RISK OF OCCUPATIONAL, WORK-RELATED, AND SOMATIC MORBIDITY AMONG METALLURGICAL INDUSTRIES WORKERS

Presently, occupational and work-related diseases make up a significant share of disability and mortality causes among the working-age population. However, to a greater extent, this is linked with the peculiarities of production rather than injuries at the workplace. In contemporary Russia, the significance of the problem is highlighted by the fact that up to 70% of metallurgical enterprises are the principal employer and mainstay of an entire town for the bulk of the employable population.

Marching to Different Drum Beats: A Temporal Perspective on Coordinating Occupational Work

In this paper, we contribute a temporal perspective on work coordination across collaborating occupations. Drawing on an ethnographic study of medical specialists—surgeons, pathologists, oncologists, and radiologists—we examine how their temporal orientations are shaped through the temporal structuring of occupational work. Our findings show that temporal structuring of occupational practices develop in relation to the contingencies and materialities of their work and that this shapes and is shaped by specialists’ temporal orientations. Further, we show that differences in occupations’ temporal orientations have important implications for coordinating work. More specifically, our study reveals how the domination of one temporal orientation can lead to recurrent strain, promoting a competitive trade-off between the different temporal orientations in guiding interaction. This temporal orientation domination is accompanied by a persistent emotional strain and potential conflict. Finally, we suggest that, alternatively, different temporal orientations can be resourced in solving coordination challenges through three interrelated mechanisms, namely juxtaposing, temporal working, and mutual adjusting. In so doing, we show how temporal resourcing can be productive in coordinating work.

Taking issue with how the Work-integrated Learning discourse ascribes a dualistic meaning to graduate employability

Work-integrated Learning (WIL) is renowned for providing a bridge between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ that fosters ‘employable graduates’. This study critically argues that the WIL discourse continues to ascribe a dualistic meaning to graduate employability that primarily contributes to creating the so-called theory–practice gap for students. As an argument towards such a conclusion, a genealogical discourse analysis of how the graduate employability idea operates in 87 present and past official documents concerning the Cooperative Education (Co-op) WIL model is used. Two accounts of graduate employability, the antagonistic practice acclaiming account and the harmonious theory and practice account, recur in both the present and past documents. Both accounts contribute to creating the gap, while the latter also contributes to bridging it. The non-dualistic account, which involves knowing that the key to becoming employable is understanding how both research-based and informal theory shape daily occupational work, could be a useful alternative to these accounts. This is because it could encourage students to see how theory is a form of knowledge manifested in, rather than disconnected from, this work. However, the usual WIL design, whereby universities and workplaces outside universities are respectively institutionalised as the places where ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ is learnt, is not so much instrumental in spreading this non-dualistic account, but rather implies to students that ‘theory’ is absent from daily work until they apply it. Thus, I discuss how establishing physical and/or virtual countersites to the usual WIL design could potentially spread this account to students.

The First Lactate Threshold Is a Limit for Heavy Occupational Work

Long-term heavy physical work often leads to early retirement and disability pension due to chronic overload, with a need to define upper limits. The aim of this study was to evaluate the value of the first lactate threshold (LTP1) as a physiological marker for heavy occupational work. A total of 188 male and 52 female workers performed an incremental cycle ergometer test to determine maximal exercise performance and the first and second lactate (LTP1; LTP2) and ventilatory thresholds (VT1; VT2). Heart rate (HR) recordings were obtained during one eight-hour shift (HR8h) and oxygen uptake was measured during 20 minutes of a representative work phase. Energy expenditure (EE) was calculated from gas-exchange measures. Maximal power output (Pmax), maximal oxygen consumption (VO2 max) and power output at LTP1 and LTP2 were significantly different between male and female workers. HR8h was not significantly different between male and female workers. A significant relationship was found between Pmax and power output at LTP1. HR8h as a percentage of maximum HR significantly declined with increasing performance (Pmax:r = −0.56; p < 0.01; PLTP1:r = −0.49; p < 0.01). Despite different cardio-respiratory fitness-levels; 95.4% of all workers performed their usual work below LTP1. It is therefore suggested that LTP1 represents the upper limit for sustained heavy occupational work; which supports its use to determine work capability and assessing the limits of heavy occupational work.

Psychological Antecedents of Refugee Integration (PARI)

The successful management of refugee immigration, including refugee integration in host societies, requires a sound understanding of underlying psychological processes. We propose the psychological antecedents of refugee integration (PARI) model, highlighting perceived forcedness (i.e., coercion and loss of control from “push” factors) and ensuing perils (risks and potential suffering during migration) as distinctive factors of refugee (vs. voluntary) migration. According to our model, perceptions and subjective representations of forcedness and associated perils activate specific psychological processes relevant to refugee integration and thus moderate responses to the demands and stressors of the immigration situation. We conceptualize these distinctive influences for integration-relevant processes in both refugees and in residents. By pinpointing the unique features of refugee migration, PARI generates novel and specific hypotheses about psychological processes predicting refugee integration. For instance, refugees’ memories of forcedness and associated perils should lead to a high level of preoccupation with the restoration of basic needs after arrival in a receiving country that interferes with integration-related activities. Conversely, residents’ perceptions of forcedness and related perils may enhance empathy with refugees but may also magnify feelings of anxiety and threat. Implications for refugee integration are discussed for the domains of occupational work, education, and mental health.

Pedology at Work

This chapter analyses the evolution of Soviet pedology as a domain of occupational work in the context of the construction of the Soviet education system across the 1920s–1930s. Of particular interest is the role that pedological work played in combating ‘underperformance’ (neuspevaemost′) through the practice of streaming and referrals to special schools of those evaluated as performing below the norm. The chapter traces the origins of this policy in the 1920s, but its focus is on the expansion of the school pedology service under the Commissariat of Enlightenment during the 1930s. The role of this service was to carry out systematic monitoring and streaming of schoolchildren, to give expert advice and support to teachers and school heads. The chapter argues that Soviet pedology had in this last period of its existence, from 1932 to 1936 been reduced to a form of science-based expertise black-boxed into an applied instrument. The chapter concludes with an account of the demise of pedology in the mid-1930s, including the build-up to the notorious Communist Party decree against pedology, published on 4 July 1936, and the process of pedology’s institutional dismantlment and symbolic de-legitimation in the wake of the decree. The chapter argues that what was being abolished and dismantled in 1936 was principally pedology as occupational work rather than science as such.

The Making of Pedology

This chapter considers the institutionalization of ‘pedology’ as a Soviet ‘state science’ at the turn of the 1920s–1930s. It examines the shift in the field’s mobilization as pedology was turned into a framework of the field’s ‘integration’. In response to the failures of educational reformism, pedology was given the task of bolstering the construction of the Soviet education system. This prompted its leaders to define pedology as a discipline, though they still needed to negotiate its theoretical and methodological heterogeneity. They envisaged it both as a general science of human development and as a mediator between the plurality of specialist biopsychosocial sciences, on the one hand, and the teachers’ own professional expertise, on the other. Since pedology claimed to be charting the laws and norms of development, the field’s leaders became embroiled not only in debates about the nature of pedology as science but also the nature of development as such. The new context also required them to negotiate pedology’s relationship to pedagogy as the academic form of the education profession’s expertise. The latter half of the chapter focuses on the politics surrounding these developments. The period 1927–9 witnessed pedology’s enthusiastic institutionalization as a ‘state science’. From 1930, the demands of the First Five-Year Plan made themselves felt and the field was at this point subjected to a de facto ‘revolution from above’. The year 1931 marked a major turning point as 1920s’ progressive educational reforms were denounced as a mistake, while Soviet scientific institutions were subjected to stringent politico-ideological disciplining. Pedology managed to survive, but principally as a form of occupational work supporting the education system.