Business partners and working the pumps: Human resource managers in the recession

This article examines the work and roles of HR managers in the Irish recession. It tests the validity of three competing views about the future of HR: that the profession needs to become a business partner; that it is knee-deep in a legitimacy crisis; and that it is fragmenting by being unable to cope with the complexity of modern organizational life. Three key findings emerge from the research. First, HR managers have gained greater influence in business decision-making, but much of this influence arises from short-run retrenchment measures. Second, many HR managers remain committed to long established professional values and ideas of good practice. Third, modern HR managers are developing a professional identity that allows them to perform multiple, competing roles. These findings challenge existing arguments about the effects of the current recession. They also speak to ongoing debates about changing HR roles by showing how HR managers remain adept at making pragmatic adaptations to secure their role in organizational life. © The Author(s) 2012.

'Mining money': science, legal technologies & working the borderlands of global finance

This paper explores the roles of science and market devices in the commodification of ‘nature’ and the configuration of flows of speculative capital. It focuses on mineral prospecting and the market for shares in ‘junior’ mining companies. In recent years these companies have expanded the reach of their exploration activities overseas, taking advantage of innovations in exploration methodologies and the liberalisation of fiscal and property regimes in ‘emerging’ mineral rich developing countries. Recent literature has explored how the reconfiguration of notions of ‘risk’ has structured the uneven distribution of rents. It is increasingly evident that neoliberal framing of environmental, political, social and economic risks has set in motion overflows that multinational mining capital had not bargained for (e.g. nationalisation, violence and political resistance). However, the role of ‘geological risk’ in animating flows of mining finance is often assumed as a ‘technical’ given. Yet geological knowledge claims, translated locally, designed to travel globally, assemble heterogeneous elements within distanciated regimes of metrology, valuation and commodity production. This paper explores how knowledge of nature is enrolled within systems of property relations, focusing on the genealogy of the knowledge practices that animate contemporary circuits of speculative mining finance. It argues that the financing of mineral prospecting mobilises pragmatic and situated forms of knowledge rather than actuarially driven calculations that promise predictability. A Canadian public enquiry struck in the wake of scandal associated with Bre-X’s prospecting activities in Indonesia is used to glean insights into the ways in which the construction of a system of public warrant to underpin financial speculation is predicated upon particular subjectivities and the outworking of everyday practices and struggles over ‘value’. Reflection on practical investments in processes of standardisation, rituals of verification and systems of accreditation reveal much about how the materiality of things shape the ways in which regional and global financial circuits are integrated, selectively transforming existing social relations and forms of knowledge production.

Dual task performance of working memory and postural control in major depressive disorder

Objective: Previous studies with patients diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) revealed deficits in working memory and executive functions. In the present study we investigated whether patients with MDD have the ability to allocate cognitive resources in dual task performance of a highly challenging cognitive task (working memory) and a task that is seemingly automatic in nature (postural control). Method: Fifteen young (18–35 years old) patients with MDD and 24 healthy age-matched controls performed a working memory task and two postural control tasks (standing on a stable or on a moving platform) both separately (single task) and concurrently (dual task). Results: Postural stability under single task conditions was similar in the two groups, and in line with earlier studies, MDD patients recalled fewer working memory items than controls. To equate working memory challenges for patients and controls, task difficulty (number of items presented) in dual task was individually adjusted such that accuracy of working memory performance was similar for the two groups under single task conditions. Patients showed greater postural instability in dual task performance on the stable platform, and more importantly when posture task difficulty increased (moving platform) they showed deficits in both working memory accuracy and postural stability compared with healthy controls. Conclusions: We interpret our results as evidence for executive control deficits in MDD patients that affect their task coordination. In multitasking, these deficits affect not only cognitive but also sensorimotor task performance.

Is the public healthcare sector a more strenuous working environment than the private sector for a physician?

Aims: The present study examined the differences between physicians working in public and private health care in strenuous working environments (presence of occupational hazards, physical violence, and presenteeism) and health behaviours (alcohol consumption, body mass index, and physical activity). In addition, we examined whether gender or age moderated these potential differences. Methods: Cross-sectional survey data were compiled on 1422 female and 948 male randomly selected physicians aged 25-65 years from The Finnish Health Care Professionals Study. Logistic regression and linear regression analyses were used with adjustment for gender, age, specialisation status, working time, managerial position, and on-call duty. Results: Occupational hazards, physical violence, and presenteeism were more commonly reported by physicians working in the public sector than by their counterparts in the private sector. Among physicians aged 50 years or younger, those who worked in the public sector consumed more alcohol than those who worked in the private sector, whereas in those aged 50 or more the reverse was true. In addition, working in the private sector was most strongly associated with lower levels of physical violence in those who were older than 50 years, and with lower levels of presenteeism among those aged 40-50 years. Conclusions: The present study found evidence for the public sector being a more strenuous work environment for physicians than the private sector. Our results suggest that public healthcare organisations should pay more attention to the working conditions of their employees.

Problem-solving and spatial working memory in patients with schizophrenia and with focal frontal and temporal lobe lesions

Problem-solving ability was investigated in 25 DSM-IIIR schizophrenic (SC) patients using the Tower of Hanoi (TOH) task. Their performance was compared to that of: (1) 22 patients with neurosurgical unilateral prefrontal lesions, 11 left (LF) and 10 right hemisphere (RF); (2) 38 patients with unilateral temporal lobectomies, 19 left (LT) and 19 right (RT); and (3) 44 matched control subjects. Like the RT and LF group, the schizophrenics were significantly impaired on the TOH. The deficit shown by the schizophrenic group was equivalent whether or not the problems to be solved included goal-subgoal conflicts, unlike the LF group who were impaired specifically on these problems. The nature of the SC deficit was also distinct from that of the RT group, in that the problem-solving deficit remained after controlling for the effects of spatial memory performance. This study indicates, therefore, that neither focal frontal nor temporal lobe damage sustained in adult life is a sufficient explanation for the problem-solving deficits found in patients with schizophrenia. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

The role of working memory capacity in multiple-cue probability learning

Multiple-cue probability learning (MCPL) involves learning to predict a criterion when outcome feedback is provided for multiple cues. A great deal of research suggests that working memory capacity (WMC) is involved in a wide range of tasks that draw on higher level cognitive processes. In three experiments, we examined the role of WMC in MCPL by introducing measures of working memory capacity, as well as other task manipulations. While individual differences in WMC positively predicted performance in some kinds of multiple-cue tasks, performance on other tasks was entirely unrelated to these differences. Performance on tasks that contained negative cues was correlated with working memory capacity, as well as measures of explicit knowledge obtained in the learning process. When the relevant cues predicted positively, however, WMC became irrelevant. The results are discussed in terms of controlled and automatic processes in learning and judgement. © 2011 The Experimental Psychology Society.