The medical licensing examination debate

National licensing examinations are typically large‐scale examinations taken early in a career or near the point of graduation, and, importantly, success is required to subsequently be able to practice. They are becoming increasingly popular as a method of quality assurance in the medical workforce, but debate about their contribution to patient safety and the improvement of healthcare outcomes continues. A systematic review of the national licensing examination literature demonstrates that there is disagreement between assessment experts about the strengths and challenges of licensing examinations. This is characterized by a trans‐Atlantic divide between the dominance of psychometric reliability assurance in North America and the wider interpretations of validity, to include consequences, in Europe. We conclude that the debate might benefit from refocusing to what a national licensing examination should assess: to achieve a balance between assessing a breadth of skills and the capacity for such skills in practice, and focusing less on reproducibility.     

Exploring host perspectives towards younger international development volunteers

Research on international development volunteering has increased significantly in recent decades, but there is a need for greater depth of understanding in relation to host communities. This article examines the impact of younger volunteers from the perspectives of host community members, evaluating the positive and negative aspects in working with young people from the “UniVol” programme of Volunteer Service Abroad, New Zealand. It argues that further insights into host community experiences can play a key role in enhancing youth IDV volunteering, creating assignments that are more beneficial for hosts, and moving away from neo-liberal “volunteer-centric” youth volunteering.     

Contesting ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ difference in emotions through music use in the UK

This article builds on social psychological critiques of ‘hardwired’ gender difference in emotions, looking at the topic through the emotional use of music. Starting from the premise that gender differences in emotion are socially and discursively constructed rather than innate, it moves on to challenge existing work in which masculinity and femininity are treated as singular, oppositional concepts, that are ‘normally’ attached to ideas of existing sex differences. Drawing on data, generated from a UK-based online survey of 914 respondents (male = 361; female = 553), this article highlights that whilst gender plays a significant part in shaping the emotional experience of music, this is often mediated heavily by age and personal experience. It suggests that music is a practical means of moving beyond ideas of differences in gender or sex differences in emotional display, towards ideas of diversity, especially given that existing face-to-face research has often found men to be ‘unable’ to communicate emotional experience in particular ways. Both inductive quantitative trends and open-ended fragments from people's emotional experiences of music are included in order to demonstrate how emotions and gender intersect discursively.     

R2P: “State of Play”

Abstract

Is R2P the most effective tool the international community has to prevent genocide, or the newest neo-imperial norm perpetuated by the most powerful states? In a dramatic performance of the key debates within R2P, each of these views is presented before Aristotlean and Tocquevillean insights are drawn upon to find a middle ground rooted in citizen resistance against mass atrocity crimes. R2P can both become a more effective tool of prevention and gain needed political legitimacy by drawing on the rich historical tradition of citizen resistance to empower local actors defying regimes engaged in mass atrocity crimes.     

feminism and futurity: revisiting Marge Piercy’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Woman on the Edge of Time</Emphasis>

This article considers the question of feminist futurity through Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). While dominant readings of this novel have focused on its relationship to the feminist utopian genre and feminist theory from the 1970s, this essay aims to critically reframe the novel through contemporary feminist theorising on time and futurity. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theory that suggests that the future might most productively be figured through more nuanced and renewed engagements with the past, I argue that readings of Piercy’s novel that frame it only through its contemporary moment obscure the novel’s critique of singular, linear models of time. The novel represents the future through the themes of loss, mourning and haunting, which I argue resist a model of time that moves linearly from past to future and instead bring the past and future into complex relation with each other. In this regard, Piercy’s novel is read as representing a form of feminist futurity that engages with progress in time as necessarily uneven, discontinuous and fractured, speaking to contemporary demands for a feminist futurity that might require more nuanced accounts of the past.     

Three decades of agrarian reform in Zimbabwe

This article examines the empirical facts about the actual outcome of Zimbabwe's land reform, based on years of field research. It shows that the popular assumption about failed land reform in Zimbabwe is wrong on several counts: the character of Zimbabwe's land reform has been redistributive, and the extent of this has been wide enough to trigger significant progressive changes in the agrarian structure. This is despite some elites having benefited from the process and foreign-owned agro-industrial estates and conservancies being retained. The distribution of land among land reform beneficiaries has been relatively uneven, with some receiving larger land allocations than others, and this in turn influenced the differentiated access of these groups to farming services and infrastructure. Yet the productivity of small producers has grown slowly with output escalating recently. Three decades of land reform has recast land-based social relations in important ways, with the poor gaining more than previously believed.     

Beyond Keeping the Peace: Can Peacekeepers Reduce Ethnic Divisions After Violence?

Existing research suggests that international peacekeeping contributes to conflict resolution and helps sustain peace, often in locations with hostile ethnic divisions. However, it is unclear whether the presence of peacekeepers actually reduces underlying ethnocentric views and parochial behaviors that sustain those divisions. We examine the effects of NATO peacekeeper deployments on ethnocentrism in postwar Bosnia. While peacekeepers were not randomly deployed in Bosnia, we find that highly ethnocentric attitudes were common across Bosnia at the onset of peacekeeper deployments, reducing endogeneity concerns. To measure ethnocentrism, we employ a variety of survey instruments as well as a behavioral experiment (the dictator game) with ethnic treatments across time. We find that regions with peacekeepers exhibit lower levels of ethnocentrism in comparison to regions without peacekeepers, and this effect persists even after peacekeepers have departed. The peacekeeping effect is also robust to a sub-sample of ethnic Bosnian Serbs, suggesting that peacekeeper deployments can have positive effects on diminishing ethnocentrism, even when local communities are especially hostile to their presence. Our results speak to the potential long-term role of peacekeepers in reducing tensions among groups in conflict.

     

Impact of job location on relationship between job satisfaction and self‐esteem of employees: Evidence from the Indian BPOs

Does job location impact on job satisfaction and self‐esteem? To answer this question, a sample of 298 responses was drawn from business process outsourcing employees working in four different locations in two south Indian states. The study conducted in both rural and urban locations witnessed that the job location (rural/urban) has a significant impact on job satisfaction and self‐esteem despite similar job demands and resource support conditions for all the respondents. Results show a very large divergence in self‐esteem between rural and urban settings and some divergence across genders. Location of delivery centres in smaller towns could thus be an effective solution for the high turnover experienced at urban delivery centres handling data capture and such low end processing.     

District Magnitude and Home Styles of Representation in European Democracies

How political representatives interact with constituents is contingent on the conditions under which they compete for re-election. It has been the assumption that intra-party competition shapes legislators’ incentive to cultivate a personal reputation and thereby the incentive to engage in any constituency-oriented action that reputation may be built on. Using data from the PARTIREP cross-national survey among regional and national legislators in 12 European democracies, the assumption is proven to be inaccurate: focusing on more than one action at a time, it becomes clear that district magnitude increases the time representatives spend on some constituency-oriented actions and decreases the time they spend on others (even when the electoral incentive to nurture a personal reputation is strong). The article demonstrates that representatives’ choice to engage in four constituency-oriented actions is related to the nature of these home styles and their electoral utility in a given context.