Search Results

This chapter explores how we have limited our own understanding and application of ethics at work through our everyday talk about it. The chapter begins by arguing that how we frame ethics is as important, and sometimes more important, than the specific ethical decisions we make. The chapter explains how a perspective on ethics that is grounded in communication and rhetoric can illuminate how we unnecessarily restrain the influence of ethics at work. The chapter makes the case for examining popular culture and everyday talk for clues to how ethics is treated in our professional lives. Turning the saying “talk is cheap” on its head, the chapter urges a serious consideration of what it means to say, for example, that one's work is “just a job” or that we should “let the market decide.” Thus, the reader is urged to find ethical implications in diverse messages and cases, ranging from codes and handbooks, to television shows and Internet advertising, to everyday conversation, including sayings that become part of who we are.

This chapter explores deeply how our common ways of speaking about ethics distract us from a more integrative vision of ethics in our lives. The chapter introduces three problems with how we typically approach ethics, as revealed in our language: compartmentalization, or putting ethics in a box; “essentialization,” or trying to reduce or crystallize ethics in terms of one thing or simple answers; and abstraction, or creating distance (or alienation) between ethical concerns and everyday practices. The chapter then explains seven common dimensions cutting across various understandings of ethics, in order to illustrate just what we mean by “ethics” when we speak about it in a particular way. These dimensions include agency and autonomy, discrimination and choice, motive and purpose, responsibility and relationship, rationality and emotionality, role and identity, and scene and situation. The discussion invokes traditional ethical theories to show how they tend to emphasize certain features over others. This chapter concludes by arguing how Aristotle's idea of eudaimonia, or flourishing, helps bring together reframed notions of virtue with our most cherished life goals.

This chapter addresses the domain of the professional, taking seriously the notion that the professional is personal, in addition to being social, political, and ethical. The chapter traces the development of modern professional classes, particularly as they implicate individual and collective moral practice. In certain ways, formal professions have the capacity to elevate moral practice and create barriers to ethical visions. This chapter considers the various sides of professional life, takes a second look at its ethical claims, and exposes some of the problems with what we usually think of as an unmitigated positive force in society; that is, professionalism. As part of this evaluation, the chapter probes issues of professional style and examines the categories into which individuals and whole segments of society are divided. The chapter concludes with a call to reconsider the meaning of “career.”

As an overlay to colonial intervention was the emerging nationalist side of the story. Faced with a colonial rhetoric about educating Indian females that was no longer credible, the British turned to promoting this cause, instead, claiming a new Indian modernity based on Western female professionalism and, with it, elements of embedded Western feminism. As far as the nationalist cause entered into this dialogue at all, M. K. Gandhi turned these arguments on their head, seeking education to make Indian girls better ‘mothers’ as a signifier that it was traditional Indian cultural spaces that would define their femininity, and with a largely different activism from Indian men in the nationalist struggle. This chapter places developments concerning female learning in this context from the 1870s onwards, embracing questions of Indian citizenship and widowhood. The work of a faction of the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal (East India), the ideology of the Arya Samaj in north India, and activists including the Parsis in Bombay (West India), are discussed. Over this relatively long time period the chapter explores how colonial women teachers responded in different and limited ways, and with different levels of success, to these largely unacknowledged but very strong Indian cultural contexts.

Tragedy’s dissemination may be said to be, in its nature, a complex and continuous process brought about through performance and re-performance at Panhellenic gatherings. Tragedy as a genre emerged from, and was part of, a Panhellenic song culture shaped by frequent travel, competition, and exchange. By the time something that could be termed tragedy appeared at the end of the sixth century, the Greeks were already connected by a complex system of overlapping networks. Despite the prominence of particular cities, such as Athens and Sparta, the Greeks possessed no one political or cultural centre. Festivals, at Athens and elsewhere, were important places for Greeks to gather and compete. From the beginning, individual tragic poets and actors worked hard to make their plays and performances known everywhere and known forever.

This chapter explores the consequences of situated standardization for the relation between standardization and patient-centeredness. In the medical sociological literature, ‘standardization’ and ‘patient-centered care’ have been positioned as perfect conceptual opposites. This chapter explore the specificities of this opposition, their limitations, and in which sense a reconceptualization of both concepts could lead to their pragmatic commensurability. Drawing empirically upon the development of patient-centered care pathways, and particularly on the disconcerting moments within empirical instances of biomedicalized and patient-centered care, situated standardization proves helpful for redefining patient-centeredness from a change in professional attitude toward ‘wholeness’, or a procedural focus on patient participation, to a material and organizational characteristic. This proves particularly important because other definitions of patient-centeredness can allow doctors to exert unprecedented power over their patients. By putting center stage the issues patients, care professionals and organizations face, care can be made patient-centered in more substantial, contestable and located ways.

This chapter looks at questions of identity at various levels. It considers the Scottish identity of the Bank of Scotland, and how personal senses of Scottishness were refracted through that institutional national identity. It looks especially at how people’s personal identities in the Bank of Scotland were often bound up with an idea of being ‘professional bankers’ in contrast to more generic ‘sales people’ associated with the Halifax. It also considers the gendered dimension of identity. More generally, it is interested in how people invest their personal identities in larger social identities, and how this process is mediated by organisational contexts such as that of the Bank. The conceptual interlude in the middle argues the importance of this triad of the personal, the social, and the organisational, for understanding and analysing identity.

This chapter is based on reflections on doing ethnographic research. It argues the centrality of comparisons of the ethnographer’s personal experiences with that of the setting in which they are researching. First it examines more closely a theme raised in earlier chapters, about how HBOS staff sometimes questioned the idea of Scottish/English differences by mobilising other axes of difference based on region, class, gender, and so on. It then looks especially at some of the similarities in institutional change going on in the university sector compared with the HBOS case, and uses this as a basis to speculate about more general trends of change in large organisations and society as a whole, in both commercial and non-commercial sectors.

During the final decades of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment efforts at comprehensive mastery gave way to different uses of system—to delimited and dedicated systems and to the dispersing of systems into other forms, including the specialized essays of the modern disciplines. Their “travel” filled the world in new ways. This transition highlights our differences from Enlightenment. For Smith, who based his master SYSTEMS on “sentiments” as probable behaviors, true knowledge was useful knowledge that worked in the world to change that world. For us knowledge is knowledge because it is true. The end-of-century proliferation of systems and of print made inclusive master SYSTEMS unsustainable. Late eighteenth-century Britain is a laboratory for studying the consequences of this proliferation: instead of becoming parts of master SYSTEMS, systems were inserted into other forms. This shifted the organization of knowledge from every kind being a branch of philosophy, moral or natural, into the specialized and professionalized disciplines of modernity. This “travel” of system into other forms—embedded systems—was exemplified by Mathus’s Population “essay,” and in works, also published in 1798, by William Wordsworth and Mary Hays. Systems embedded in other forms and stretched to accommodate more things meant system proliferated into every aspect of everyday life.

This chapter surveys the media and journalistic landscape of early twentieth century Ireland. It examines the main national, provincial, and periodical titles, and what journalistic life was like as new technology and social developments prompted growth in the newspaper industry. It examines the impact that the new journalism had in Ireland, particularly how it prompted lobby groups to campaign against what were referred to as objectionable publications. It also examines the work environment and routines of journalists, the role of female journalists, early attempts to professionalise journalism through the establishment of the Association of Irish Journalists, and debates about the education of journalists.

The care of people living with addiction is ethically complex work. Addiction is stigmatized in our society and clinical services for addiction-related conditions are underdeveloped, raising many ethical issues related to respect, confidentiality, and justice. Addictions of all kinds are associated, by definition, with a lack of personal control over the addictive behavior and are often linked with intermittent or enduring cognitive deficits, creating concerns about affected individuals’ capacities for autonomy and shared decision-making with caregivers. Some addictions are associated with risky and/or illegal activities, introducing very difficult considerations related to dangerousness, self-neglect, or self-injury and potential harm toward others. Moreover, the history of treatment for addiction has been riddled with approaches that emphasize punitive consequences, raising issues pertaining to beneficence, nonmaleficence, and medical professionalism. Finally, addiction often co-occurs with other health conditions, which may be difficult to recognize and burdensome to treat because of the addiction, raising ethical issues related to clinical competence. For these reasons, every aspect of clinical care for addictive disorders should be viewed as having important ethical meaning and implications.

The practices of both forensic psychiatry and clinical psychiatry appear to require and to use, in boundary-violation discourse, a special way of referring to the heightened attention to the ethics of interpersonal exchange. But this discourse and the judgments it expresses are each in need of closer scrutiny. A variety of factors make the determination of certain actions to be boundary violations unclear, including the range of alleged boundary-violating behavior, ambiguities in the fundamental metaphor of boundaries violated or transgressed, and confusion about the explanatory status of the value judgments boundary-violation language is used to express. In addition, disputes and disagreements regarding boundary-violation judgments require analysis--an analysis undertaken in this article through appeal to theories of professional role morality. Noted also is the significance of gender in boundary-violation ethics.

When a patient or patient’s family presents a psychiatrist with a gift, the clinician is challenged to maintain appropriate professional boundaries but have the flexibility to respond with warmth and appreciation. The psychiatrist must consider such factors as the intention of the gift, its value to the patient, and the anticipated effect of accepting or refusing it on the patient and the treatment. Psychiatric practitioners are ethically obligated to consider patients’ best interests when deciding about how to handle the offer of a gift. Ethical deliberations about such situations occur on a case-by-case basis and require careful analysis of how to promote the patient’s best interest while adhering to professional ethics. In this article, members of the McLean Hospital Ethics Committee present a pragmatic model for managing the presentation of a gift from a patient or a patient’s family member.

When taken too far, certain well-intentioned ethical guidelines can become transformed into artificial boundaries that serve as destructive prohibitions and thereby undermine clinical effectiveness. Rigid roles and strict codified rules of conduct between therapist and client can obstruct a clinician’s artistry. Those anxious conformists who go entirely by the book, and who live in constant fear of malpractice suits, are unlikely to prove significantly helpful to a broad array of clients. The author argues that one of the worst professional/ethical violations is to permit current risk-management principles to take precedence over humane interventions.

Social work literature clearly demonstrates that ethical issues related to boundaries are among the most problematic and challenging. Boundary issues involve circumstances in which social workers encounter actual or potential conflicts between their professional duties and their social, sexual, religious, or business relationships. This article provides an overview of boundary issues in social work (circumstances involving dual and multiple relationships); presents a conceptually based typology of boundary issues in the profession; and provides guidelines to help social workers manage the boundary issues and risks that arise in practice.

With the growth of the Internet, psychiatrists can now search online for a wide range of information about patients. Psychiatrists face challenges of maintaining professional boundaries with patients in many circumstances, but little consideration has been given to the practice of searching online for information about patients, an act we refer to as patient-targeted Googling (PTG). Psychiatrists are not the only health care providers who can investigate their patients online, but they may be especially likely to engage in PTG because of the unique relationships involved in their clinical practice. Before searching online for a patient, psychiatrists should consider such factors as the intention of searching, the anticipated effect of gaining information online, and its potential value or risk for the treatment. The psychiatrist is obligated to act in a way that respects the patient’s best interests and that adheres to professional ethics.

Our analysis begins in Chapter 1, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with an inquiry into the nature of early sport and early cricket. The key events will be placed within the context of the social, economic, and cultural development of the country. We will focus on pre-modern cricket, its formative development in the south-east of England and the role played by competition, commercialism and professionalism, and also the initial growth of cricket in the North and the influence of pre-modern sport on its structure and character. In this period, sport and recreation were shaped by the new social, economic and cultural pressures of capitalist industrialisation, and cricket became an emerging expression of local and civic identity.

For Maria Edgeworth, women's exclusion from professional labour frees them from the requirement to tailor their knowledge to the demands of a single specialisation: it provides them with ‘leisure to be wise’. This chapter questions the social utility of the intellectual capital that this formulation allows women to accrue. It compares accounts of female readers with their male counterparts, asking how the issue of gender helps to distinguish leisured wisdom from unproductive indolence. Using the example of Edgeworth's Belinda, it revisits the idea of reading as symbolic labour, attending both to its positive agency and its limitations.

This introduction provides framing examples of American writers’ transatlantic vocational pursuits, including Whitman’s editorial attempt to introduce his poetry to foreign readers and Douglass’s recognition of the personal and journalistic potential of his liberating experience abroad. In a critical context that considers the evolution of transatlantic literary studies and explains the implications of such key terms in this book as ‘professionalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism,’ the introduction develops an understanding of the professional commitments and political stances that led nineteenth-century writers to shape their careers in a transatlantic public sphere. The six authors featured in this book – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Grace Greenwood, and Walt Whitman – thought beyond the nation and acted outside of literature itself to play leading roles in making global culture. The introduction concludes with detailed summaries of subsequent chapters.

Does transatlantic professionalism still matter? This afterword examines the multifaceted careers of two contemporary American writers – Paule Marshall and Adam Gopnik – who combine creative pursuits in literature with complementary work in journalism, lecturing, and editing. Their writing testifies to the resurgence of antebellum interests in national difference as an element of cultural critique, in the Atlantic as a geographical space conscious of the continuing history of slavery, and in self-promotion in a reading world without national boundaries. By fusing politics with personal memoirs, seeking sensual pleasure and material gain, and forgoing dissent in favor of institutionalizing transatlantic culture, these writers both preserve and betray the vocational spirit that they inherit from their antebellum literary ancestors.