Surviving Objects

Surviving Objects (2012) is a devised multi-media practice-as-research performance based on extensive interviews conducted with my elderly mother and recorded on a hand-held device. Our conversations concern her experiences as a child refugee following violent deportation by the Soviet Army from Eastern Poland to Siberia (1941), and her subsequent route, via Persia, to a British-run refugee camp in Northern Rhodesia, where she remained for 6 years before arriving in the UK. In order to aid my mother’s reflections, our recorded conversations focus on the objects remaining from that period in her life – my ‘inheritance’. The material presence of this handful of objects is central to the ninety-minute performance. Surviving Objects constitutes my attempt to locate a theatrical form through which to root/re-route this engagement with my mother’s marginalised voice. The end-on performance haptically navigates themes of intimacy and failing memory – navigates, indeed, my constantly shifting relationship with my mother. It searches for new cross-medial pathways along which her experience, and my experience of her, can play-out. Surviving Objects involves: 1. live performance (two silent female actors handling/presenting my mother’s objects); 2. Film (two synchronously-playing, large-scale projections exploring the objects by means of a highly-magnifying macro lens); 3. Pre-recorded sound (my mother’s voice, taken from our recorded interviews, which were conducted in Polish, with my own verbal contribution meticulously editorially excised from those conversations); 4. My translation of her stories (appearing periodically as written text that ‘overlays’ - rather than sub- or surtitles - the projected imagery).

Recognition of "difference" in Shari'a: a feminist scrutiny through the lens of substantive equality

The paper looks at the works of notable Islamic feminists to examine whether Islam can be reconciled with a substantive approach to gender equality. Located within contemporary feminist debates related to gender equality, it considers the Qur’anic verses related to two controversial areas of Shari’a law, namely, duty of obedience and polygamy, to explore how Islamic scriptures perceive ‘difference’ and its implications for substantive equality-based legal reforms in a Muslim society.

Exploring identities and cultures in inter-professional education and collaborative professional practice

Although the concept of multi-agency working has been pursued and adopted as the most appropriate way to improve child care provision and health workforces in recent years, both in the UK and more globally, research suggests that participation in such work can be problematic. This article examines current developments in inter-professional education and collaborative professional practice. Drawing on desk research across the fields of Education, Health and Social Care, it applies a critical lens to re-examine inter-professional working using well-established concepts of profession, identity, culture, career, and training/work transitions. The article uses theoretical hooks to look for similarities and differences in the promotion of inter-professionality across the Education, Health and Social Care sectors, alongside those which occur within each. It looks towards a re-invigoration of knowledge creation and application through research. This is viewed as especially urgent in times of fragmentation, transformation, and arguably, disintegration, in the services its professional and academic educators and workers seek to serve.

Speech therapy after stroke: trial shows only that practice varies

Bowen and colleagues’ methods and conclusions raise concerns.1 At best, the trial evaluates the variability in current practice. In no way is it a robust test of treatment. Two communication impairments (aphasia and dysarthria) were included. In the post-acute stage spontaneous recovery is highly unpredictable, and changes in the profile of impairment during this time are common.2 Both impairments manifest in different forms,3 which may be more or less responsive to treatment. A third kind of impairment, apraxia of speech, was not excluded but was not targeted in therapy. All three impairments can and do co-occur. Whether randomised controlled trial designs can effectively cope with such complex disorders has been discussed elsewhere.4 Treatment was defined within terms of current practice but was unconstrained. Therefore, the treatment group would have received a variety of therapeutic approaches and protocols, some of which may indeed be ineffective. Only 53% of the contact time with a speech and language therapist was direct (one to one), the rest was impairment based therapy. In contrast, all of the visitors’ time was direct contact, usually in conversation. In both groups, the frequency and length of contact time varied. We already know that the transfer from impairment based therapy to functional communication can be limited and varies across individuals.5 However, it is not possible to conclude from this trial that one to one impairment based therapy should be replaced. For that, a well defined impairment therapy protocol must be directly compared with a similarly well defined functional communication therapy, with an attention control.

The prevalence and nature of prescribing and monitoring errors in English general practice – a retrospective case note review

Objective To determine the prevalence and nature of prescribing and monitoring errors in general practices in England. Design Retrospective case note review of unique medication items prescribed over a 12 month period to a 2% random sample of patients. Mixed effects logistic regression was used to analyse the data. Setting Fifteen general practices across three primary care trusts in England. Data sources Examination of 6048 unique prescription items prescribed over the previous 12 months for 1777 patients. Main outcome measures Prevalence of prescribing and monitoring errors, and severity of errors, using validated definitions. Results Prescribing and/or monitoring errors were detected in 4.9% (296/6048) of all prescription items (95% confidence interval 4.4 - 5.5%). The vast majority of errors were of mild to moderate severity, with 0.2% (11/6048) of items having a severe error. After adjusting for covariates, patient-related factors associated with an increased risk of prescribing and/or monitoring errors were: age less than 15 (Odds Ratio (OR) 1.87, 1.19 to 2.94, p=0.006) or greater than 64 years (OR 1.68, 1.04 to 2.73, p=0.035), and higher numbers of unique medication items prescribed (OR 1.16, 1.12 to 1.19, p<0.001). Conclusion Prescribing and monitoring errors are common in English general practice, although severe errors are unusual. Many factors increase the risk of error. Having identified the most common and important errors, and the factors associated with these, strategies to prevent future errors should be developed based on the study findings.

Knowledge-based clinical pathway for medical quality improvement

Clinical pathways have been adopted for various diseases in clinical departments for quality improvement as a result of standardization of medical activities in treatment process. Using knowledge-based decision support on the basis of clinical pathways is a promising strategy to improve medical quality effectively. However, the clinical pathway knowledge has not been fully integrated into treatment process and thus cannot provide comprehensive support to the actual work practice. Therefore this paper proposes a knowledgebased clinical pathway management method which contributes to make use of clinical knowledge to support and optimize medical practice. We have developed a knowledgebased clinical pathway management system to demonstrate how the clinical pathway knowledge comprehensively supports the treatment process. The experiences from the use of this system show that the treatment quality can be effectively improved by the extracted and classified clinical pathway knowledge, seamless integration of patient-specific clinical pathway recommendations with medical tasks and the evaluating pathway deviations for optimization.

Introduction to politics of climate change: discourses of policy and practice in developing countries

This Themed Section aims to increase understanding of how the idea of climate change, and the policies and actions that spring from it, travel beyond their origins in natural sciences to meet different political arenas in the developing world. It takes a discursive approach whereby climate change is not just a set of physical processes but also a series of messages, narratives and policy prescriptions. The articles are mostly case study-based and focus on sub-Saharan Africa and Small Island Developing States (SIDS). They are organised around three interlinked themes. The first theme concerns the processes of rapid technicalisation and professionalisation of the climate change ‘industry’, which have sustantially narrowed the boundaries of what can be viewed as a legitimate social response to the problem of global warming. The second theme deals with the ideological effects of the climate change industry, which is ‘depoliticisation’, in this case the deflection of attention away from underlying political conditions of vulnerability and exploitation towards the nature of the physical hazard itself. The third theme concerns the institutional effects of an insufficiently socialised idea of climate change, which is the maintenance of existing relations of power or their reconfiguration in favour of the already powerful. Overall, the articles suggest that greater scrutiny of the discursive and political dimensions of mitigation and adaptation activities is required. In particular, greater attention should be directed towards the policy consequences that governments and donors construct as a result of their framing and rendition of climate change issues.

Visualizing probabilistic flood forecast information: expert preferences and perceptions of best practice in uncertainty communication

The aim of this article is to improve the communication of the probabilistic flood forecasts generated by hydrological ensemble prediction systems (HEPS) by understanding perceptions of different methods of visualizing probabilistic forecast information. This study focuses on interexpert communication and accounts for differences in visualization requirements based on the information content necessary for individual users. The perceptions of the expert group addressed in this study are important because they are the designers and primary users of existing HEPS. Nevertheless, they have sometimes resisted the release of uncertainty information to the general public because of doubts about whether it can be successfully communicated in ways that would be readily understood to nonexperts. In this article, we explore the strengths and weaknesses of existing HEPS visualization methods and thereby formulate some wider recommendations about the best practice for HEPS visualization and communication. We suggest that specific training on probabilistic forecasting would foster use of probabilistic forecasts with a wider range of applications. The result of a case study exercise showed that there is no overarching agreement between experts on how to display probabilistic forecasts and what they consider the essential information that should accompany plots and diagrams. In this article, we propose a list of minimum properties that, if consistently displayed with probabilistic forecasts, would make the products more easily understandable. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The effect of the national setting on employment practice: the case of downsizing

Although there is now a sizeable body of academic literature that tries to explain cross-country differences in terms of corporate control, capital market development, investor protection and politics, there is as yet very little literature on the degrees of protection accorded to other corporate stakeholders such as employees, based on a systematic comparison of firm level evidence. We find that both theories of legal origin and the varieties of capitalism approach are poor predictors of the relative propensity of firms to make redundancies in different settings. However, the political orientation of the government in place and even more so the nature of the electoral system are relatively good explanators of this propensity. In other words, political structures and outcomes matter more than more rigid institutional features such as legal origin. We explore the reasons for this, drawing out the implications for both theory and practice.

Knowledge-based design cost estimation through extending industry foundation classes

In order to overcome divergence of estimation with the same data, the proposed digital costing process adopts an integrated design of information system to design the process knowledge and costing system together. By employing and extending a widely used international standard, industry foundation classes, the system can provide an integrated process which can harvest information and knowledge of current quantity surveying practice of costing method and data. Knowledge of quantification is encoded from literatures, motivation case and standards. It can reduce the time consumption of current manual practice. The further development will represent the pricing process in a Bayesian Network based knowledge representation approach. The hybrid types of knowledge representation can produce a reliable estimation for construction project. In a practical term, the knowledge management of quantity surveying can improve the system of construction estimation. The theoretical significance of this study lies in the fact that its content and conclusion make it possible to develop an automatic estimation system based on hybrid knowledge representation approach.

Knowledge intensive processes characteristics and improvement: a banking best practice example

This paper identifies characteristics of knowledge intensive processes and a method to improve their performance based on analysis of investment banking front office processes. The inability to improve these processes using standard process improvement techniques confirmed that much of the process was not codified and depended on tacit knowledge and skills. This led to the use of a semi-structured analysis of the characteristics of the processes via a questionnaire to identify knowledge intensive processes characteristics that adds to existing theory. Further work identified innovative process analysis and change techniques that could generate improvements based on an analysis of their properties and the issue drivers. An improvement methodology was developed to harness a number of techniques that were found to effective in resolving the issue drivers and improving these knowledge intensive processes.

Urban integrated meteorological observations: practice and experience in Shanghai, China

Observations of atmospheric conditions and processes in citiesare fundamental to understanding the interactions between the urban surface and weather/climate, improving the performance of urban weather, air quality and climate models, and providing key information for city end-users (e.g. decision-makers, stakeholders, public). In this paper, Shanghai's urban integrated meteorological observation network (SUIMON) and some examples of intended applications are introduced. Its characteristics include being: multi- purpose (e.g. forecast, research, service), multi-function (high impact weather, city climate, special end-users), multi-scale (e.g. macro/meso-, urban-, neighborhood, street canyon), multi-variable (e.g. thermal, dynamic, chemical, bio-meteorological, ecological), and multi- platform (e.g. radar, wind profiler, ground-based, satellite based, in-situ observation/ sampling). Underlying SUIMON is a data management system to facilitate exchange of data and information. The overall aim of the network is to improve coordination strategies and instruments; to identify data gaps based on science and user driven requirements; and to intelligently combine observations from a variety of platforms by using a data assimilation system that is tuned to produce the best estimate of the current state of the urban atmosphere.

Relational pluralism: organizational foresight in practice

This paper examines organizational foresight from a relational perspective. In doing this, we present relational incumbency as a transient conceptual framework to explore how the organizing social relationships and interactions of lower participants may influence organizational foresightfulness. The research employed an exploratory case-based approach with three software organisations and their four new product innovation projects serving as the empirical research sites. Drawing on the case evidence, we provide an account on how normative organizing structures, rights and authority relationships constitutively influence the creative emergence of organizational foresight in practice. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the managerial implications and some directions for future research.

The human-resource management practice of retail branding: an ethnography within Oxfam trading division

Purpose – While the charity retail literature emphasizes the richness of human resource practices among charity retailers, it rarely makes the link between these practices and their interest for establishing charity retailers' brands. Simultaneously, while the retail branding literature increasingly emphasizes the central role of human resource practices for retail branding, it rarely explains how retailers should conduct such practices. The purpose of this study is to test the recent model proposed by Burt and Sparks in 2002 (the “fifth generation of retail branding”) which proposes that a retail brand depends on the alignment between a retailer's substance (vision and culture) and its perceived image by customers. Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on an ethnographic study conducted within the Oxfam Trading Division, GB from October to December 2002. Findings – The study supports the Burt and Spark's model and makes explicit the practice of human resource for branding. The study demonstrates that it was the alignment between the vision of Oxfam's top management and its new customer‐oriented culture, two elements of its core substance mediated to customers by store employees, which has enabled an improved customers' perception of the brand. The study also seeks to elaborate upon the Burt and Spark's model by specifying an ascending feedback loop starting from customers' perception of Oxfam brand and enabling the creation of a suitable culture and vision again mediated by store employees. Research limitations/implications – New research should explore whether and how retailers create synergies between human resource and marketing functions to sustain their brand image. Practical implications – If the adoption of business practices by charity retailers is often discussed, this study highlights that commercial retailers could usefully transfer human resource best practices from leading charity retailers to develop their retail brand. Originality/value – The paper is of value to commercial retailers.