Successful but Unappealing: Fifteen Years of Workplace Partnership in Ireland:Special Issue: Partnership, Collaboration and Mutual Gains

This paper presents the first comprehensive review and assessment of Ireland's influential 15-year experiment with workplace partnership. The paper reviews the outcomes of workplace partnership and explains the limited adoption of partnership in the private and public sectors, drawing on the authors' experiences as participants in policy initiatives concerned with promoting partnership in the workplace. Although the promotion of partnership was to the fore in public policy between the late 1990s to the onset of the recession and successful outcomes were reported for the main stakeholders where partnerships were established, the paper explains why the concept nevertheless remained largely unappealing across the private and public sectors.

Listening to the World Through New Ears:Reinvention of the soundtrack in the works of Lucrecia Martel and Sofia Coppola

This paper explores the production and post-production techniques and tensions in designing sound for film. Considering the films of Lucrecia Martel and Sofia Coppola, amongst others, Greene and Yang will discuss how the soundtrack takes on a primary role in these films and becomes a medium for symbolism, reflection, characterisation, as well as storytelling. There will be a close examination of the processes involved in creating character-orientated soundscapes. These processes are sensitive to the effects sound has on an audience. Exploring how these filmmakers (with their sound teams) utilise the listening experience, including attention to point of audition and sound perception, this paper will critically unpick how such creative decisions are arrived at during various stages of the production process. Outlining the use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound and the potential musicality of sound effect design, issues of reverberation, noise and intent are discussed to highlight the sonic framing of these creative teams. Greene will approach these soundtracks from a production/post-production perspective, while Yang will explore the composer’s/designer’s ear.

Recent Developments in the Law of Torts in Northern Ireland Annual Conference of the Irish Association of Law Teachers

This paper reviews decisions from the Northern Ireland and England and Wales High Courts and Courts of Appeal as well as the UK Supreme Court relating to tort and principally to the tort of negligence in the past 12 months or so.

In structure, the paper will be presented in four parts. First, three preliminary points relating to contemporary features of the NI civil courts: personal litigants – Devine v McAteer [2012] NICA 30 (7 September 2012); pre-action protocols – Monaghan v Graham [2013] NIQB 53 (3 May 2013); and the rise of alternative dispute resolution. On the last named issue, the recent decision of PGF II SA v OMFS Company 1 Ltd [2013] EWCA Civ 1288 (23 October 2013) on unreasonable refusal to mediate, will be discussed.

Second, the paper moves to consider the law of negligence generally and case law from the NI High Court reiterating Lord Hoffmann’s view in Tomlinson v Congleton Borough Council [2004] 1 AC 46 that no duty of care arises from obvious risks of injury. In this, reference will be made to the application of the above “Hoffmann principle” in West Sussex County Council v Pierce [2013] EWCA Civ 1230 (16 October 2013), which concerned an accident sustained by a child at school. A similar set of facts was presented recently to the UK Supreme Court in Woodland v Essex County Council [2013] UKSC 66 (23 October 2013). The decision there, on non-delegable duties of care, will have a significant impact for schools in the provision of extracurricular activities.

Third, I will review a NI case of note on the duty of care of solicitors in the context of professional negligence in the context of conflicting advice by counsel.

Fourth, I will examine a series of cases on employer liability and including issues such as the duty of care towards the volunteer worker; tort and safety at work principles generally; and, more specifically, the duty of care of the employer towards an employee who suffers psychiatric illness as a result of stress and/or harassment at work. On the issue of workplace stress, the NI courts have made extensive reference to the Hale LJ principles found in the Court of Appeal decision of Hatton v Sutherland [2002] 1 All ER 1 and applied to those who have suffered trauma in reporting on or policing “the troubles” in Northern Ireland. On the issue of statutory harassment at work, the paper will also mention the UK Supreme Court’s decision in Hayes v Willoughby [2013] UKSC 17 (20 March 2013).

Implementing IFRSs in the UK Devolved Administrations

Purpose
– Utilising concepts drawn from the governmentality literature, the purpose of this paper is to examine the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs) in the UK’s devolved administrations of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales in order to assess why they were adopted and how their introduction has been governed.

Design/methodology/approach
– This research applies a combination of three different approaches, namely: a content analysis; an anonymous online questionnaire; and semi-structured interviews.

Findings
– These include: the transition has had minimal impact upon policy setting and the information produced to aid budgeting and decision making; IFRSs are not entirely appropriate for the public sector; the time, cost and effort involved outweighed the benefits; public sector accounting has become overly-complicated; and the transition is not perceived as part of a wider privatisation programmeResearch limitations/implications
– As this study focuses upon the three UK devolved administrations, the findings may not be applicable in a wider setting.

Practical/implications
– Public sector change must be adequately resourced, carefully planned, with appropriate systems, trained staff and interdisciplinary project teams; accounting change should be based on value for money; and a single, coherent financial regime for the way in which government uses budgets, presents estimates to Parliament and publishes its resource accounts should be implemented.

Originality/value
– This study highlights that accounting change is not just a technical issue and, while it can facilitate a more business-like environment and enhance accountability, all those affected by the changes may not have the requisite skills to fully utilise the (new) information available.

Government as Institutional Entrepreneur: Extending Working Life in the UK and Japan

Through the lens of Institutional Entrepreneurship, this paper discusses how governments use the levers of power afforded through business and welfare systems to affect change in the organisational management of older workers. It does so using national stakeholder interviews in two contrasting economies: the United Kingdom and Japan. Both governments have taken a ‘light-touch’ approach to work and retirement. However, the highly institutionalised Japanese system affords the government greater leverage than that of the liberal UK system in changing employer practices at the workplace level.

Preparing to prescribe: How do clerkship students learn in the midst of complexity?

Prescribing tasks, which involve pharmacological knowledge, clinical decision-making and practical skill, take place within unpredictable social environments and involve interactions within and between endlessly changing health care teams. Despite this, curriculum designers commonly assume them to be simple to learn and perform. This research used mixed methods to explore how undergraduate medical students learn to prescribe in the 'real world'. It was informed by cognitive psychology, sociocultural theory, and systems thinking. We found that learning to prescribe occurs as a dynamic series of socially negotiated interactions within and between individuals, communities and environments. As well as a thematic analysis, we developed a framework of three conceptual spaces in which learning opportunities for prescribing occur. This illustrates a complex systems view of prescribing education and defines three major system components: the "social space", where the environmental conditions influence or bring about a learning experience; the "process space", describing what happens during the learning experience; and the intra-personal "cognitive space", where the learner may develop aspects of prescribing expertise. This conceptualisation broadens the scope of inquiry of prescribing education research by highlighting the complex interplay between individual and social dimensions of learning. This perspective is also likely to be relevant to students' learning of other clinical competencies.

Still Rising: The Career Politician in the British House of Commons, the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet

There is a public perception that politicians in the United Kingdom are increasingly detached from the electorate due to the apparent increase in the number of ‘career politicians’ with a professional background in politics. This article examines the occupational backgrounds of successful candidates to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom between the 1997 and 2010 general elections, comparing the parliamentary compositions of the three main political parties (Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats) during this period, and the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet as of 2014. By evaluating original and secondary quantitative data, it is argued that professionalised politicians have increased in the House of Commons relative to other occupational backgrounds, and are even further disproportionately represented in the senior teams of each major party.