Fortune d’une catégorie : la souffrance au travail chez les médecins du travail

For about 10 years now in France, doctors in occupational medicine have been using the category “suffering at work” to refer to what they consider to be new pathologies at the workplace. This category's diffusion in industrial medicine reveals the influence of a current in psychology (the “psychodynamics of work”) on these doctors. A qualitative study carried out with workplace doctors shows how a large percentage of them have appropriated this category. An active — and activist — fraction has wielded it to defend a new conception of industrial medicine's role, which centered around clinical practices, should pay more attention to workers’ subjective sense of suffering. In a context where the institutional prospects of industrial medicine are a cause of concern and where feelings of a lack of esteem have been revived in a profession that, since its origins, has been looking for legitimacy, the category of work-related suffering enables these doctors to win new territory and breathing room by transforming their line of work.     

Estimating efficacy in a proposed randomized trial with initial and later non-compliance

Summary.  A controversial topic in obstetrics is the effect of walking on the probability of Caesarean section among women in labour. A major reason for the controversy is the presence of non-compliance that complicates the estimation of efficacy, the effect of treatment received on outcome. The intent-to-treat method does not estimate efficacy, and estimates of efficacy that are based directly on treatment received may be biased because they are not protected by randomization. However, when non-compliance occurs immediately after randomization, the use of a potential outcomes model with reasonable assumptions has made it possible to estimate efficacy and still to retain the benefits of randomization to avoid selection bias. In this obstetrics application, non-compliance occurs initially and later in one arm. Consequently some parameters cannot be uniquely estimated without making strong assumptions. This difficulty is circumvented by a new study design involving an additional randomization group and a novel potential outcomes model (principal stratification).     

Towards better preparation and support for health and social care practitioners conducting specialised assessments in remote Indigenous contexts

Remote health professionals encounter many challenges associated with delivering care in poorly serviced remote locations and working across cultures. Despite an identified need for the assessment practices of health and social care professionals to accommodate cultural differences, and for staff training in the area, deficits in preparing the remote workforce for assessment remain. This paper combines the results of two qualitative studies to consider current and improved approaches to preparing and supporting staff for conducting assessments in remote and Indigenous settings. Study A focused on aged care assessment practices within the remote Aboriginal context of Central Australia, and Study B focused on the practice for assessing cognition among Aboriginal Australians in the Northern Territory. Our secondary analysis of these combined data sets provides valuable information to improve planning of approaches to preparing staff for assessments in these contexts. We report themes relating to three categories: the assessment workforce, current approaches to preparing assessment staff, and cross‐cultural knowledge/skill. We discuss which areas require more detailed attention to prepare staff for this work – such as critical reflection and cultural safety – as well as how this may best be achieved – such as through the inclusion of cultural supervisors in practitioners' supervision models, and in follow‐up components to workshop models.     

Gender,electrodermal activity,and videogames: Adding a psychophysiological dimension to sociolinguistic methods

User experience research on the affective dimensions of videogame players’ interactions has looked to psychophysiological measures as proxies for emotional states. We add to the growing body of literature on this topic and offer our research as a novel application to the methodological toolbox of sociolinguistics. We present a case study of an interaction occurring in a mixed‐gender group (3m/1f) playing a video game that has a potentially sexualized component in gameplay, using a Nintendo Wii‐mote joystick as a mimetic penis in the game Mario Party 8. Through a detailed analysis of (1) gameplay interaction, including talk, laughter and gesture, (2) participants’ electrodermal activity (EDA), and (3) a post‐game debriefing, we track the varied engagements of the players in‐game and with each other, showing how the design of the game itself and the entanglement of hardware and software design with gendered gameplay serve to marginalize and exclude the female participant.     

'Our struggles are bigger than the World Cup': civic activism, state-society relations and the socio-political legacies of the 2010 FIFA World Cup

South Africa's hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup saw a large number of public demonstrations, strikes and other forms of civic campaigning. World Cup activism was both preceded and followed by extensive and intensifying public unrest and industrial action that in the period before the tournament, threatened to derail the event. This paper assesses the motivations, forms and implications of the activism during South Africa's staging of the FIFA finals and interprets them against the larger context of shifting state-society relations in the country. There are two purposes to the analysis. First, to explore the underlying internal social forces that gave shape to the protests at the time, and the possible influence of the exogenous politics of mega-event social mobilization. Second, the implications and outcomes of these dynamics for longer term socio-political processes in the country are considered. The activism displayed many of the features of the politics of contestation of sport mega-events today. Importantly, however, the activism stemmed from a particular systemic dynamic and reflected changing relations in the post-apartheid political community. Therefore, while the World Cup was used as a strategic opportunity by many advocacy groups, it was one that rather fleetingly and ambivalently presented an additional platform to such groups in an otherwise on-going set of political battles. Rather than a strong case study of sport's transformative capacity, the civic campaigning during South Africa's World Cup demonstrates the way a sport mega-event can be used as a strategic entry point by civil society groups in their engagement with the state, although this can occur with greater or lesser success.     

Provident funds in Asia: Some lessons for pension reformers

As the British were dismantling their empire in the 1950s, they generally left behind a pension legacy consisting of two elements. One was a conventional defined benefit pension scheme for government workers, basically budget–supported. The other was a provident fund for those in the industrial and urban formal sector. Some components of the empire chose to ignore London's advice to create a provident fund — notably Hong Kong, which only recently has created an employer–based system for its workforce. Three features traditionally define state provident funds: central management (with some contracting–out exceptions), a formal structure of individual accounts, and lump sum withdrawals. The term has begun to migrate, however. In Hong Kong, the new mandatory system is called a mandatory provident fund, though it works on a very decentralized basis through employers and requires workers to make their own investment choices. The term is also used in Thailand to describe various schemes that apply to government workers and some private sector firms, along with an evolving pensions system. This paper will concentrate on the four "classic", colonial–era–derived provident funds of Singapore, Malaysia, India and Sri Lanka.     

The Conclusions and Recommendations of the Commission on the Investigation of the Social Studies in the Schools

ABSTRACT

How can teachers effectively use documentary film to teach history, and toward what goals? This article addresses these important questions by: (1) exploring what we know about secondary teachers' practices with documentary film and secondary students' beliefs about documentary film as a source of knowledge about the past, (2) proposing a rationale for the use of documentary film that supports the goals of history education, and (3) discussing examples of documentaries that can be shown to further the rationale presented. Although there are numerous suitable purposes and methods for using documentary film, we argue that two of the most powerful and appropriate are as a way to explore multiple perspectives and as a way to teach about controversial issues.