The importance of developing intermediate care options for older people is gaining increasing prominence in the UK with the promotion of new health and social care partnerships…
Abstract
The importance of developing intermediate care options for older people is gaining increasing prominence in the UK with the promotion of new health and social care partnerships. Consequent changes in practice and values are demanded from staff. An action research approach provides a process of generating information linked to dialogues which facilitate such changes. This article draws on a case study of nursing staff working with older people in a newly‐defined rehabilitation setting in a Welsh community hospital. The action research cycle reported, focused on a series of collaborative interventions aimed at bringing about such changes in thinking and practice from a ‘doing for’ to an ‘enabling’ rehabilitative style of nursing. Three questionnaires and a round of group interviews were successively undertaken with a group of 49 staff, with planning and discussion sessions taking place between each data collection round. The process highlighted differing assumptions between different grades of nursing staff and between nurses and therapists about the nature of the rehabilitative process and how far it could be integrated with nursing care. The article discusses how the action research process supported a shared change in perspective that progress needed to be made to work in an integrated rehabilitative way. Participative approaches, such as action research, should be drawn on if the positive and cost‐effective benefits of rehabilitation for older people are to be more actively realised.
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The successful identification and management of environmental risks remains one of the most important challenges facing mankind. The global nature of environmental risks makes the…
Abstract
Purpose
The successful identification and management of environmental risks remains one of the most important challenges facing mankind. The global nature of environmental risks makes the assumption and practice of environmental responsibility difficult. This paper aims to examine the nature of this difficulty, arguing that although environmental responsibility remains global, it is situated and practiced at the local level.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a case study methodology, the paper examines three family dairy farms in Belsize, New South Wales, Australia. Repeated interviews with adult members of the farming families explored their perspectives of the past, present and future of the farm, eliciting rich narratives about relationships between farm, environment, community and individual, and the role that responsibility plays in negotiating these relationships.
Findings
Environmental responsibility is established as multi‐faceted, and negotiated between social actors as one of myriad other, competing responsibilities. Responsibility is positioned as a critical factor in the generation and maintenance of social relationships, but one which is often mobilized as a mechanism of governance. The paper argues that this can result in tension for some social actors.
Originality/value
This paper positions responsibility generally, and environmental responsibility in particular, as situated on the junction between local and global networks. This occurs as a result of the intrusion of the global into the local, and the corresponding need for individuals to act on the global stage through the medium of their local contexts. In managing the changes in behavior and identity necessary to do this successfully, responsibility is identified as one means of establishing social identity and group members, and a way of defining specific social roles.
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Gill Toms, Stephanie Green, Alison Orrell and Fiona Verity
Research can be an influential driver in raising care home standards and the well-being and human rights of residents. This paper aims to present a case for how a relational…
Abstract
Purpose
Research can be an influential driver in raising care home standards and the well-being and human rights of residents. This paper aims to present a case for how a relational research capacity building programme could advance this agenda.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses Axel Honneth’s Recognition Theory as a lens through which to explore organisational and institutional factors (such as research capacity and investment) that can either enable or limit “recognition” in the context of research in care homes. This paper draws on recent evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK and worldwide, to argue that such a relational capacity building agenda is even more pressing in the current context, and that it resonates with evidence from existing relational capacity building initiatives.
Findings
A lack of relevant research arguably contributed to the crisis experienced by the care home sector early in the pandemic, and there are only tentative signs that residents, care home providers and staff are now informing the COVID-19 research agenda. Evidence from pre COVID-19 and insights from Honneth’s Recognition Theory suggest that relational approaches to building research capacity within the care home sector can better generate evidence to inform practice.
Originality/value
This is a novel application of recognition theory to research in the care home sector. Drawing on theory, as well as evidence, has enabled the authors to provide a rationale as to why relationship-based research capacity building in care homes warrants further investment.
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Kaybinder Gill, Sabina Kauser, Kalsum Khattack and Fiona Hynes
The purpose of this paper is to outline the role of a new healthcare professional, the physician associate (PA), within the developing National Health Service (NHS), particularly…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to outline the role of a new healthcare professional, the physician associate (PA), within the developing National Health Service (NHS), particularly within the specialty of psychiatry.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors reviewed the available literature from the UK and the USA on the history and development of PAs, particularly within the UK. The paper focuses on PA training and the role of the PA, specialities in which PAs are employed in the UK and an insight into the role of PAs within psychiatry. This paper also drew upon research and viewpoints of the effectiveness and benefits of employing a PA, along with current misconceptions and limitations of the role.
Findings
The initial influx of PAs into the NHS at a time of medical staffing crisis was found to be effective and successful in improving service provision and helping provide continuity of care for patients. Where PAs have been employed they have helped to relieve some of the strain by being a consistent member of the medical team and performing many of the duties of junior doctors. However they are still unable to prescribe and order radiological investigations, but this will come in time as the PA profession push for statutory registration.
Originality/value
This paper is one of the first in the UK that gives an overview of the key roles of the PA within the liaison, forensic and community subspecialties of psychiatry.
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Often, researchers view silence as antagonistic to equity-aimed projects. Because verbal, written, and textually agentive communications are presumed to be the most valid…
Abstract
Purpose
Often, researchers view silence as antagonistic to equity-aimed projects. Because verbal, written, and textually agentive communications are presumed to be the most valid qualitative-research data, moments of silence are under-analyzed. Yet, we argue that silence holds meaning as data and that it is a valid, rich form of communication.
Design/methodology/approach
Through this reflective analysis of silence, we invite readers to reconceptualize silence in research from a critical disability-research perspective with emphasis on crip willfulness. We introduce silence as an interpretive, agentive and relational gesture.
Findings
We attend to silence as necessary in all research because it helps researchers excavate able-bodied expectations about communication in qualitative-data-collection practices.
Originality/value
We demonstrate that silences in research can be an interpretive, relational, and agentive gesture that can teach us about taken-for-granted assumptions about research practices. Revisiting our research encounters with this framing of silence informed by critical disability studies allows us to question how traditional social science research methods value some modalities of expression over others. Rather than viewing silence in research as moments when nothing happens, we show that silence indicates something happening and is valid data.
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The purpose of this paper is to explore comparatively the relationship between the employment relations contexts and trends in collective conflicts based at the workplace and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore comparatively the relationship between the employment relations contexts and trends in collective conflicts based at the workplace and conflicts handled individually in employment tribunals outside the workplace.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper employs an international comparative approach comparing conflict data and employment relations models in Britain, France, Italy, Portugal and Poland.
Findings
Collective disputes are at lower levels in the 2000s than in earlier periods in each of the countries studied, while accessing employment courts appears to be as or more frequent than in the past. In France and Italy, conflict appears to be more systematically legitimated in defence of citizenship rights than elsewhere. Both individual and collective conflicts are more common than in Poland and Portugal where labour regulation and employee rights appear either less effectively enforced or, as in Britain, only weakly embedded.
Practical implications
Unions in France and Italy appear more successful in focusing media attention on their collective conflicts, and in securing somewhat more positive state intervention than in the other countries, while at the same time supporting individuals taking cases to the courts. In Poland and Portugal, there are very high levels of individual employment complaints taken to the courts, and little collective strike action, while in Britain unions find it difficult to mobilise action at both collective and individual levels.
Social implications
Unions will have to become more aware of the need to win public legitimacy for resistance if they are to continue to be able to defend workers' interests both collectively and individually.
Originality/value
The paper considers whether different national institutional frameworks are presenting similar shifts from collective‐based to individual‐based resistance in workplace disputes.
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Fiona Armstrong-Gibbs and Jan Brown
This empirical chapter explores the case of Baltic Creative Community Interest Company (BC CIC), a creative hub that enabled and demonstrated intrapersonal entrepreneurial…
Abstract
This empirical chapter explores the case of Baltic Creative Community Interest Company (BC CIC), a creative hub that enabled and demonstrated intrapersonal entrepreneurial capitals (Pret et al., 2016) to adapt quickly and develop novel offers for their tenants during an unprecedented period of crisis and change in the wider ecosystem. BCCIC is a community-owned property development company established to regenerate an underused post-industrial area in Liverpool and support the Creative and Digital community. Over the past decade, they have become a creative hub where small, unique micro-businesses thrive alongside more established enterprises.
Using an organisational ethnographic approach, the authors highlight the complexity in the conversion of entrepreneurial capitals and how this has demonstrated resilience and adaptability in the CIC during the global coronavirus pandemic in the 2020s. During the first coronavirus lockdown in 2020, The CIC responded swiftly to tenants by providing a wide variety of business support initiatives. Regular communications on sector-specific COVID-19 operational guidance and a support programme to help tenants apply for Liverpool City Council Small Business Support grants.
The establishment of this hub for creative entrepreneurs prior to the recent disruption proved invaluable. Although they were severely tested, emerging behaviours, such as agility, adaptability, and resilience during periods of crisis, were identified. This chapter offers key insights for scholars and those leading on creative hubs and cluster policy development and economic initiatives for creative sector support regionally, nationally, and internationally.
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This paper aims to contribute to entrepreneurship theorising by highlighting the salience of feminine caring positions in creating novel entrepreneurial roles and investigating…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to contribute to entrepreneurship theorising by highlighting the salience of feminine caring positions in creating novel entrepreneurial roles and investigating how these roles contribute to community resilience. Using a critical feminist economics lens, alternative conceptualisations of the economy are expanded upon to reveal how an economic externality influences entrepreneurial discourse, gender roles and community resilience.
Design/methodology/approach
In this interpretive approach, empirical evidence is drawn from six months of intensive ethnographic research with 20 tourism handicraft micro-entrepreneurs in Crete and Epirus, Greece, in 2012 and hence in the context of a macroeconomic crisis. Ethnographic interviewing and participant observation are used as the methods to achieve the research objectives.
Findings
Thematic analysis is used to investigate how gender roles and entrepreneurial roles interact and how this interaction influences community resilience to an economic crisis. Using the critical theory to critique neoclassical economics interpretations of entrepreneurship, it becomes evident that politico-economic structures perpetuating feminised responsibility for social reproduction configure feminine entrepreneurial roles, and these roles have a positive effect on increasing community resilience. By conceptualising entrepreneurial involvement as being primarily for community gain, participants highlight how feminine entrepreneurial discourse differs from the neoclassical economics entrepreneurial discourse of entrepreneurial involvement being primarily for individual gain.
Social implications
This paper contributes to theoretical advancements on the role of gender in entrepreneurship and community resilience by investigating the entrepreneurs’ gendered responses to an exogenous shock. Providing insight into the role gender has in entrepreneurial adaptation and sustainable business practices means that new policies to combat social exclusion and promote rural development can be formulated.
Originality/value
The theoretical interplay between gender and entrepreneurship is investigated from a novel angle, that of critical feminist economics. The relationship between feminised interpretations of entrepreneurship and community resilience is brought to light, providing a unique insight into entrepreneurial resilience.
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Red Riding Hood is said to have been assembled from folktales that pre-date the collector Charles Perrault's 1697 re-telling and initial publishing (Dundes, 1989; Zipes, 1993)…
Abstract
Red Riding Hood is said to have been assembled from folktales that pre-date the collector Charles Perrault's 1697 re-telling and initial publishing (Dundes, 1989; Zipes, 1993). Since then, it is a story that has been re-told and re-imagined many times in various media contexts, with Beckett suggesting that it is one of the most familiar icons of Western culture, and a ‘highly effective intertextual referent’ (Beckett, 2002, p. XVI). Even though this story has been generally regarded as a children's tale, adult themes of sexuality and transgression have been explored in modern re-conceptions. In this chapter, we examine the representation of gender and masculinity in commercial media output: the 2011 American film Red Riding Hood (Hardwicke, 2011) and the pilot episode of the NBC series Grimm (2011). In Red Riding Hood, a romantic horror film, the male characters may be regarded as satellites that cluster around the female protagonist, whereas in Grimm, through its generic fusion of police procedural and horror genres, the text plays upon strong established examples of traditional male roles alongside more nuanced and contemporary representations of masculinity. Our analysis explores themes of transformation and heteronormativity and the extent to which the texts challenge or conform to traditional tellings.