The sense of violence and the absence of consolation

The paper is an attempt to engage with our contemplations of violence and the failure of familiar explanations to capture these contemplations. We begin our explorations of these familiar accounts by examining contemporary debates on media violence but find these problematic. By reducing media violence to mere spectacle or, on the contrary, by seeing such violence as desensitising and destructive, the various positions in the debates deprive violence of meaning and fail to address our fascination with violence. Other explanations that seek to attach meaning or utility to violence, be it economic, symbolic or moral, equally fail to convince. There is always an excess that transcends these explanations, an excess that is ill-captured by the notion of ‘gratuitous violence’ often deployed to condemn violence that does not make sense. Furthermore, the various accounts of violence we review tend to consider violence only in terms of its victims and perpetrators rather than the (fortunately) more common position of the observer. In the remaining of the paper, we try to say something about the sense of violence without investing it with deterministic or moralistic implications. This leads us to re-interpret the notion of desensitisation; for the observer, desensitisation indexes a lack of sensation of violence. This lack of sensation, our inability as observers to sense and make sense of violence, we argue, brings about moral questioning and acuity rather than moral indifference.     

Program evaluation of services for the homeless : Challenges and strategies

The rapid growth of the homeless population in North America has given rise to a sharp increase in the number of task forces and studies aimed at setting up either programs for the homeless, or policies for controlling the phenomenon. Whenever there is a need for program evaluations in this process, numerous methodological and strategic challenges have to be faced. Due to the characteristics of the clientele, evaluation studies of services for the homeless call for innovative approaches. This paper reviews the research strategies (types of evaluations, designs, and indicators) that have been developed to assess programs for chronic inebriates and mentally ill homeless. The findings from previous evaluations are then summarized and their consequences for evaluation practice are considered.     

Response of wild bee communities to beekeeping,urbanization, and flower availability

Urban Ecosystems - Wild bees provide pollination services and are currently declining at the global scale. A potential cause for this decline is competitive interactions with domestic honey bees....     

In-depth analysis of road crashes involving powered two-wheelers vehicles: typical human functional failures and conditions of their production

Traffic safety related to motorcycle riding constitutes a growing issue all over the world. This is notably the case in France, where the important progress recently obtained toward a safer driving by car didn't prove to be so much effective for motorcycling. The present study has the purpose to give some cues on the reasons why, by characterizing the specificities of accident scenarios involving a powered two-wheeler (PTW). It is based on an in-depth accident analysis conducted by research teams composed of a psychologist and a technician intervening on the scene of the accident and later on. A sample of 384 accident cases involving a PTW is compared to a sample of 1174 car drivers involved in an accident without PTW. The results show the important differences regarding the human errors committed by PTW riders and by car drivers. They also show the interactional aspects of these different errors in the production of accidents, in the sense the physical and behavioral characteristics of PTW lead to certain errors by car drivers (perceptive failures) and these errors lead in turn to certain errors by PTW riders (prognostic failures).     

Graduates Construction Systems and Career Development

The paper draws on the Chicago School'sconceptualization of career and on Personal ConstructPsychology to examine the relationships betweengraduates construction systems and patterns of careerdevelopment during the first 4 years of employment. Itseeks to identify differences in trends of constructiverevision between successful and less successfulgraduates. The study is based on 33 graduates whocompleted repertory grids on entering employment (T1), 6months later (T2), and 4 years later (T3), re-elicitingconstructs each time. The results show some significantchange in the nature of the constructs elicited by graduates over the 4 years; in particular,graduates made greater use of constructs related toachievement, cynicism, and organizational politics.Graduates whose career was more successful (i.e., who experienced one or two promotions during the 4years of the study and felt generally satisfied withtheir careers) were more likely to use constructsrelated to social behavior and flexibility at T1, while graduates whose career was less sucessful(i.e., no promotion and felt dissatisfied with theircareers) were more likely to construe themselves interms of achievement and work competence at T1. Fouryears on, successful graduates tended to rely more onconstructs related to achievement and flexibility, whileless successful graduates were more likely to useconstructs related to social behavior. The significance and implications of these results fororganizational recruitment and development practices arediscussed.     

Socioeconomic Status,Income Inequality,and Health Complaints: A Basic Psychological Needs Perspective

Socioeconomic status (SES) and income inequality are now recognized as important determinants of health, and there is growing interest in uncovering the intermediary psychosocial pathways through which the socioeconomic context affects physical well-being (Marmot in The status syndrome: how social standing affects our health and longevity, Henry Holt, New York, 2004; Wilkinson and Pickett in The Spirit Level: why more equal societies almost always do better, Allen Lane, London, 2009). We adopted the applied framework of self-determination theory (SDT; Deci and Ryan in Psychol Inq 11:227–268, 2000) and hypothesized that fulfillment of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness would mediate the relationships that SES and income inequality have to self-rated health. An online community sample of American participants (N = 1,139) completed a detailed demographic survey and provided self-reports of need fulfillment and health complaints. Structural equation models controlled for impression management and self-deceptive enhancement. Controlling for sex and age, need fulfillment was predicted positively by subjective SES and objective household income and negatively by state-level income inequality; in turn, need fulfillment predicted lower levels of health complaints. These findings suggest that SDT provides a useful framework for the study of SES, income inequality, and health, and that basic psychological needs are an important mechanism through which socioeconomic contexts influence health.     

Comments on the Mixture Detection Rule Used in SPC Control Charts

When calculating independently the false alarm rate of the eight usual runs rules used in SPC control chart, it appears that the proposed rule designed to detect mixture patterns corresponds to a Type-I error strongly lower than the seven other rules. This discrepancy is underlined and the mixture rule is showed to be useless both for in-control and out-of-control processes. Thus a modification of the mixture detection rule is proposed and the impact of this new mixture rule is then illustrated and discussed using Monte Carlo calculations.     

The Appeal to 'Professionalism' as a Disciplinary Mechanism

The paper examines the deployment of 'professional' discourses in occupational domains not traditionally associated with the professions (eg management, clerical or sales staff are turned into 'providers of professional services'). It first proposes to analyse professionalism as a disciplinary logic which inscribes 'autonomous' professional practice within a network of accountability and governs professional conduct at a distance. It is argued that professional labour is autonomous labour where the conditions of autonomy have already been inscribed in particular forms of conduct embodied in the notion of 'professional competence'. The paper then suggests that the appeal to the discursive resources of professionalism in new occupational domains potentially acts as a disciplinary mechanism that serves to profess 'appropriate' work identities and conducts. The extension of the disciplinary logic of professionalism is illustrated with the turn to competencies to regulate managerial work in Teamco, a large privatised service company. However, the final section of the paper cautions against a deterministic analysis of the disciplinary logic of professionalism in regulating employees' conduct, and suggests that the constructed and contestable nature of professionalism makes it an inevitably imperfect form of government.