Erosion of Professional Integrity: The Collapse of the Canterbury TV Building in Christchurch on 22 February 2011

From 4 September 2010 on, a series of earthquakes shattered New Zealand for more than one year the most devastating of which caused the Canterbury TV (CTV) building in downtown Christchurch to collapse on 22 February 2011. One hundred and fifteen people were killed. A Royal Commission found out that, in 1986, the Christchurch City Council (CCC) had granted a building permit despite concerns about structural design issues. Moreover, the authority did not insist on structural analyses of the building after the initial earthquake of 4 September 2010. Thorough investigations after the disaster of 22 February 2011 revealed that the early concerns about insufficient joints between floors and shear walls had been entirely justified since the failure of the joints, according to all likelihood, had triggered the collapse of the building.

Exploring the paradoxes of addressing sustainability in commercial research: A study of scientist views

<p>Research scientists increasingly engage in commercial research as well as face the need to address sustainability by taking into account the social, environmental and economic consequences of development activities. This role often entails addressing contradictory imperatives. Though paradox has pervasive effects on science work and managing for sustainability, it remains underexplored in these contexts. This research is positioned at the novel intersection of three bodies of work: sustainability in the context of science work, commercial research, and paradox in management and organisation. It engages a sensemaking perspective to examine the experiences of research scientists with managing sustainability in commercial research and explicates the tensions they perceive, as well as the ways in which they respond to them. The study is primarily based on a set of 44 semi-structured interviews conducted with research scientists across four Crown Research Institutes in New Zealand. It offers two sets of findings. First, it identifies three main paradoxes research scientists perceive and elucidates their dynamics. These include the paradoxes of service ethos, role identity, and professional integrity. Second, it explicates perceived responses to these paradoxes, both constraining and productive. The former comprise the practices of opposing, isolating, over-committing, and suppressing. The latter, productive responses, consist of a range of management tactics premised on differentiation or integration. Differentiation tactics include diversification in scope of services, variation in work organisation and responsibilities, and incrementalism. Integration tactics used with external parties comprise identifying financial synergies between public and commercial projects, (re)framing problems and solutions for clients, (re)positioning across roles and identities, as well as harnessing economies of scope by co-authoring with clients. This research contributes to the literature on research management by casting the emphasis on perceived paradoxes to be navigated when addressing sustainability in commercial research. It also offers a secondary contribution to the literature on paradox in management by contextualising organisational paradoxes and their management in science work. Specifically, it provides new insight into the ways by which scientists’ engagement with sustainability cuts across ethos and shapes their views on professional integrity. It also contributes to a nuanced understanding of role identity by focusing on the tensions research scientists at Crown Research Institutes experience in the dual role of advocates of change towards sustainability and allies of business. Altogether, this work extends existing organisational research by offering insights into scientists’ experience of paradox and its management when engaging with sustainability in commercial research.</p>

Exploring the paradoxes of addressing sustainability in commercial research: A study of scientist views

<p>Research scientists increasingly engage in commercial research as well as face the need to address sustainability by taking into account the social, environmental and economic consequences of development activities. This role often entails addressing contradictory imperatives. Though paradox has pervasive effects on science work and managing for sustainability, it remains underexplored in these contexts. This research is positioned at the novel intersection of three bodies of work: sustainability in the context of science work, commercial research, and paradox in management and organisation. It engages a sensemaking perspective to examine the experiences of research scientists with managing sustainability in commercial research and explicates the tensions they perceive, as well as the ways in which they respond to them. The study is primarily based on a set of 44 semi-structured interviews conducted with research scientists across four Crown Research Institutes in New Zealand. It offers two sets of findings. First, it identifies three main paradoxes research scientists perceive and elucidates their dynamics. These include the paradoxes of service ethos, role identity, and professional integrity. Second, it explicates perceived responses to these paradoxes, both constraining and productive. The former comprise the practices of opposing, isolating, over-committing, and suppressing. The latter, productive responses, consist of a range of management tactics premised on differentiation or integration. Differentiation tactics include diversification in scope of services, variation in work organisation and responsibilities, and incrementalism. Integration tactics used with external parties comprise identifying financial synergies between public and commercial projects, (re)framing problems and solutions for clients, (re)positioning across roles and identities, as well as harnessing economies of scope by co-authoring with clients. This research contributes to the literature on research management by casting the emphasis on perceived paradoxes to be navigated when addressing sustainability in commercial research. It also offers a secondary contribution to the literature on paradox in management by contextualising organisational paradoxes and their management in science work. Specifically, it provides new insight into the ways by which scientists’ engagement with sustainability cuts across ethos and shapes their views on professional integrity. It also contributes to a nuanced understanding of role identity by focusing on the tensions research scientists at Crown Research Institutes experience in the dual role of advocates of change towards sustainability and allies of business. Altogether, this work extends existing organisational research by offering insights into scientists’ experience of paradox and its management when engaging with sustainability in commercial research.</p>

Prevention of the psychoemotional burnout of academics during their professional activities

The article shows that psychoemotional burnout is one of the most common syndromes, developing against the backdrop of continuous exposure to stressful situations, and it leads to intellectual, mental, and physical fatigue and exhaustion. The pedagogical activities of academics lead to burnout syndrome among most professionals of this occupation. The aim of the article is theoretical substantiation of the concept of burnout syndrome, experimental study of its symptoms characteristic of academics, and presentation of recommendations for its prevention. The study involved 59 academics of different ages and records of work. The analysis of literature sources allows stating that the study of the burnout syndrome among academics requires a further search for solutions. The academic profession is one of those for which burnout syndrome is the most common because the professional activity of academics is recognized as one of the most emotionally stressful. It was found that burnout is exhaustion, which manifests itself in emotional devastation and fatigue, and depersonalization, in particular, depersonalization of relationships with people. It is established that most teachers are characterized by inadequate emotional response, reduced interaction with colleagues, termination of professional responsibilities, the desire to stay alone, intensified emotional thriftiness. A pronounced feature for teachers is the reduction of personal achievements when they negatively assess themselves, their professional achievements and success, express professional integrity in a negative way, and limit their opportunities and responsibilities.

Procedure for authorization of professional integrity testing and assessment of the result of professional ingritacy test

In this article analyzed the procedure for authorizing the testing of professional integrity and the assessment of the result of the test of professional integrity regulated in XXXIV of the Code of Civil Procedure of the Republic of Moldova. All the procedural conditions in which this procedure takes place are investigated. Particular attention was given to the analysis of the means offered by the procedural law to the court to ascertain circumstances in order to achieve the purpose of this procedure - authorizing the testing of professional integrity and assessing the result of the professional ingratitude test.

The (de)construction of culture in interpreter-mediated medical discourse

In Norway, perceived communication problems in medical encounters with minority patients are often ascribed to ‘culture’ by the professional in charge of the institutional dialogue. Even in literature on medical encounters involving language barriers and interpreting, culture is used as an explanatory tool for observed complications, and an expansion of the interpreter role is suggested as the remedy. Comparing statements about the concept ‘culture’ made by medical professionals against a backdrop of Norwegian legislative texts on the role of the medical professional and interpreter, this article deconstructs culture as an explanatory tool. It is suggested that the source of the perceived problems of communication may lie at general levels of human interaction, e.g. concentration or language proficiency, rather than culture. We argue that the use of the concept of culture may lead to ‘othering’ of minority patients, may conceal rather than reveal communication problems, and may confuse the intersection between interpreters’ and medical professionals’ areas of expertise. Ultimately, not only minority patients’ health but also medical personnel’s professional integrity may be threatened.

COVID-19 and Moral Distress: A Pediatric Critical Care Survey

Background Moral distress adversely affects the delivery of high-quality patient care and places health care professionals at risk for burnout, moral injury, and the loss of professional integrity. Objectives To investigate whether pediatric critical care professionals are experiencing moral distress during the COVID-19 pandemic and, if so, for what reasons. Methods An exploratory survey of pediatric critical care professionals was conducted via the Pediatric Acute Lung Injury and Sepsis Investigators Network from April to May 2020. The survey was derived from a framework integrating contemporary literature on moral distress, moral resilience, and expert consensus. Integration of descriptive statistics for quantitative data and thematic analysis for qualitative data yielded mixed insights. Results Overall, 85.8% of survey respondents reported moral distress. Nurses reported higher degrees of moral distress than other professional groups. Inducers of moral distress were related to challenges to professional integrity and lack of organizational support. Five themes were identified: (1) psychological safety, (2) expectations of leadership, (3) connectedness through a moral community, (4) professional identity challenges, and (5) professional versus social responsibility. Most respondents were confident in their ability to reason through ethical dilemmas (76.0%) and think clearly when confronting an ethical challenge even when pressured (78.9%). Conclusions During the COVID-19 pandemic, pediatric critical care professionals are experiencing moral distress due to various factors that challenge their professional integrity. Despite these challenges, they also exhibit attributes of moral resilience. Organizations have opportunities to cultivate a psychologically safe and healthy work environment to mitigate anticipatory, present, and lingering moral distress.

Journalism ethics with Foucault: Casually employed journalists’ constructions of professional integrity

This article examines how journalists in non-permanent employment respond to their growing precarity. It is based on in-depth interviews with freelance journalists and interns who find that their working lives increasingly require entrepreneurial efforts. To work towards continuous access to journalistic work, these casually employed journalists engage in self-management and self-branding. To be able to make a living, they subsidize their income with work for clients outside of journalism that frequently offer better working conditions than news organizations but pursue narrow, strategic goals. The article develops a typology of non-journalistic work that illustrates that some non-journalistic jobs, but not others, cause these precarious news workers to defend their journalistic professional integrity. Furthermore, the study introduces Michel Foucault’s notions of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ and the ‘ethical self’ to interpret the different registers of professionalism between which journalists move today, identified as counter-, conforming and coping subjectivity. Thereby, the article uses a novel conceptual lens to make sense of resilience and change in journalistic professional identities under conditions of precarity.