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This chapter reviews the evidence of the development of ethical decision-making competencies of medical professionals. Selected studies are reviewed that use a theoretical framework that has shown the most promise for providing evidence of character formation. The evidence suggests that entering professionals lack full capacity for functional processes that give rise to morality (sensitivity, reasoning, motivation and commitment, character and competence). Further, following professional education, considerable variations in these abilities persist. Whereas many perceive that role modeling is the most effective way to teach professionalism, there is no empirical evidence to support the role of modeling in professional development. The chapter concludes with suggestions for facilitating character development resistant to influence by negative role models or adverse moral milieu.

This chapter sets out to examine the topic of a spatial analysis of urban crime through an analysis of David Simon’s seminal television series The Wire. By developing an analysis of the issues that are presented in the series, issues such as race, ethnicity and representation will be addressed in order to add to the understanding of these topics in relation to race and media representations. Each section will address a set of themes which are evident in The Wire. The chapter highlights the idea of race in the series and how characters are presented on screen. The research is also concerned with economic issues depicted in the series and the effect of the economy on the characters in Baltimore, the U.S. city in which The Wire was set.

The conclusion of the chapter addresses poverty class and inequality as topics and sets out to document these themes in relation to race. The third chapter also discusses the racism and discrimination that is apparent in The Wire. By contextualising the series, the book is attempting to theorise relevant issues surrounding race, gender and power through an examination of relevant literature and the development of a theoretical framework from which key issues will be addressed.

This paper reports on the ways in which a group of middle school students who received character education in elementary school define and experience character. The research was designed to improve our understanding of the meanings that the children ascribe to their character lessons in the long term, and to determine whether they see connections between these lessons and their experiences with character in middle school. The data come from interviews with 24 children who attended five different elementary schools in one town that used the Character Counts! curriculum at the time of the study. The students were questioned about their understanding of the curriculum and their own personal experiences with character-related issues in middle school. The results demonstrate that the elementary school character lessons are carried forward. Children are able to recall the formal meaning of many of the character traits that they studied. As they graduate to middle school, however, peer culture assumes an increasingly important role and their lived experience of character become more complex. Thus, the preteens studied here are actively working to reconcile the differences between character as a “learned,” and then a “lived” experience. While maturation and character lessons received beyond school may confound these findings, the results presented here suggest the need to bridge, and then perhaps adapt character programming to empower adolescent input and embrace the role of peer culture in defining and then redefining character.

Fostering the development of professional character in student physicians remains the most essential, yet challenging and sometimes elusive goal of those in medical education. Current understandings and contemporary approaches to learning and teaching can provide perspectives that may inform our thinking. In this chapter, learning with and from others is explored along with approaches that form the foundation for the development of professional character that integrates moral conduct into professional practice. The implications for both teaching and learning and the importance of the learning environment are discussed. Education as a moral endeavor and values-based practice is emphasized.

The resurgence of interest in professionalism necessarily focuses us on the moral core of medicine and the character of the good doctor. While medical education reform projects aimed at educating for professionalism are replete with lists of laudable virtues necessary for the doctor, we have made little progress in mapping those character traits, values and behaviors to admission procedures, curricular reform and faculty development. If educating for professionalism is to be effective, medicine must re-claim the moral core of professionalism and identify clearly the fundamental traits, values and virtues necessary for good medical practice in the twenty-first century.

Our focus is on the use of narrative in ethics education in organisations. The effectiveness of stories as a basis for executive education and organisational development has been described in other chapters in this book and elsewhere. Many writers provide examples linking stories and ethics, but the examples are drawn most often from overtly ethical stories. We offer a more expansive and inclusive view, suggesting that all stories are valuable for teaching ethics. We use Booker’s (2004) finding that all stories belong to one of seven basic plots – overcoming the monster; rags to riches; the quest; voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; and rebirth – to show that no major category of narrative need be omitted from those which can provide examples or links to the development of virtue in organisations. We provide examples of how stories can be used to encourage the development of specific virtues including courage, integrity, hope, inquisitiveness, humour and prudence. Six further aspects are considered – whether only moral stories are useful, the value of complexity, the benefit of familiarity, stories of failure, the selection of appropriate stories and whether non-fiction can be included.

The Australian Football League (AFL) is the premier sporting competition in Australia in terms of capital outlay, breadth of industry associations, public consumption, and arguably cultural significance. The AFL competition is now a domain of specialisations and interests, which provides vast opportunity for both sporting and non-sporting institutions seeking to utilise the game to capitalise on a society of consumption, entertainment and risk. AFL officials expect high standards of their players both on and off the field. These standards are expressed in various forms of Codes and Policies. Off field player misconduct is an ongoing concern not escaping media attention, which is a resounding indication more needs to be done by the AFL to improve responsible player character development. Whether the current education programmes are sufficient to meet the AFL’s own expectations is the central issue addressed in this chapter. As it stands AFL governance is deficient on several counts. In this chapter I will focus on three governance deficiencies: firstly, the AFL Illicit Drug Policy (IDP) contains unnecessary inconsistencies relative to its primary purpose; secondly, the present measures undertaken to ensure players have appropriate education to achieve the expected character development are far from efficacious and so arguably can be vastly improved; and thirdly, the promotion of live-odds gambling during televised games is culturally problematic and inconsistent with its own demands. The ethical grounds central to this investigation are ‘fairness’ and ‘cultural influence’. In order to resolve some of its governance concerns I will explain why the AFL should be characterised as a practice-community and as such should adopt a comprehensive virtue and value-based compliance ethical education programme consistent with its own vision and conduct expectation of its players and officials. I will argue that the AFL as a practice community is much more than simply a game, given its cultural influence, commercial associations and community programmes.

Most fairy tale narratives have a hero, a damsel in distress and the ever-present opposing villain. The villains, or antagonists, share several commonalities across the various narratives as well as one over-arching trait of evil. However, as television viewers have become more intuitive, and demand for more sophisticated narratives have increased, contemporary portrayals of villains, as in the television series Once Upon a Time (Horowitz & Kitsis, 2011–2018), have shifted away from presenting villains as one-dimensional and restricted characters.

Instead, the construct of evil is depicted as a multifaceted and evolutionary trait of the character. Whereas previously evil was the fundamental core of the character it is now presented as a fluid concept. This chapter investigates how the construct of evil, and therefore the villain, has been redefined through a contemporary television narrative.

In this chapter, we consider how the character of Rob Titchener has been developed in The Archers, moving him from hero of the hour to villain of the piece. We draw on a critical disability studies’ perspective to argue that ability and disability have been crucial in turning the character of Rob from the desirable and attractive man who first arrived in the village into a national hate figure, despised by all. We begin this analysis by introducing critical disability studies and studies of ableism as fields of academic inquiry. We then draw on these resources to offer an analysis of the ways in which ability and disability were used as a narrative device to develop Rob’s character. We question the ways in which ability and disability are used to denote ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the development of characters in cultural texts like The Archers, and end with a plea to scriptwriters to engage differently with dis/ability and to consider the impact of the stories we tell on the everyday lives of disabled people.

Purpose – This paper extends research on social movement media by focusing on the use of a literary genre – realist fiction – namely, the labor problem novel in the context of the labor movement and countermovement in late 19th-century America.

Methodology – I do a close reading of a significant early dialogical cluster of such novels to address three key questions: (1) Field position of authors – What was the position of these labor problem authors in relation to the movement field and literary field and how did that positioning matter? (2) Genre selection – What was it about the realist novel that attracted labor problem partisans to it? (3) Internal content – How did authors shape the internal structure and content of their stories?

Findings – As literary activists, authors pivoted between the movement field and literary field selecting the novel for the special powers that it possessed relative to other historically available media. Authors produced stories with a good/evil binary attached to characters that stood for emerging social categories in young industrial America. During the Gilded Age (and beyond) the novel played an important role as medium for the labor movement and its opposition – characterizing collective actors, dramatizing forms of action, providing materials for claims of injustice or threats, solutions to social problems, and new categories and collective identities – all with powerful emotional appeal and entertainment value.

Implications – This study suggests that social movement scholars might expand their purview of cultural media used by movements and also take genre and its selection by activists seriously.

Originality – This study demonstrates how literature – realist fiction – has been shaped by movement agents and played an important, but under-appreciated, role in the struggle over cultural supremacy in the context of movement–countermovement dynamics.