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Ordinary People (ordinary + people)
Selected AbstractsOrdinary people, extraordinary voices: The emotional labour of lay people caring for and about people with a mental health problemINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MENTAL HEALTH NURSING, Issue 5 2010Christine Hogg ABSTRACT Many attempts to reduce the stigmatization of people with mental illness have often been predicated, based on the desire to persuade the public that people with mental illness are ,ill' in the same way as people with medical conditions. This paper presents one aspect from the findings of a study that examined the ways in which lay people perceived mental health and illness. Data are drawn from the discussion of the roles and experiences of different non-mental health professionals who cared for and about people they met in their everyday employment. In this paper, we argue that central to these roles is the importance of listening to people in an arena which is non-statutory and without judgment. We demonstrate that people use popular sectors when they are unsure of the problem they have, or they are reluctant to refer themselves to the professional sector. The paper presents narrative extracts illustrating the emotional labour operating in each participant's role and the extent to which they provide support for their client's emotional and psychological well-being. The implications for mental health nursing are discussed in relation to working with and alongside people experiencing mental distress, in relation to ,ordinary human qualities'. [source] Early Socio-political and Environmental Consequences of the Prestige Oil Spill in GaliciaDISASTERS, Issue 3 2003J.D. García Pérez The controversial form in which the oil industry is run has once more caused a huge disaster , this one affecting the Galician coastal environment and economy. Oil-spill clean-up operations have been managed in Europe with some success but with considerable economic, environmental and social costs. The oil industry often avoids fully or even partially compensating those affected. The lack of both political will and political power has let the culprit (the oil industry) off the hook. This paper considers the spill of the Prestige to assess whether the balance of power between affected people and the oil industry can be changed. The paper examines the growing awareness of environmental issues among ordinary people in Spain, through the massive involvement of volunteers concerned with the damage done to the environment and to the livelihoods of fishing communities in Galicia. To understand these growing public concerns and the strength of opinion, the paper examines the details of the decisions taken by the central Spanish and local governments and the way these have informed the clean-up operations, the character of the oil companies involved and the feeling of impotence in the face of such disasters. The conclusion here is that the operations of the oil industry should be tightly regulated through EU legislation, and that this can come about as a result of organised political pressure from those affected by the oil spill, from the mass of volunteers, as well as from public opinion at large. [source] A Declaration of IndependenceECONOMIC AFFAIRS, Issue 4 2000David Graham Television was a true mass medium, its ,classic' output located within the concerns and lives of ordinary people. Television was also the amphitheatre of the nation, in which great events were played out. As a result of its massive power, regulation was imposed on it. By the 1970s, the unitary power of national channels was beginning to break down, first with the arrival of the VCR, then with satellite and cable. Along with this, came a growing separation of the broadcasting from the creative or programme making function driven by ,independent' producers. This divergence is now being hastened by the end of ,spectrum scarcity'. Creative companies and teams will strive to control their work and share in the rewards of their success in a way that will create a very different kind of entertainment industry in the 21st Century. [source] Historical and political implications of haemophilia in the Spanish royal familyHAEMOPHILIA, Issue 2 2003C. Ojeda-Thies Summary. ,The political implications of haemophilia in the marriage of King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Princess Victoria Eugenie Battenberg of England have been reviewed in recent books on history. However, the fact that they had haemophilic sons also affected their personal relationship. In this article, we review the consequences haemophilia bore on their lives. We feel great compassion for families who suffer the illness, be it ordinary people or members of royalty; however, in this case, it can be said that when the disease affected a royal couple, the political consequences were great. [source] What choices should we be able to make about designer babies?HEALTH EXPECTATIONS, Issue 3 2006A Citizens' Jury of young people in South Wales Abstract Background, Young people will increasingly have the option of using new technologies for reproductive decision making but their voices are rarely heard in debates about acceptable public policy in this area. Capturing the views of young people about potentially esoteric topics, such as genetics, is difficult and methodologically challenging. Design, A Citizens' Jury is a deliberative process that presents a question to a group of ordinary people, allows them to examine evidence given by expert witnesses and personal testimonies and arrive at a verdict. This Citizens' Jury explored designer babies in relation to inherited conditions, saviour siblings and sex selection with young people. Participants, Fourteen young people aged 16,19 in Wales. Results, Acceptance of designer baby technology was purpose-specific; it was perceived by participants to be acceptable for preventing inherited conditions and to create a child to save a sibling, but was not recommended for sex selection. Jurors stated that permission should not depend on parents' age, although some measure of suitability should be assessed. Preventing potential parents from going abroad was considered impractical. These young people felt the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority should have members under 20 and that the term ,designer baby' was not useful. Conclusions, Perspectives on the acceptability of this technology were nuanced, and based on implicit value judgements about the extent of individual benefit derived. Young people have valuable and interesting contributions to make to the debate about genetics and reproductive decision making and a variety of innovative methods must be used to secure their involvement in decision-making processes. [source] The Russian Revolution: Broadening Understandings of 1917HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2008Sarah Badcock The rich historiography of the revolution has tended to focus around urban and political elites, labour history and events in Petrograd and to a lesser extent Moscow. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened previously inaccessible archives and shifted the ideological battlegrounds ranged over by scholars of the Russian revolution. New archivally based research is shifting its focus away from the capitals and political elites, and draws together social and political approaches to the revolution. By investigating revolutionary events outside the capitals, and lived experiences of revolution for Russia's ordinary people, most of whom were rural, not urban dwellers, current research draws a complex and multifaceted picture of revolutionary events. Explanations for the failure of democratic politics in Russia can now be found not only in the ineptitudes of Nicholas II, the failings of Kerensky, or the machinations of Lenin and his cohort. Instead, ordinary people, outside the capitals and in the countryside, defined and determined revolutionary events. [source] Customary Law in Common Law SystemsIDS BULLETIN, Issue 1 2001Gordon R. Woodman Summaries How can the idea of the ,rule of law' be made a reality for ordinary people in African countries where customary law still underpins popular experience of ,law as practice'? It is argued that the idea of law itself should include all non-state ,normative orders' that are known, acceptable and pre-determined, as well as state law. What is called customary law is often closer to observed social norms (practised law) than the state law imported by colonialism, and indeed evolves in line with social and economic change, particularly in the field of land tenure. Any notion of the rule of law must support the institutions of customary law. One problem, however, is that in any country there are many different bodies of customary law particular to different localities, regions, cultures. This diversity must be both researched and recognised. [source] ,Home comes first': housing and homemaking in Finnish civic educational films during 1945,1969INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CONSUMER STUDIES, Issue 5 2009Minna LammiArticle first published online: 6 AUG 200 Abstract This article focuses on how the ideals of housing and homemaking were presented in post-war civic educational films in Finland. The films chosen for the article pertain to housing on a wide scope. The analysis shows that the ideals of good homes appeared to be remarkably consistent in the Finnish educational short films. The most important objective was to guide citizens towards careful household management and saving. Through rationalizing home economics, consumers were able to buy their own home. The ideal housewife had a positive attitude towards technology and rational household management. While the short films instructed people towards temperate and sensible consumption, they also created space for ordinary people to envision new opportunities for consumption. [source] Student and community perceptions about organ donors, non-donors and transplant recipientsJOURNAL OF COMMUNITY & APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 2 2009Melissa K. Hyde Abstract Despite efforts to encourage organ donation, low organ donation rates in Australia and other Western nations do not meet the demand for transplantable organs. One influence on organ donation decision-making yet to be fully explored is that of prototype perceptions about organ donors, non-donors and transplant recipients. We conducted focus groups and interviews with 54 student and community participants to explore these perceptions of donors and non-donors in a living and posthumous context, as well as transplant recipients. Using content and thematic analysis, transcripts were analysed for consistently emerging themes. Donors were generally perceived positively as altruistic and giving and as ordinary people; however, some participants questioned the motives of living anonymous donors. Non-donors were commonly viewed negatively as self-absorbed and unaware, with living-related non-donors particularly perceived as cold-hearted and weak. Transplant recipients were generally viewed sympathetically (unfortunate and unwell); however, many participants also expressed negative views about transplant recipients as responsible for their predicament, depending upon the type of organ transplant needed. To encourage people's willingness to donate their organs, it is crucial to understand the extent to which these perceptions influence organ donation decisions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Juror Beliefs About Police Interrogations, False Confessions, and Expert TestimonyJOURNAL OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2010Mark Costanzo Although there has been a rapid expansion in research on police interrogations and false confessions, little is known about the beliefs of potential jurors as to these issues. In collaboration with a trial research firm, we recruited 461 jury-eligible men and women who matched the demographic characteristics of jury pools in several states. Surrogate jurors responded to questions and statements in five areas: likely rates of false confessions for different crimes, the ability to discern true from false confessions, beliefs about false confessions, beliefs about permissible interrogation tactics, and beliefs about expert testimony on police interrogations. Results indicated that jurors believed that police interrogators are better than ordinary people at identifying lies and that this ability improves with experience. Jurors believed that they would be able to differentiate a true confession from a false confession by watching a videotape, but were less confident about making such a differentiation from an audio recording. A large majority of the sample reported that it would be helpful to hear expert testimony about interrogation techniques and reasons why a defendant might falsely confess to a crime. There were no significant gender differences. Compared to whites, nonwhite jurors had significantly less confidence in the abilities of the police and gave significantly higher estimates of false confession rates. Results are discussed in light of prior research and implications for jury decision making and expert testimony. [source] Consuming Projects in Uncertain Times: Making Selves in the Galilee1JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2003TANIA FORTE This article proposes a different approach. It explores how ordinary people, through projects of their own which exhibit particular forms of intentional cultural production and consumption, manifest historically situated notions of selves. I use the idea of "projects" to understand the interconnections between global consumer culture, identity, and nationalism as they are manifested in the everyday lives of Palestinian citizens of Israel. To exemplify these interconnections, I focus on two significant, creative projects through which Palestinian inhabitants of the Western Galilee shape and manifest selves in history. Though these projects appear very different on the surface, they are used to address the same central question , that is, to understand how senses of self in history and attending identities are materially and discursively constituted by members of a national minority in the ever-present context of political conflict. They show that people are not passive consumers of homogenizing rituals and discourse and reveal how, through a bricolage of objects and ideas, people inscribe intentions, meanings, ways of thinking, and self-narration in places and histories. [source] Information and communication technology for process management in healthcare: a contribution to change the culture of blameJOURNAL OF SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE AND EVOLUTION: RESEARCH AND PRACTICE, Issue 6-7 2010Silvana Quaglini Abstract Statistics on medical errors and their consequences has astonished, during the previous years, both healthcare professionals and ordinary people. Mass-media are becoming more and more sensitive to medical malpractices. This paper elaborates on the well-known resistance of the medical world to disclose actions and processes that could have caused some damages; it illustrates the possible causes of medical errors and, for some of them, it suggests solutions based on information and communication technology. In particular, careflow management systems and process mining techniques are proposed as a means to improve the healthcare delivery process: the former by facilitating task assignments and resource management, the latter by discovering not only individuals' errors, but also the chains of responsibilities concurring to produce errors in a complex patient's pathway. Both supervised and unsupervised process mining will be addressed. The former compares real processes with a known process model (e.g., a clinical practice guideline or a medical protocol), whereas the latter mines processes from raw data, without imposing any model. The potentiality of these techniques is illustrated by means of examples from stroke patient management. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Landscapes of the Law: Injury, Remedy, and Social Change in ThailandLAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 1 2009David M. Engel Sociolegal theorists since Weber have postulated that state law operates by interacting with and responding to nonstate legal orders. This article, examining conceptions of injury and compensation in Thailand, analyzes two ways of mapping law onto the landscape. The first is associated with state law and legal institutions established at the turn of the twentieth century. The state legal system imagines space from the outside in, drawing a boundary line and applying law uniformly throughout the jurisdiction it has enclosed. A second type of mapping, which has been more familiar over the centuries to ordinary Thai people, imagines space from the inside out. Nonstate legal orders are associated with sacred centers and radiate outward, diminishing in intensity and effectiveness with distance. This article, based on extensive interviews with injured persons and other actors and observers in northern Thailand, examines the interconnections between these two ways of imagining the landscape of law. It suggests that recent transformations of Thai society have rendered ineffective the norms and procedures associated with the law of sacred centers. Consequently, state law no longer interacts with or responds to nonstate law and surprisingly plays a diminished role in the lives of ordinary people who suffer injuries. [source] Justice Excused: The Deployment of Law in Everyday Political EncountersLAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 2 2006George I. Lovell This paper examines the use of legal claims by government officials and citizens in everyday political encounters involving civil rights. Data come from 580 letters sent to the federal government between 1939 and 1941, and from the replies sent by the newly formed Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department. In almost every case, the department refused to intervene and explained its refusal by making legal claims about federal jurisdiction. These legal claims masked the department's discretionary choices and thus helped depoliticize the encounters. Surprisingly, however, a substantial number of letter writers challenged the government's legal claims by deploying their own legal and moral arguments. The willingness of these citizens to challenge official legal pronouncements cautions against making broad generalizations about the capacity of ordinary people to respond effectively when government officials deploy legal rhetoric. [source] Deliberative Democracy and "Human Nature": An Empirical ApproachPOLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2006Janusz Reykowski The idea of deliberative democracy is based upon an implicit and questionable assumption that the ability for a meaningful participation in deliberation is a common characteristic of citizens of democratic countries. This paper discusses that assumption and describes the results of empirical research aimed at finding out (1) whether ordinary people are able to solve important ideological and moral controversies by means of deliberation, (2) what factors may facilitate this process, and (3) what are the effects of the deliberation. The research consisted in studying 20 small groups of parents of school-aged children who were asked to participate in a debate about sex education in Polish schools (N = 195). The debates were conducted by a facilitator. Before and after the debate participants filled out questionnaires testing their attitudes and some psychological variables. The debates were recorded on videotapes. We found that it is possible to conduct a debate on ideologically contentious issues that meets some criteria of the deliberative functioning and such a debate may have some of the effects postulated by deliberative theorists. [source] Drafting the BOLERO PlanPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 6 2009Gene A. Brewer Editor This year marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of the D-Day invasion, when Allied forces crossed the English Channel and established beachheads along a 50-mile stretch of the Normandy coast in northern France. Troops overcame stiff resistance and systematically moved inland, liberating Northern Europe and forcing the surrender of Germany and the end of World War II in that part of the world. The D-Day invasion took place on June 6, 1944, but its planning began more than two years earlier. This case studies the strategic planning that led up to the invasion. The Operations Division of the War Department General Staff, formerly known as the War Plans Division, was the principal staff agency of the U.S. Army high command during World War II. The story focuses on the Operations Division's role in formulating a strategic plan for ending the war as well as Operation BOLERO,the American military troop buildup in Great Britain that preceded the cross-channel invasion. By reprinting this case from the original U.S. Army historical record, PAR pays tribute to the brave men and women who planned and executed this bold maneuver, many of whom paid the ultimate price to achieve victory and restore freedom. Popularized as the "Greatest Generation," they were ordinary people who answered the call of public service with extraordinary bravery and sacrifice. Members of the modern-day public administration community proudly stand on their shoulders. This chapter-length excerpt is taken from Ray S. Cline, Washington Command Post: The Operations Division (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1951), chapter IX, "Case History: Drafting the BOLERO Plan," pp. 143,63. [source] The revival of death: expression, expertise and governmentalityTHE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2003Arnar Árnason ABSTRACT This paper discusses Walter's (1994) assertion that death in the West has recently undergone a revival. In particular it focuses on his claim that this revival is composed of two different strands: a late modern strand and a postmodern strand. The former, according to Walter, is driven by experts who seek to control death, the latter by ordinary people who seek to express their emotions freely. Describing the history and work of Cruse Bereavement Care, the largest bereavement counselling organization in the UK, we question Walter's distinction. We then problematize Walter's suggestion that the revival of death is caused by general social transformations. In contrast we evoke Rose's (1996) work on ,subjectification' and seek to link recent changes in the management of death and grief to permutations in governmental rationality. [source] HISTORY ILLUMINATED: WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT'S LONDON BRIDGEART HISTORY, Issue 5 2006NANCY ROSE MARSHALL Grappling with the complex problem of how to represent history through the experience of ordinary people, William Holman Hunt's London Bridge of 1864 combined a modern urban crowd scene, a careful choice of depicted location, and an unusual deployment of light effects to create a painting about Victorian perceptions of time itself. By portraying a night-time scene lit by the gas illuminations on the bridge in honour of the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales, Hunt drew on the traditional aesthetic of the sublime to create a spectacle of an historic event , a royal marriage , that inspired both wonder and fear. Juxtaposing the flame-lit city with the moonlit Thames at the charged site of London Bridge allowed the artist to set in play the common Victorian framework one might term the ,moralizing sublime'. This pervasive mode of thought involved reading the mighty strivings of man and the modern industrial city as puny, transitory glimmers in comparison with the infinite onward rush of time; paradoxically, it also permitted the wilful overlooking of any negative yet ephemeral consequences of modernity. These ideas were underscored by the original exhibition of London Bridge with another work by Hunt in which light plays a key role in producing meaning: The Afterglow in Egypt. [source] Shaped on the Anvil of Mars: Vance and Nettie Palmer and the Great WarAUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 3 2007Deborah Jordan In Australia as elsewhere within the belligerent nations of the Great War, dissenting thinkers were marginalised with the mobilisation of militarism. Vance and Nettie Palmer, Australia's most important literary partnership in the interwar period, were initially critical of the war, their response typical of the English radical intelligentsia among whom they were living at the time of its outbreak. Forced back to Australia in 1915, the Palmers had to re-establish themselves in its increasingly turbulent intellectual battlefields. Nettie's earlier anti-war beliefs and cosmopolitanism were undermined while Vance became ever more deeply enmeshed in a discourse concerning the virtues of the "ordinary people", which encompassed the men of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). Nevertheless, in their extensive writings about Australia, neither Palmer ever endorsed the legend of the heroic Anzacs. The Great War, however, profoundly shaped their political consciousness and their choice of genre and writing strategies, as it did others of their literary generation. This article will show that the war was a far more important influence on their work than usually acknowledged in Australian literary scholarship, and thereby reveal some of the cultural patterns that shaped their generation of Australian radical writers and intellectuals , particularly in Melbourne, arguably the heartland for the tradition of democratic literary nationalism which the Palmers have been seen to epitomise. [source] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||