This article presents a novel theoretical approach to explore nurse executives’ paradoxical identity and agency of executive and nurse in homecare organizations. This complex phenomenon has yet to be well theorized or analyzed. Through a synthesis of literature, we demonstrate that Critical Management Studies, as informed by Foucault, and the Sociology of Ignorance, can create a different understanding of the complex interplay between knowledge and nonknowledge (ignorance) that positions nurse executives in both influential and precarious ways in homecare organizations. This (...) theoretical framework has the potential to allow for the explicit exploration of nurse executives’ strategic epistemic and discursive positioning and highlights hierarchal power structures within homecare organizations. We posit that this framework, that spans nursing, management and sociology disciplines, sets a different understanding of homecare organizations as epistemic landscapes, exposing institutional knowledge and ignorance dynamics that remain largely concealed and unchallenged, yet are integral to understanding nurse executives’ epistemic agency. (shrink)

Emotional inertia (i.e. the tendency for emotions to persist over time) is robustly associated with lower wellbeing. Yet, we know little about the mechanisms underlying this relationship. Good quality sleep and frequent use of adaptive cognitive emotion regulation (CER) strategies reduce the persistence of negative affect (NA) over time. However, whether sleep and adaptive CER strategy use work in concert to reduce NA inertia is unclear. In the current study, participants (N = 245) watched a series of film clips and (...) rated how each clip made them feel on negative and positive affective states. Emotion ratings were collected again after a short rest period to determine the persistence of clip-induced affect. Standardised questionnaires were used to index participants’ sleep quality and tendency to engage in adaptive CER strategies. Autoregressive models demonstrated that better sleep quality was associated with lower NA inertia (d = 0.25). This association also held when controlling for mean and variability of NA. Interestingly, the association between adaptive CER strategy use and NA inertia was observed irrespective of whether sleep quality was good, average, or poor (d = 0.13). These findings suggest that sleep and adaptive CER strategies hold independent rather than interdependent roles in maintaining emotional wellbeing. (shrink)

The controversy over the so-called Ashley Treatment (AT), a series of medical procedures that inhibited both growth and sexual development in the body of a profoundly intellectually impaired girl, usually centers either on Ashley’s rights, including a right to an intact, unaltered body, or on Ashley’s parents’ rights to make decisions for her. The claim made by her parents, that the procedure would improve their ability to care for her, is often dismissed as inappropriate or, at best, (...) irrelevant. We argue, however, that caregiving is a central issue in the controversy, as Ashley’s need for caregiving is a defining characteristic of her life. In this article, we analyze the ethics of the Ashley Treatment within the context of family caregiving. Through the physical and emotional work of caregiving, families participate in the formation and maintenance of personal identity, a process that Hilde Lindemann recently called “holding.” We argue that, in an intellectually disabled person such as Ashley, who depends on her family for every aspect of her care, the family’s contribution to identity is an essential source of personhood. We believe that the treatment can be justified if it is indeed an instance of appropriate family “holding” for Ashley. (shrink)

Lisa Freitag and Joan Liaschenko’s thoughtful and important article goes directly to the under-examined heart of Ashley’s case, namely to what sustains her in a habitable and intelligible identity. Though quite sympathetic with their conclusion and line of argument, I try to trouble their proceedings a bit, largely by wondering how having a specific such identity, out of several that may be inprinciple available, matters to someone with Ashley’s cognitive scope. I do this not simply to be (...) contrary, but because their article also seems to me to raise issues in the ethics of bioethics—in particular, what I call the dilemma of ethical endeavor: How ought one publicly pursue deeply important and complex issues, the very raising of which may offend interlocutors who indeed have grounds for resentment. Making a habit of second guessing oneself may be part of the answer. (shrink)

Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality asks what happens when the sense that "I must" collides with the realization that "I can't." Bringing together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology, Lisa Tessman here examines moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that "ought implies can.".

Psychological construction constitutes a different paradigm for the scientific study of emotion when compared to the current paradigm that is inspired by faculty psychology. This new paradigm is more consistent with the post-Darwinian conceptual framework in biology that includes a focus on (a) population thinking (vs. typologies), (b) domain-general core systems (vs. physical essences), and (c) constructive analysis (vs. reductionism). Three psychological construction approaches (the OCC model, the iterative reprocessing model, and the conceptual act theory) are discussed with respect to (...) these ideas. (shrink)

Alongside clinical practice, medical schools now confront mounting reasons to examine nontraditional approaches to ethics. Increasing awareness of systems of oppression and their effects on the experiences of trainees, patients, professionals, and generally on medical care, is pushing medical curriculum into an unfamiliar territory. While there is room throughout medical school to take up these concerns, ethics curricula are well-positioned to explore new pedagogical approaches. Feminist ethics has long addressed systems of oppression and broader structures of power. Some of its (...) established concepts can offer distinct value as medical climates change and adapt in response to increased awareness of the experiences of marginalized individuals and populations. In this essay, we offer a set of concepts from feminist ethics that have a fundamental role to play in medical school curriculum: relationality, relational autonomy, and epistemic justice. Though these concepts are not exhaustive, they can be taught in tandem with the concepts that have historically grounded ethics education in medical school, such as autonomy and beneficence. Ultimately, we contend that these concepts hold particular value in ethics curriculum insofar as they diversify mainstream ethical approaches, directly address the pervasiveness of systems of oppression in medicine, and recognize the voices and concerns that may be marginalized in standard approaches. (shrink)

We talk about irrationality when behaviour defies explanation or prediction, when decisions are driven by emotions or instinct rather than by reflection, when reasoning fails to conform to basic principles of logic and probability, and when beliefs lack coherence or empirical support. Depending on the context, agents exhibiting irrational behaviour may be described as foolish, ignorant, unwise or even insane. -/- In this clear and engaging introduction to current debates on irrationality, Lisa Bortolotti presents the many facets of the (...) concept and offers an original account of the importance of judgements of irrationality as value judgements. The book examines the standards against which we measure human behaviour, and reviews the often serious implications of judgements of irrationality for ethics and policy. Bortolotti argues that we should adopt a more critical stance towards accepted standards of rationality in the light of the often surprising outcomes of philosophical inquiry and cognitive science research into decision making. -/- Irrationality is an accessible guide to the concept and will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in the limitations of human cognition and human agency. (shrink)

For over 100 years, the field of contemporary public health has existed to improve the health of communities and populations. As public health practitioners conduct their work – be it focused on preventing transmission of infectious diseases, or prevention of injury, or prevention of and cures for chronic conditions – ethical dimensions arise. Borrowing heavily from the ethical tools developed for research ethics and bioethics, the nascent field of public health ethics soon began to feel the limits of the clinical (...) model and began creating different frameworks to guide its ethical challenges. Several public health ethics frameworks have been introduced since the late 1990s, ranging from extensions of principle-based models to human rights and social justice perspectives to those based on political philosophy. None has coalesced as the framework of choice in the discipline of public health. This paper examines several of the most-known frameworks of public health ethics for their common theoretical underpinnings and values, and suggests next steps toward the formulation of a single framework. (shrink)

© The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comIn Objective Becoming, Bradford Skow declares that he aims to defend the ‘anaemic’ passage of time in the block universe. This is in contrast to the ‘robust’ kind of passage – normally understood as the change in an objectively privileged present moment, the NOW – associated with A-theories of time. The defence of any sense of passage in the (...) block universe is a growing endeavour, but Skow seeks to defend it in a peculiar and roundabout way. Specifically, Skow argues that the best A-theory of robust passage is the moving spotlight theory of time, and if the best theory is inadequate, then one should accept the anaemic passage of the block universe. Skow, obviously, finds MST inadequate, and in doing so, accepts the... (shrink)

Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even mind and matter. Habit thus discloses a paradox. It takes (...) up a unique position in affect modulation, which encompasses both regulation (in the form of discipline) and also extends the body’s potential for engaging the new, change and creativity. In order to understand the basis of the ambivalent duality governing understandings of habit it is argued that a genealogical approach to this question is necessary. This will be located within the recent ‘turn to affect’ and histories of conation within the psychological sciences, particularly taking the writings of William McDougall as a focus. (shrink)

The extraction of natural resources is a controversial business practice that has profound ethical and economic risk implications for both firms involved in extractive activities and society at large. In response to these implications, the Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 directed the Securities and Exchange Commission to create the first ever rules requiring annual corporate responsibility disclosures. The two proposed rules, requiring disclosure of the source of “conflict minerals” and of payments to foreign governments by extractive firms, conjured intense debate among (...) stakeholders, largely related to the risks of firms providing the information. These risks span from required disclosures increasing compliance costs for firms to non-disclosure threatening human rights. In this study, we seek to understand the way in which stakeholders perceive the risks associated with corporate responsibility disclosures. We analyze comment letters submitted to the SEC related to the two disclosure rules through the lens of Douglas’s cultural perspectives of risk. We find consistencies across the two proposed disclosures with regard to the presence of three risk perspectives within the comment letter discourse for each proposal. We find inconsistencies, however, in the underlying nature of risk perceived across the two rules, which we argue reveals an aspect of risk that incorporates ethicality and is ultimately linked to reputational considerations. We complement these insights by analyzing the market reaction to the proposed regulations. Overall, our analysis suggests that stakeholders’ perceptions of risk have consequences for how risk is perceived and acted upon in the market. (shrink)

In “Bourdieusian reflections on language: Unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation”, Simon Susen proposes that Bourdieu’s account of language is based on a number of ontological presuppositions. While the extensive commentary on Bourdieu’s analysis of language tends to bracket these assumptions—not least because of an enduring attachment to the “sociological Bourdieu”—Susen insists that a recognition of the ontological features of language is consistent with Bourdieu’s own writings. While Susen’s ontological retrieval may be controversial, especially to those attached to the (...) “sociological Bourdieu”, in this reply I suggest that in “Bourdieusian reflections on language” we find something more interesting than any such controversy. Specifically, Susen’s ontological retrieval opens out Bourdieu’s oeuvre to currents in the social sciences which question the limits of the sociology of the social in the context of an increasingly ontological life. In this reply, I ask how Susen’s “ontological Bourdieu” fares in a dialogue with this body of work. (shrink)

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich's recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and argues (...) that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice. (shrink)

A growing body of research demonstrates the relevance of character strengths for flourishing in general, but also for important outcomes across different life domains. Studies have also shown that there are differences in the extent to which character strengths are applied, that is, perceived as relevant and shown in behavior in a given context, between work and private life, but they have not considered other life domains. This study aims to close this gap by examining the life domains of work, (...) education, leisure, close personal relationships, and romantic relationships. The present study investigates whether strengths-related behavior across different life domains explains additional variance in flourishing beyond the trait level of each respective character strength and studies differences in the relevance of character strengths and strengths-related behavior across different life domains, and examines their relationships with flourishing. A sample of 203 German-speaking adults completed self-reports assessing flourishing and character strengths. They also indicated which of the five life domains were personally relevant to them and reported the character strengths' perceived relevance and the frequency of displaying strengths-related behavior for each of these life domains separately. The results demonstrate that strengths-related behavior averaged across all relevant life domains explained unique variance in flourishing above the trait-level of character strengths in some cases, different life domains were characterized by specific profiles of character strength—regarding both their relevance and strength-related behavior. Moreover, character strengths and strengths-related behavior in different life domains both showed substantial correlations with flourishing. In some cases, these associations were domain-specific. In conclusion, we suggest that examining strengths-related behavior across different life domains represents a worthwhile addition to research on character strengths. (shrink)

Two experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that the nature of the remember–know instructions given to participants influences whether these responses reflect different memory states or different degrees of memory confidence. Participants studied words and nonwords, a variable that has been shown to dissociate confidence from remember–know judgments and were given a set of published remember–know instructions that either emphasized know judgments as highly confident or as less confident states of recognition. Experiment 1 replicated the standard finding showing that (...) remembering and knowing were differently influenced by the word–nonword variable, whereas confidence responses were not. By contrast, Experiment 2 showed a similar pattern of data for remember–know and sure–unsure responses, thus demonstrating the importance of the instructions for interpreting the relationship between remembering and knowing and confidence. (shrink)

In _Law’s Rule_, Gerald Postema provides a robust theoretical framework of the rule of law that technology scholars can use to analyze power in the digital world. He articulates how the rule of law can be concerned with private power, and not just public power. His emphasis on the ethos of fidelity allows us to see how the rule of law of law may be degraded in the digital era through the erosion of the informal institutions and practices needed to (...) sustain the rule of law. In addition to outlining these contributions, this paper argues that Postema’s account of digital power needs to focus more on digital power structures rather than digital power wielding, that digital power structures erode many informal constraints on power, and that addressing sociotechnical systems might require rethinking law’s distinctive instrumentalities in order to embrace the use of digital technologies to increase transparency and compliance. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to elaborate two concerns: those of maternal ethics, and notions of making things public. I attempt to bring these two concerns together and think them alongside one another, in hopefully productive ways. I want, in other words, to think about the ethics of what mothers ‘make public’, whether this is understood in its most rudimentary form, of enabling a child to express something, to make public an affective state, for instance, even if it is only (...) the mother who is there to witness or receive it, through to more overt and material forms of ‘publication’ glimpsed when mothers parent in spaces we call ‘public’. This paper focuses on what happens to us all when we encounter ‘mothering’ – not in the enclosed, private, secluded spaces where we imagine mothering to take place, but in what Marc Augé has termed the ‘non-places of supermodernity’, where much of the day-to-day material practices of mothering in Western late-modern urban contexts actually occurs. As is often the case, it is when experience is dislodged from the contexts in which we expect to find it that its contours are shown up in relief, and we are called on to re-configure our understandings of experiences in ways that also shift our understandings of the contexts in which they occur. In this sense, mothering, that I am claiming ‘makes things public’, as well as occurring frequently and importantly ‘in public’, not only shows up something we may overlook about the maternal, but also deforms and reforms our understandings of ‘the public’ itself. (shrink)

This paper considers a problem for Bayesian epistemology and proposes a solution to it. On the traditional Bayesian framework, an agent updates her beliefs by Bayesian conditioning, a rule that tells her how to revise her beliefs whenever she gets evidence that she holds with certainty. In order to extend the framework to a wider range of cases, Jeffrey (1965) proposed a more liberal version of this rule that has Bayesian conditioning as a special case. Jeffrey conditioning is a rule (...) that tells the agent how to revise her beliefs whenever she gets evidence that she holds with any degree of confidence. The problem? While Bayesian conditioning has a foundationalist structure, this foundationalism disappears once we move to Jeffrey conditioning. If Bayesian conditioning is a special case of Jeffrey conditioning, then they should have the same normative structure. The solution? To reinterpret Bayesian updating as a form of diachronic coherentism. (shrink)

Psychiatric culture provides an important site for humanities scholars interested in the relationships between body, culture and identity. The problem raised in this article is how to ‘think’ the body as discursive, material and embodied without reinstating the notion that the discursive and material are two separate, preexisting entities that somehow ‘interact’. The focus of this article will be on the complex relational dynamics that exist between science and culture in the production of psychopathology. The discussion will centre on the (...) practices of a psychiatric user-movement, the Hearing Voices Network, that provide a radical challenge to the alignment of body, culture and identity in the production and understanding of psychopathology, and specifically the phenomenon of voice-hearing. The article will consider the importance of affectivity, relationality and embodiment in understanding the relationship between the performative injunctions of psychiatry, the transformative practices of the HVN and the production of subjectivity. (shrink)

Legal minds have utilized the principle of double effect as proposed by St. Thomas Aquinas for centuries to shape legal authority in cases where moral judgment and legal reasoning meet. The U.S. Supreme Court had uti­lized double-effect reasoning in the realm of self-defense cases. This article discusses more recent use of double-effect reasoning in the landmark Supreme Court case Vacco v. Quill and its companion case, Washington v. Glucksberg. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the Court in Vacco, introduced double-effect (...) reasoning to identify the distinctions between palliative care and assisted suicide in an effort to uphold the constitutionality of the ban on assisted suicide in New York. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 11.1 (Spring 2011): 41–48. (shrink)

This article discusses three important models of concept combination—Smith and colleagues' Selective Modification model, Hampton's Composite Prototype model, and Costello and Keane's C3 model. Smith and colleagues' famous model of concept combination combines a model for producing complex concepts out of simple concepts with a prototype model of concept representation and a metric for computing the typicality of objects with respect to those concepts. The model of concept combination proposed by Smith and colleagues applies only to modifier–head complex concepts. Hampton's (...) model of concept combination includes, along with a qualitative description of the process resulting in complex concepts, a model of concepts, a model of categorization, and a model of typicality judgement. For Hampton, concept combination consists in the inheritance of typical properties from the combined concepts by the complex concept. (shrink)

Assessment is a necessary task in all areas of education, but there is no agreement on how to assess the impacts of different approaches to sex education, both on an individual level and on a population level over time. The history of mid-20th Century Family Life Education in the United States illuminates some of the obstacles that have made assessing sex education programmes so difficult: control groups, access to large numbers of research subjects and the means to verify self-reporting are (...) elusive. These persistent challenges have to do with the nature of the subject, which is, in contrast to most subjects, not supposed to be practised at school. Standards of reliability, validity and classroom authenticity, therefore, apply partially at best. We argue that some approaches to sex education are valuable whether or not they are assessable, and that some things that are assessable may not be valuable in the way they are thought to be. (shrink)

Examination of the fluidity of communal and individual identity in the Middle East and North Africa suggests that such identities are not stable, singular or mutually exclusive but shaped by circumstances, particularly political and economic duress. An approach that adopts the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics may be more productive in understanding identity politics in the region and in general.

The rule of law is widely perceived to be a public law doctrine, concerned with the way governmental authority conforms to dictates of law. This book explores the idea that the rule of law instead concerns the conditions under which any relationship - that among citizens as well as that between citizens and the state - becomes subject to law.

This paper analyzes the fecal metaphor utilized in the philosophies of Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek; and considers how the fecal metaphor explain social relations mediated by consumption and production. For both philosophers, the fecal metaphor exposes epistemological and practical processes latent in both biological and artificial production. Adding to their questions, Dominique LaPorte and his, 1978 History of Shit, couples civilization with the publicly legislated private containment of shit. This paper investigates the relevance of these metabolic metaphors of consumption (...) for design history and studies. I suggest that the metaphors offer a systematic approach to design consumption and prompt us to consider the role of material context in design production, as reality altering material conceptualizations. (shrink)

In this paper I critique two popular, non-scientific attitudes toward genetically engineered foods. In doing so, I will be employing the concepts of ambiguity, purity/impurity, control/resistance, and unity/diversity as developed by Latina feminist metaphysicians. I begin by casting a critical eye toward a specific anti-biotech account of transgenic food crops, an account that I will argue relies on an anti-feminist metaphysics. I then cast that same critical eye toward a specific pro-biotech account, arguing that it also relies on such an (...) anti-feminist metaphysics. I will argue further that this metaphysics yields a less accurate account of genetics. I end by arguing that if we adopt a Latina feminist metaphysics we can more accurately understand plants, genetics, and genetic engineering. (shrink)

Nearly 90 % of allegations of biomedical research misconduct in the United States are dismissed by responsible institutions without any faculty assessment or auditable record. Recently, members of the U.S. Congress have complained that the penalties for those against whom findings of research misconduct are made are too light and that too few grant funds associated with research misconduct have been recovered for use by other researchers and taxpayers. Here we discuss the laws that empower federal agencies that can oversee (...) investigations of biomedical research misconduct: the Office of Research Integrity and the Office of the Inspector General, both located within the Department of Health and Human Services. Research misconduct investigations pertaining to U.S. physical sciences funded through the National Science Foundation are overseen by the NSF’s OIG. While OIGs may provide some improvement over the ORI in the handling of research misconduct, we have found that a much more serious flaw exists which undermines an ability to conduct performance audits of the effectiveness by which allegations of research misconduct are handled in the United States. Specifically, sufficient data do not need to be retained by U.S. research institutions funded by HHS or NSF to allow effective audit of why allegations of research misconduct are dismissed before being seen by faculty inquiry or investigative committees. U.S. federal Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards, if applied to the research misconduct oversight process, would allow a determination of whether the handling of allegations of biomedical research misconduct actually functions adequately, and if not, how it might be improved. In particular, we propose that independent, external peer review under GAGAS audit standards should be instituted without delay in assessing the performance of ORI, or any other similarly tasked federal agency, in handling allegations of research misconduct. (shrink)

According to the logic of the gendered modernity/tradition binary, women in traditional societies are oppressed and women in modern societies liberated. While the binary valorizes modern women, it potentially erases gendered oppression in the West and undermines feminist movements on behalf of Western women. Using U.S. newspaper text, I ask whether female genital cutting is used to define women in modern societies as liberated. I find that speakers use FGC to both uphold and challenge the gendered modernity/ tradition binary. Speakers (...) use FGC to denigrate non-Western cultures and trivialize the oppressions that U.S. women typically encounter, but also to make feminist arguments on behalf of women everywhere. I argue that in addition to examining how culturally imperialist logics are reproduced, theorists interested in feminist postcolonialism should turn to the distribution of such logics, emphasizing the who, where, when, and how of reinscription of and resistance to such narratives. (shrink)

A dimensional rather than a typological approach to studying class clown behavior was recently proposed (Ruch, Platt, & Hofmann, 2014). In the present study, four dimensions of class clown behavior (class clown role, comic talent, disruptive rule-breaker, and subversive joker) were used to investigate the associations between class clown behavior and indicators of social status and social functioning in the classroom in a sample of N = 300 students attending grades 6 to 9 (mean age: 13 years, 47.7% male). Participants (...) and their teachers completed measures of class clown behavior, and peer nominations of peer acceptance, mutual friends as well as social behavior in the classroom (popular-leadership, aggressive-disruptive, sensitive-isolated, and prosocial behaviors) were collected. The results showed that overall, class clown behavior was positively related to peer acceptance, the number of mutual friends in the classroom and peer-perceived social status. Overall, it was also positively related to peer-rated popular-leadership and aggressive-disruptive behaviors, as well as negatively related to prosocial behaviors. When considering the four dimensions of class clown behavior, comic talent was particularly relevant for the relationship with social status and with popular-leadership behaviors, but also with aggressive-disruptive behaviors. Aggressive-disruptive behaviors were also particularly related to the class clown dimension disruptive rule-breaker. The results underline the significance of class clown behavior for the social status and functioning of students and may help further understand the phenomenon in its multidimensional nature. (shrink)

This article deals with the qualitative approach to empirical studies. This approach is presumed to be closer to the social sciences. Data collection in the qualitative approach follows a combination of these three methods—direct observations, in-depth interviews, and document analysis. It typically starts with the identification of methodology, data collection, analysis, ethical concerns, and adapt to the dynamics if working in a team. Well-compiled qualitative research enhances comprehensibility of social phenomenon. The technique used in the selection of data collection depends (...) on the research question, leading to the research strategy that best fits the research objective, availability/access to particular data sources, and available resources. While various beliefs are held in common between the quantitative and the qualitative, a researcher must first assert the purpose and nature of the project, in order to come to a deterministic conclusion as to which approach is best suited for the research to be conducted. (shrink)

My best friend Bernard died a few weeks ago after a long illness. We worked in adjacent offices teaching philosophy at our public state college for eighteen years. Bernard could simultaneously discuss Descartes's Third Meditation and cook you the perfect souffle while tossing scraps to his miniature poodle. He was a man of deep understanding, empathy, and humor. All who knew him were blessed.But the fact that I was Bernard's colleague, and nominally his chair, means my private grief is public.One (...) of the qualities that made grieving a loved one during COVID-19 uniquely terrible was its total privacy. For many months, what should have been final hospice visits, or hours of sitting Shiva, or boisterous wakes and the... (shrink)

The administrative reform of the datafied public administration places great emphasis on the classification, control, and prediction of citizen behavior and therefore has the potential to significantly impact citizen–state relations. There is a growing body of literature on data-oriented activism which aims to resist and counteract existing harmful data practices. However, little is known about the processes, policies, and political-economic structures that make datafication possible. There is a distinct research gap on situated and context-specific empirical research, which critically interrogates the (...) premises, interests, and agendas of data-driven public administration and how stakeholders can impact them. This paper therefore studies the conditions of participation in public administration datafication. It asks the overall research question of how citizens are problematized and included in policy and practitioner discourse in the datafication of public administration. The paper takes Norway as its case and applies Cardullo and Kitchin’s scaffold of smart citizen participation at the system level. It makes use of a unique empirical insight into the field, consisting of a survey, interviews, and an extensive document analysis. Unexpectedly, we find that citizens and civil society are rarely engaged in this administrative reform. Instead, we identify a paternalistic, top-down, technocratic approach where the context, values, and agendas of datafication are obscured from the citizen. (shrink)