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The purpose of this paper is to assess the extent of empathy in paramedic students across seven Australian universities.

A cross‐sectional study was carried out using a paper‐based questionnaire employing a convenience sample of first, second, and third year undergraduate paramedic students. Student empathy levels were measured using a standardised self‐reporting instrument: the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy‐Health Profession Students (JSPE‐HPS).

A total of 783 students participated in the study, of which 57 per cent were females. The overall JSPE‐HPS mean score was 106.74 (SD=14.8). Females had greater mean empathy scores than males 108.69 v 103.58 (p=0.042). First year undergraduate paramedic mean empathy levels were the lowest, 106.29 (SD=15.40) with second year's the highest at 107.17 (SD=14.90).

The overall findings provide a framework for educators to begin constructing guidelines focusing on the need to incorporate, promote and instil empathy into paramedic students in order to better prepare them for future out‐of‐hospital healthcare practice.

A unifying theme apparent at this year's Symposium was the need for balance when lifting the veil of bank secrecy: (1) the need to protect civil liberties versus the need to fight crime; (2) the bank's need to balance its role as policeman while furthering its commercial objectives; (3) the necessity of weighing international cooperation against the awareness that individual nations jealously guard their own legislative regime; (4) the dichotomy of technology that serves both to protect and penetrate secrecy; (5) the balance required when investigating crimes.

This paper investigates online evaluation processes on peer-to-peer platforms to highlight how online peer evaluation enacts neoliberal subjects and collectives.

The paper uses netnography (Kozinets, 2002) to study the online community of Airbnb. It is also based on 18 interviews, mostly with Airbnb users, and quantitative data about reviews.

Results indicate that peer-to-peer platforms constitute biopolitical infrastructures. They enact and consolidate narcissistic entrepreneurs of the self through evaluation processes and consolidating a for-show community. Specifically, three features make evaluation a powerful neoliberal agent. The object of evaluation shifts from the service to the user's own worth (1). The public nature of the evaluation (2) and symetrical accountability between the evaluator and the evaluatee (3) contribute to excessively positive reviews and this keeps the market fluid.

This paper calls for problematization of the idea of sharing in the so-called “sharing economy”. What is shared on peer-to-peer platforms is the comfort of engaging with people like ourselves.

This paper contributes to the literature on online accounting by extending consideration of evaluation beyond the review process. It also stresses that trust in the evaluative infrastructure is fostered by narcissistic relationships between users, who come to use the platform as a mirror. The peer-to-peer context refreshes the our knowledge on evaluation in a corporate context by highlighting phenomena of standardized spontaneity and euphemized evaluation language. This allows evaluation processes to incorporate a market logic without having to fuel competition.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature on accounting’s performativity by developing a ventriloquial perspective that directs the attention to the reciprocity between the accounting signs and the accountants: they both do things by making each other speak. This oscillation explains where accounting number’s authority, materiality and resistance come from.

In order to show the relevance of this approach, the authors examine various ways numbers manage to speak or do things in the context of video-recorded conversations taken from fieldwork completed with Médecins sans frontières (also known as Doctors without Borders) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The analyses show how this ventriloquial perspective can inform the way the authors interpret what happens: when numbers do not say the same thing; when numbers are competing with other figures; and when numbers backfire on their own promoters.

Even if some of the numbers studied are sometimes far from accounting per se, it shows how the absence or presence of accounting can make a difference.

The authors then discuss the implications of this research for accounting social innovation through accounting inscriptions.

This perspective helps to understand that numbers can give great power, but that everything cannot be told with numbers. This is why making numbers speak is a great talent.

This refreshing perspective on accounting could be extended to other fields such as auditing and auditing.

How might the profession of child protection social work be “future proofed”, i.e. remain intact and of value beyond its present existence? The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This is a discussion/“think piece” paper, in which the author argues that foregrounding the art and science of helping relationships is a way forward. Recognising and promoting the centrality of helping relationships is the direction in which the author believes (or is it hopes?) social work should head, because “more of the same” is not, in the author’s view, possible to sustain for much longer. Treading the well-worn but pot-holed path of box-ticking, endless risk assessment and perfunctory statutory visiting is likely to lead to continuing problems retaining social workers and, for those who do stay, increased burnout, compassion fatigue and secondary trauma, each of which interrupts or delays the development of working alliances with family members.

Growing reliance on thresholds and checklists to assess risk has served to increase referrals. As a result, social workers spend much of their time on triaging and filtering rather than working with the children and families that most need help and protection. Further, it is not what is in the practitioner’s toolkit that matters: rather, it is a defined set of personal skills and qualities that tips the balance to achieve lasting change. Thus, in order to “future proof” social work, we would do well to deepen our understanding of how helping relationships can lead to lasting change. Supporting social workers in this work is not just the responsibility of individual practitioners and their professional bodies, action also needs to be taken at governmental and managerial levels.

This is a discussion/“think piece”.

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of professional and leader identity and the maintenance of identity, through identity work as IT professionals transitioned to a permanent hybrid role. This study therefore contributes to the under-researched area of permanent transition to a hybrid role in the context of IT, where there is a requirement to enact both the professional and leader roles together.

The study utilised a longitudinal design and two qualitative methods (interviews and reflective diaries) to gather data from 17 IT professionals transitioning to hybrid roles.

The study findings reveal that IT professionals engage in an ongoing process of reconciliation of professional and leader identity as they transition to a permanent hybrid role, and they construct hybrid professional–leader identities while continuing to value their professional identity. They experience professional–leader identity conflict resulting from reluctance to reconcile both professional and leader identities. They used both integration and differentiation identity work tactics to ameliorate these tensions.

The longitudinal study design, the qualitative approaches used and the unique context of the participants provide a dynamic and deep understanding of the challenges involved in performing hybrid roles in the context of IT.