This paper explores educational fallout from the realisation that the world system has planetary boundaries as limits that are real and that require different thinking and governance concerning how human beings ought to inhabit the planet. It will be difficult to have billions of people think about global concerns when they are focused on their own well-being. And so it comes to governance, locally, with bigger things in mind. Environmental education rhetoric has already begun to expand thinking to engage world systems as groundings for the politics that underpins decision-making above and beyond levels of theory/praxis. The educational challenge will be to lay out background theory and guidelines as we find ways to engage politically the problems amidst the power and control of the people that we elect as “leaders” at each level of educational and political systems. However, the challenge has been taken up and environmental education has created openings for exploring complexities of political ecology within environmental education.

The scholarship on political skill documents that it is a social savvy, personal style construct, associated with positive personal and organizational outcomes. However, this study takes a counterintuitive view and demonstrates that despite being a positive resource, political skill also has the potential to be used as a self-serving device to achieve one's personal agendas in the form of self-serving counterproductive work behaviors. Borrowing insights from the trait activation theory, this study demonstrates that a context, high in political perceptions, acts as an incentivized condition for politically skilled people to execute its dark side. The results supported the hypothesis and revealed that under high perceptions of organizational politics, political skill will have a significant, positive relation with self-serving counterproductive work behaviors. The study discusses important theoretical and practical implications of these results and extends the domains of political skill and counterproductive work behaviors.

This piece is a highlight of the foresight, wisdom, humbleness, role-modelling and leadership of Ken Parry.

Ken Parry once asked me why I wanted to take the lead on a particular initiative. This paper summarises the answer I'd like to have given him. Taking the lead is pleasurable in three principle ways: it affirms or modifies self-concept, confirms a degree of control over the external world and promises self-transcendence through relationship with others. The paper proposes three categories: identity, influence and interaction, as the basis of an analytic framework for further research into the pleasures of power.