Search results

The Trainee Mental Health Worker (TMHW) Programme is an initiative developed collaboratively between Middlesex University and local NHS Mental Health Trusts in response to national workforce requirements for flexible clinical personnel. The purpose of this paper is to explore the experience of this new category of mental health workers and to address the feedback given by previous cohorts of TMHWs.

This qualitative study comprised of three focus groups who met over their year-long training. In total, 20 participants self-selected from a population of 60 TMHWs, and their expectations of the TMHW role prior to starting the programme and following each of two practice placements were explored.

The thematic analysis identified five domains: identity, career strategy, functioning in the system, status and responsibility; the TMHWs demonstrated notable changes in their attitude and behaviour as they progressed. The findings demonstrate the challenges of integrating a new type of workforce into the rigid systems of the health care service.

Focus groups by their nature are not always representative, and this programme is limited in its number of students.

This study has led to a greater understanding of the experiences of trainees across a variety of clinical settings.

The results from this study will assist employing trusts in recruitment and retention by helping them to understand this phenomenon and the role itself.

This study’s value lies in the insight it offers into the experience of a new kind of worker moving from novice status to practitioner outside the constraint of a professional registration.

This chapter presents the principal interpretations that took place in Denmark and Sweden regarding the discourse on ‘Diversity Management’. We organise our presentation around three major themes that are central to the local Scandinavian context: gender equality, migration and moral grounds. This chapter shows the important role of gender equality work practices and how these practices now tend to be progressively incorporated in a broad Diversity Management construct, possibly leading to a less radical stance. Moreover, the comparison between Denmark and Sweden reveals the political associations with Diversity Management and migration in Denmark, but not in Sweden. Our third contribution unveils the tensions between the value of equality, which remains strong in the Scandinavian welfare state model, and the actual practices of Diversity Management.

Ethics work in research is often conceived of as a process of research governance. The case study chapters, however, provide evidence of a much more sophisticated engagement with ethical dilemmas arising in research and an enactment of ‘everyday ethics’, in other words, a concern with our relationships with, and responsibilities to, other people (Banks, 2016). This emphasis on relationality can often lead to what Cook (2009) describes as ‘mess’ in research, which needs to be made sense of. This is in contrast to the notion of ‘well-ordered’ research, which underpins many of the ethical frameworks, principles and guidelines that are produced for research. The chapters also indicate the opening up of new spaces for research that raise new challenges in respect of ethical practice, including, for example, digital spaces (Case Study 4 – Minecraft Club). Case Study 8 – Democratic Engagement also demonstrates that both researchers and participants in the research process find ways in which to challenge conformity and research norms in order to access knowledge, and this is not always a harmonious process. The following sections try to make sense of the implications of these issues for the ethical practice of research. This chapter pulls together three key themes emerging from the case studies of research governance, ethical relationality and ethical spaces, presenting an analytical overview of all three areas using the concept of ‘willful subjects’.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the dominance of the mainstream discourse and practice of diversity management (DM) by identifying and problematizing three distinct but related issues that it encompasses: first, its tendency to displace all alternative approaches; second, its general neglect of the social-historical context and third, its almost exclusive focus on the business case rationale for supporting diversity.

Employing ethnographic research methods, the empirical material was collected in an international manufacturing corporation based in Sweden. It consists of three different, but interconnected approaches: archival research, interviews and observations.

The paper shows that in neglecting power, identity, intersectionality and the changing socio-historical context of diversity, a well-meaning corporate diversity programme tended to obscure ethnic and age-related disadvantages at work.

The limitations of this research relate largely to its dependence on a single case study and the limited focus on diversity as it affected able-bodied, white male immigrant workers. A broader study of the multiplicity of types of discrimination and ways in which diversity is managed in a range of countries and organizations could facilitate a more in-depth exploration of these issues and arguments.

Although not entirely new, the three arguments that have been drawn upon to discuss, analyse and illustrate DM through our data have rarely been brought together in one theoretical and empirical study.

The statements which have recently been made in various quarters to the effect that Danish butter is losing its hold on the English market, that its quality is deteriorating, and that the sale is falling off, are not a little astonishing in face of the very strong and direct evidence to the contrary furnished by the official records. As an example of the kind of assertions here alluded to may be instanced an opinion expressed by a correspondent of the British Food Journal, who, in a letter printed in the March number, stated that “My own opinion is that the Danes are steadily losing their good name for quality, owing to not using preservatives and to their new fad of pasteurising… .”

This paper aims to investigate the influence of cognitive style diversity on intra-group relationship conflict and individual-level organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). The role of leader-member exchange as a moderating variable is also examined.

The authors used hierarchical linear modeling and hierarchical regression analysis to analyze results from a sample of 344 members from 83 teams nested within 126 departments in six manufacturing organizations in the People’s Republic of China.

Results yielded general support for our hypothesized relationships between cognitive style diversity and intra-group relationship conflict. Leader-member exchange was also found to moderate the relationship between these two variables. Contrary to expectations, there were no relationships between these variables and individual-level organizational citizenship behaviors.

This research addresses calls from the team diversity and conflict literature to address the understudied area of deep-level cognitive diversity. Second, this study addresses previous calls for more team-level and mixed-level theory and methodology to inform OCB research. Third, this is the first study of group-level cognitive style diversity and the moderating influence of leader-member-exchange and provides valuable insights into ways of mitigating some of the negative effects of cognitive diversity on teams.