Search results

This article examines how a profit-centered restructuring of labor relations in an academic medical center undermined team-based care practices in its intensive care unit. The Institute of Medicine has promoted team-based care to improve patient outcomes, and the staff in the intensive care unit researched for this paper had established a set of practices they defined as teamwork. After hospital executives rolled out a public relations campaign to promote its culture of teamwork, they restructured its workforce to enhance numerical and functional flexibility in three key ways: implementing a “service line” managerial structure; cutting a range of staff positions while combining others; and doubling the capacity of its profitable and highly regarded intensive care unit. Hospital executives said the restructuring was necessitated by changes to payment models brought forth by the Affordable Care Act. Based on 300 hours of participant-observation and 35 interviews with hospital staff, findings show that the restructuring lowered staff resources and intensified work, which limited their ability to practice care they defined as teamwork and undermined the unit’s collective identity as a team. Findings also show how staff members used teamwork as a sensitizing concept to make sense of what they did at work. The meanings attached to teamwork were anchored to positions in the hospitals’ organizational hierarchy. This paper advances our understanding of he flexible work arrangements in the health care industry and their effects on workers.

Children comprise a significant component of developing countries’ populations, but are rarely present in a substantive way in urban decision-making. The first step toward changing the exclusion of children in urban planning is through analyzing the roots of the problem. Applying a critical approach, this research aimed to explore and challenge the structural patterns of society that exclude children and marginalize them in the case of Iran. The present study interviewed Iranian urban planning professionals in a range of roles, to explore the roots of the persistent failure to incorporate children’s voices. The findings revealed various obstacles to including children: on the one hand, these impediments consisted of broad macro-level barriers derived from the cultural context; on the other, obstacles included micro-level barriers associated with planning processes and the urban management system. Together these embedded sociocultural roots provide insights into mechanisms maintaining a top-down approach and preventing it from shifting to a more inclusive and child-friendly approach in planning modern Iranian cities.

Drawing upon Alfred Sohn-Rethel's work, we argue that, just as capitalism produces abstract labor, it coproduces both abstract mind and abstract life. Abstract mind is the split between mind and nature and between subject/observer and observed object that characterizes scientific epistemology. Abstract mind reflects an abstracted objectified world of nature as a means to be exploited. Biological life is rendered as abstract life by capitalist exploitation and by the reification and technologization of organisms by contemporary technoscience. What Alberto Toscano has called “the culture of abstraction” imposes market rationality onto nature and the living world, disrupting biotic communities and transforming organisms into what Finn Bowring calls “functional bio-machines.”

An amateur boxer; A professional soldier turned indestructible zombie; A fast-driving heister; A combat pilot on another world; A taco truck driver with a heart of gold; A Smurf; Michelle Rodriguez, American actress, has played them all. As Leticia ‘Letty’ Ortiz, Rodriguez' most famous role offers both a sensitive portrayal of a tenacious woman living out a tough existence who exhibits as much courage, strength, moral standing and fibre as her male counterparts, whilst also revealing a softer, emotional side and one that focuses on family and ideals of accepting Motherhood. This is what makes Rodriguez such a fascinating contradiction. Whilst much praise is heaped on other actresses for their roles in action films, this chapter will offer, through both an overview of her action-hero career and in-depth look at Rodriguez's work in the Fast and Furious films, an insight into the importance of this actress to the growing canon of action hero(ine) characters and film stars.

To examine whether or not exposing novice teachers in a graduate literacy education diversity course to particular texts and activities focused on economic diversity and lifestyle differences among students makes them more likely to positively respond to these lesser understood forms of diversity in their own teaching and if so, in what ways. The research design was qualitative and included written reflections from the teacher–participants at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester, and videotaping and transcribing activities and post-activity discussions. Ethnographic observations and notes were made by the primary investigator. The theoretical frameworks that were foundational to the study were critical literacy and teaching for social justice. The findings of this qualitative study indicate that exposing teachers to texts, discussions, and activities that educate them on economic diversity and lifestyle differences among students makes them more likely to positively respond to these forms of diversity in their own teaching. Specific examples of how participants did this are provided. This study contributes to the literature on diversity in literacy instruction by providing concrete, research-based suggestions for how both teacher educators and K-12 teachers can expand their definitions of student diversity to include economic disparities and lifestyle differences among students. It includes recommended texts and activities for both teacher educators and K-12 teachers to address less typical forms of diversity, with a focus on economic diversity and lifestyle differences.

The emergence of gender-nonconforming behavior in a child presents an opportunity and, often, significant pressure for parents to question the gender beliefs they have taken for granted. The purpose of this research is to examine how parents of gender-diverse youth respond to such pressures and ultimately come to understand and support their children’s gender identity.

This research is guided by Ridgeway’s theoretical concept of gender as a primary frame for coordinating social life. Using in-depth interviews with 36 supportive parents of gender-diverse children, the author details the process by which parents developed a critical consciousness of gender and subsequently adopted trans-affirming beliefs in response to their children’s gender-nonconformity.

Findings illustrate the power of gender as a primary frame for organizing life within the family as well as the circumstances under which hegemonic gender beliefs can be disrupted and alternative beliefs can be formed. The analysis shows that the process of making space for gender diversity within the home, which is taken on almost exclusively by mothers, invokes competing maternal mandates of raising “proper” children versus modeling selfless devotion to children’s happiness and well-being. As mothers navigate these conflicting requirements to create greater gender freedom for their children, they reinforce and perpetuate gender stereotypes that cast women as natural caregivers. Ironically, the work of intensive mothering is also the mechanism through which women come to develop alternative gender beliefs that they then use to expand gender possibilities for their children.