Total quality management: panacea or placebo for hospital management?

Total Quality Management (TQM) has gained widespread acceptance and application in both the private and public sector organisations in Australia yet, for a number of complex reasons, the public health sector has not kept pace with these developments. Several attempts have been made recently to introduce TQM into public hospitals although with mixed results. This article examines one of the first of these to draw out the paradoxes and dilemmas confronting those seeking to implement TQM in public hospitals. It is argued that the implementation of TQM or quality programs in health care will require different management and organisational approaches to the ones commonly found in the TQM literature.     

How best to open up local democracy? A randomised experiment to encourage contested elections and greater representativeness in English parish councils

Interventions aimed at increasing the supply and representativeness of elected officials range from facilitative to the formally authorised. This paper reports on a field experiment aimed at testing the effect of facilitative approaches at the local level based on a collaboration between parish councils and the research team. We randomly allocated 818 parish council clerks across five counties in Southern England, either to receive information and the opportunity for member training for recruitment, or not to receive this contact. We investigated the effect of this intervention on political recruitment. Despite evidence of an effect on use of social media, our results suggest that there are significant institutional and structural barriers to participation in local politics that cannot easily be overcome using facilitative measures.     

Career Paths and Choices in a Highly Differentiated Profession: The Position of Newly Qualified Solicitors

Differences in the working lives of solicitors have become increasingly marked in recent years. Growing numbers of lawyers are employed in the public and corporate sectors and, with the increasing size and wealth of City of London commercial firms, there are significant differences between these firms and those 'high-street' firms that serve local communities. These differences impact on lawyers throughout training and beyond, both in terms of rites of passage into the profession and in conditions of employment. This research, the final stage in a longitudinal survey spanning the 1990s, combines quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the reactions of newly qualified solicitors to their work. Building on the project's previous surveys, which charted the nature of disadvantage suffered by many prospective entrants to the legal profession, the research finds a large measure of satisfaction regarding careers. It also identifies causes for concern, including increasing specialisation in legal education and the potential separation of the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of professional practice.     

Mimesis,metaphor and representation: holding out an olive branch to the emergent schreiner canon [1]

There are complex and interesting representational issues and interpretational practices involved in claiming to ‘know past lives’ and these have particular resonance in feminist terms. These ideas are examined in relation to a particular case study, of the feminist writer and theorist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), although the discussion contributes to the ‘women's history and post-structuralism’ debate by eschewing taking up an abstract ‘position’ in favour of examining these ideas through a grounded historical example. A range of representations of Schreiner is discussed, including a photograph which her estranged husband contemporaneously had ‘touched up’ before sending it to some of her friends just after her death, and presentday representations of Schreiner in the emergent feminist canon of claimed knowledge about her. The ideas of mimesis and alterity are used both in relation to photographic representation and also in relation to the use of metaphor to stand for perceived facets of Schreiner's character. Representational issues are fundamental and ought not to be excised from feminist discussion; at the same time, the past and its ‘irreducible things that happened’ must also be taken seriously.     

naming and defining ‘domestic violence’: lessons from research with violent men

In this paper we draw on data from in-depth interviews with men who have used violence and abuse within intimate partner relationships to provide a new lens through which to view the conceptual debates on naming, defining and understanding ‘domestic violence’, as well as the policy and practice implications that flow from them. We argue that the reduction of domestic violence to discrete ‘incidents’ supports and maintains how men themselves talk about their use of violence, and that this in turn overlaps with contentions about the appropriate interventions and responses to domestic violence perpetrators. We revisit Hearn’s 1998 work The Violences of Men, connecting it to Stark’s later concept of coercive control, in order to develop and extend understandings of violence through analysis of the words of those who use it. We conclude by exploring the implications of these findings for recent legal reform in England and Wales and for policies on how we deal with perpetrators.     

Attention under repair: asceticism from self-care to care of the self

This essay examines the contemporary mindfulness movement as a cultural response to a larger problem of attention in the United States. As raw material for both capital (re)production and subjectivity, attention is a zone of indeterminacy and struggle for workers in a so-called immaterial economy. This essay suggests that the rise of concern around “paying attention” from the 1950s onward is driven by post-Fordist labor requirements more than networked technologies. First, it examines mindfulness as a technique of attention management for businesses and gives a broad survey of its current popularity and prevalence in US culture. Second, it proposes viewing techniques of attention like mindfulness through a triple lens of repair: (1) as managerial tools to repair psychic labor capacity for capital; (2) as practices that subjects use to repair alienation; and (3) as sites for reparative reading. Third, the essay illuminates the ties between Eve Sedgwick’s repair and Michel Foucault’s care of the self in order to suggest that resistance to practicing the self is founded on a paranoid defense. Its central argument is that attention is a method in Foucault's care of the self, and, as such, a potential portal into pleasure and political change rather than a mere feedback loop into capital.     

Drug use and violence: Rethinking the connections

This paper examines the available empirical and theoretical literature on the connections between drug use and violent crime, using the conceptual framework developed by Goldstein (1985). The authors argue that the available evidence on the drugs/violence nexus does not support moral claims about the ‘harmfulness’ of illegal drugs that underpin the criminalization of certain mind-active drugs. Instead, much of the connection between legal and illegal drug use and violence appears to be an effect of a history of criminalization of certain drugs. Law is therefore implicated in producing the connection between drug use and violence, rather than acting simply as a neutral mechanism for controlling criminal violence.