of human "care" in its various guises: concern for and commitment to individuals, ideals, and causes. Blustein focuses on the nature and value of personal integrity and intimacy, and on the questions they raise for traditional moral theory. Among the topics considered are: what is the nature of caring as such? what do we (and should we) care about? what is implied by the claim that caring supports a sense of the meaningfulness of our lives? how does caring benefit the one who cares and what is the good of care? how do we care about caring? Clearly and accessibly written, this book takes a fresh look at the issues surrounding personal values and relationships.

My writing of this book has evolved over the past thirty-six years of professional nursing practice. These were my first efforts as an author, which were published in 2013: Promoting a Culture of Safety: Preventing Central Line Infections in Weill Cornell Medical Center, which used a performance improvement process to lower the rate at which critically ill patients in cardiac care developed central line infections, and Factors Influencing Critical Nurses' Perception of their Overall Job Satisfaction: An Empirical Study, which used a correctional approach and was statistically analyzed to determine the perception of critical-care nurses of their manager's leadership style and its effect on their job satisfaction. Having been on the receiving end of leadership behaviors gave me a firsthand opportunity to observe these diverse nurse leaders at both extremes of the spectrumfrom laissez-faire leadership style to dictatorial leadership style and everything in between. Each encounter has enriched my life immeasurably. My personal and professional experiences, as well as the knowledge I gained from completing my dissertation, all compelled me to write this bookto share with novice managers and those aspiring for a leadership role an awareness and provide them with some valuable information needed as they forge their career paths into a leadership role, knowing that one of the keys to effective leadership is the ability to stay intellectually curious and committed to learning with the understanding that new knowledge can come from variety of sources and to make it a point of duty to be always on a lookout for new knowledge.

The narratives and analysis included in this book were written by and derived from teacher participants in a post-graduate course that the chief editor, Dr Fang, has taught at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. Narrative inquiry has been used in the course to help teachers and school leaders make meaning of their personal and professional growth and learning trajectory. Narratives give them their own voice, which leads to a deeper understanding of their work and lives and informs teacher educators, researchers, and policy makers on ways to better support their professional learning and development.More than being a mere summary of teacher narratives, the overviews of each of the six parts of the book, written by the editorial team after many rounds of reading and re-reading, tease out patterns to usher readers into the narratives contained in each part in more informative and reflective ways. The final part with two reflective essays and one research paper explores more systematically the narrative experiences of the course participants, while the epilogue records the author's own journey in developing a narrative inquiry pedagogy in teacher education. The book is expected to benefit future course participants and local teachers as a resource for professional development, and inform researchers and policymakers who are interested in understanding the lived experiences of teachers in Singapore and creating better teacher engagement in schools.

In 1991, the Government of Canada ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, requiring governments at all levels to ensure that Canadian laws and practices safeguard the rights of children. A Question of Commitment: Children’s Rights in Canada is the first book to assess the extent to which Canada has fulfilled this commitment. The editors, R. Brian Howe and Katherine Covell, contend that Canada has wavered in its commitment to the rights of children and is ambivalent in the political culture about the principle of children’s rights. A Question of Commitment expands the scope of the editors’ earlier book, The Challenge of Children’s Rights for Canada, by including the voices of specialists in particular fields of children’s rights and by incorporating recent developments.

A tension lies at the heart of family law. Expressed in the language of rights and duties, it seeks to impose enforceable obligations on individuals linked to each other by ties that are usually regarded as based on love or blood. Taking a contextual approach that draws on history, sociology and social policy as well as law and legal theory, this book examines the concept of obligation as it has been developed in family law and the difficulties the law has had in translating it from a theoretical and ideological concept into the basis of enforceable actions and duties. Increasingly, the idea of commitment has been offered as the key organising principle for the recognition of family relationships, often as a means of rebutting claims that family ties are becoming attenuated, but the meaning and scope of this concept have not been explored. The book traces how the notion of commitment is understood and how far it has come to be used as a rationale for imposing the core legal obligations which underpin care and caring within families.

In contemporary philosophy, the will is often regarded as a sheer philosophical fiction. In Will as Commitment and Resolve, Davenport argues not only that the will is the central power of human agency that makes decisions and forms intentions but also that it includes the capacity to generate new motivation different in structure from prepurposive desires. The concept of "projective motivation" is the central innovation in Davenport's existential account of the everyday notion of striving will. Beginning with the contrast between "eastern" and "western" attitudes toward assertive willing, Davenport traces the lineage of the idea of projective motivation from NeoPlatonic and Christian conceptions of divine motivation to Scotus, Kant, Marx, Arendt, and Levinas. Rich with historical detail, this book includes an extended examination of Platonic and Aristotelian eudaimonist theories of human motivation. Drawing on contemporary critiques of egoism, Davenport argues that happiness is primarily a byproduct of activities and pursuits aimed at other agent-transcending goods for their own sake. In particular, the motives in virtues and in the practices as defined by Alasdair MacIntyre are projective rather than eudaimonist. This theory is supported by analyses of radical evil, accounts of intrinsic motivation in existential psychology, and contemporary theories of identity-forming commitment in analytic moral psychology. Following Viktor Frankl, Joseph Raz, and others, Davenport argues that Harry Frankfurt's conception of caring requires objective values worth caring about, which serve as rational grounds for projecting new final ends. The argument concludes with a taxonomy of values or goods, devotion to which can make life meaningful for us.