Search results

As occupational therapists embrace evidence-informed and occupation-centred practice, the use of standardised visual perceptual tests remains a strong feature of typical paediatric practice. Yet, the research evidence for the use of such tools is inconclusive at best. This study compared the results of the Test of Visual Perceptual Skills (TVPS) with a checklist of reported functional difficulties in 30 children attending occupational therapy. The purpose of this paper was to determine the usefulness of visual perceptual testing in relation to occupation-centred practice.

A descriptive correlational study design was used. Participants were 30 primary school-age children who were on a paediatric occupational therapy caseload. An additional 30 typically developing children participated in the development of the checklist.

Correlations were found between reported functional visual skill difficulties and two subtests of the TVPS (visual memory and visual discrimination). No correlation was found between the reported functional difficulties and any of the other five subtests of the TVPS or the total score.

Results highlight the weak relationship that existed in this study between standardised measures of visual perception, as measured by the TVPS, and functional difficulties. Therapists are cautioned to explore both the evidence base for continued use of standardised visual perceptual measures to inform occupation-centred practice and the need to embrace a more comprehensive person-centred approach to visual perceptual assessment.

Covid-19 has caused many businesses to rethink their short- and potentially long-term workforce operations. The use of lateral flow serology can provide a clinically convenient approach for the assessment of prior infection with Covid-19. However, its widespread adoption in organisations seeking to use it to test for workforce immunity is controversial and confusing. This paper aims to explore the paradoxical dilemmas and dialectics immunity workforce testing creates.

This study involved capturing the ethnographical participation of a chief executive officer (CEO) dealing with the experience of managing the outcomes of Covid-19 workforce immunity testing. The aim was to take a snapshot in time of the CEO's empirical world, capturing their lived experiences to explore how management actions resulting from Covid-19 immunity testing can played out.

Providing staff with immunity tests at first glance appears sensible, decent and a caring action to take. Nevertheless, once such knowledge is personalised by employees, they can, through dialectic dialogue, feel disadvantaged and harbour feelings of unfairness. Subsequently, this paper suggests that immunity testing may only serve to raise awareness and deepen the original management dilemma of whether testing is a worthwhile activity.

This paper aims to be amongst the first works to empirically explore the workforce management challenges that arise within small businesses within the service sector following the completion of Covid-19 immunity testing of their staff. It seeks to achieve this via utilising the robust theoretical framework of the paradox theory to examine Covid-19's impact upon small business workforce management thinking and practice.

Bullying affects at least one-third of the workers through either direct exposure or witnessing, both of which lead to compromised health, and as a result, reduced organizational effectiveness or productivity. However, there is very little evidence that organisations provide effective protection from bullying, and in fact, the converse appears to the case. The purpose of this paper to explore the role of both individual and organisational power in the creation and maintenance of the problem. Such an approach moves away from the specific practice of identifying “bullying” that typically engages targets and perpetrators in a dance that is really just around the edges (Sullivan, 2008) of a larger problem; a culture that permits the abuse of power and ill-treatment of workers, in both practices and through organisational politics.

This paper elucidates key problems with organisational response as identified in the literature and critically examines weak organisational response to workplace bullying using the power theory, arguing that while overt approaches to addressing bullying appear to be underpinned by a simplistic, functionalist understanding of power, practices on the ground are better explained by more sophisticated “second-dimension” theorists.

There is a need for organisations to move beyond the current individualistic understanding of bullying towards a more nuanced understanding of how anti-bullying policies and procedures are themselves an exercise in institutional power protecting and reinforcing dominant power structures.

The literature from which this paper is drawn is limited to studies published in English.

The authors advocate a realistic assessment of the role of both individual and organisational power in the creation and maintenance of workplace bullying, as a way forward to plan appropriate intervention.

Workplace bullying is problematic for organisations at several levels, and therefore for society.

That power is relevant to workplace bullying has been apparent since the work of Brodsky in 1976 and Einarsen's early work, this paper builds on a the more nuanced work of McKay (2014), D'Cruz and Noronha (2009), Liefooghe and MacDavey's (2010) and Hutchinson et al. (2010), exploring the organisational response to the raising of bullying issues by individual employees as an exercise of power.