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1 – 10 of over 1000David Flood and Carol‐Ann Farkas
This paper seeks to examine the value of teaching about mental illness through the use of literature.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to examine the value of teaching about mental illness through the use of literature.
Design/methodology/approach
Using the examples of two colleges in eastern USA that focus on educating students for healthcare careers, the paper examines two different course formats for using literature to teach about mental illness: a course that places the topic within the larger context of medicine and literature; and a freestanding madness and literature course.
Findings
While professional education tends towards specialization, it can lead to a monocultural vision that limits approaches to patients and problems alike. Courses integrating mental illness and literature were found to be effective means of counteracting this trend.
Research limitations/implications
The study is limited to two healthcare‐centred colleges in eastern USA.
Practical implications
For mental health clinicians and healthcare professionals in general, literature broadens the scope of both perspectives and analytical tools for understanding mental disorders and responses to them.
Originality/value
While literature courses often contain such themes as mental illness, courses that truly integrate literature with mental illness meet a growing need for interdisciplinary education as a means of preparing more flexibly thinking healthcare professionals.
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Amber A. Smith, Alan D. Smith and O. Felix Offodile
The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management and interested research a sense of how the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament is affecting worker…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management and interested research a sense of how the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament is affecting worker productivity in the workplace. There are several positive and negative issues concerning how some employees are willing to spend work time following the NCAA tournament and related office gambling activities.
Design/methodology/approach
A review of the applied literature on sports‐related gambling and bracketing that is quite widespread in the USA and other countries was provided. The sample consisted of relatively well‐paid professionals, who may routinely engage in office pools and most universally are involved in bracketing March Madness plays. This resulted in 145 useable questionnaires recording responses to 28 variables from an initial sampling frame of slightly over 200 potential respondents associated with a major Pittsburgh‐based financial service provider. Factor analysis and multivariate statistical analysis were used to test several hypotheses.
Findings
Management appears to be successfully delivering the message that office gambling activities harm productivity if management activity discourages office gambling, but there appears to be a trade‐off as labor productivity may be slightly reduced on the short term, and employee cohesiveness may increase on the long term. It was also found that the degree of personal involvement is important; the more an employee is involved, the more negative the impact that March Madness activities will have on his/her productivity.
Practical implications
March Madness is a time‐honored tradition that many employees take for granted and will engage in regardless of the extrinsic controls that management may care to implement, making the extrinsic controls too expensive for a questionable return in enhanced labor productivity during March Madness.
Originality/value
It is an interesting academic research question concerning the balance of productivity losses and gains in employee cohesiveness that warrants additional research in the intrinsic motivations of both management and their employees.
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Amber A. Smith and Alan D. Smith
The purpose of this paper is to explore and test certain assumptions concerning the employee productivity and employee morale associated with the annual participation in March…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore and test certain assumptions concerning the employee productivity and employee morale associated with the annual participation in March Madness activities.
Design/methodology/approach
The sample consisted of relatively well‐paid professionals many of whom routinely engage in office pools and most universally are involved in bracketing March Madness plays, from a major Pittsburgh‐based financial service provider. Multivariate statistical analyses were used to test the hypotheses.
Findings
Although management may advertise that their companies lose operational productivity, respondents generally agree that there is little drop off in workplace productivity. Apparently, there is a trade off between labor productivity, which may be slightly reduced on the short term, and employee cohesiveness, which may increase on the long term.
Practical implications
March Madness activities are such time‐honored traditions that it may be questionable whether any efforts on the part of management to curb office pooling would be effective, due to the expense, uncertain consequences, and doubtful impacts on productivity arising from such initiatives.
Originality/value
Continued research to determine the balance of productivity losses and gains in employee cohesiveness and morale is needed to develop appropriate strategies to effectively deal with the complexities posed by March Madness activities in the workplace environment.
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In Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum (1996) offers one version of an argument frequently repeated in the history of law-and-literature scholarship; to wit, that the literary…
Abstract
In Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum (1996) offers one version of an argument frequently repeated in the history of law-and-literature scholarship; to wit, that the literary imagination performs a salutary function with regard to many domains of modern public life. While law and economics are governed by logics of bureaucratic rationality and utilitarian calculus, literature, in particular the novel, presents a counterdiscourse, inviting us to empathize with others, expanding our moral sense, emphasizing the importance of affect and imagination in the making of a just, humane, and democratic society. Nussbaum's broad goal is a commendable one; concerned that “cruder forms of economic utilitarianism and cost-benefit analysis that are…used in many areas of public policy-making and are frequently recommended as normative for others” are, in effect, dehumanizing, she argues for the importance to public life of “the sort of feeling and imagining called into being” by the experience of reading literary texts (1996, p. 3). This sort of feeling and imagining, Nussbaum explains, fosters sympathetic understanding of others who may be quite different from us and a deepened awareness of human suffering.