Person‐centred care is founded on ethics as a basis for organizing care. In spite of healthcare systems claiming that they have implemented person‐centred care, patients report less satisfaction with care. These contrasting results require clarification of how to practice person‐centred ethics using Paul Ricoeur's ‘Little ethics’, summarized as: ‘aiming for the good life, with and for others in just institutions’. In this ethic Kantian morality is at once subordinate and complementary to Aristotelian ethics because the ethical goal needs to be (...) critically assessed and passed through the examination of the norm in each care situation. This paper presents examples that describes a person‐centred care practice that balance a critical review of care activities based on a conviction of aiming for patients' wellbeing. In contrast to patients' experiences of person‐centred care in real life, research projects have shown that if the clinical performers comprehend and apply the practice of person‐centred ethics, patients report positive outcomes. The implementation of person‐centred care therefore demands that stakeholders and managers enables and requires that healthcare staff study ethics in the same way as studying for example pharmacology is required when handling patients' medicines. (shrink)

Sustainability challenges typically occur across sectoral boundaries, calling the state, market, and civil society to action. Although consensus exists on the merits of cross-sector collaboration, our understanding of whether and how it can create value for various, collaborating stakeholders is still limited. This special issue focuses on how new combined knowledge on cross-sector collaboration and business models for sustainability can inform the academic and practitioner debates about sustainability challenges and solutions. We discuss how cross-sector collaboration can play an important role (...) for the transition to new and potentially sustainability-driven business models given that value creation, delivery, and capture of organizations are intimately related to the collaborative ties with their stakeholders. Sustainable alternatives to conventional business models tend to adopt a more holistic perspective of business by broadening the spectrum of solutions and stakeholders and, when aligned with cross-sector collaboration, can contribute new ways of addressing the wicked sustainability problems humanity faces. (shrink)

Background: A fair distribution of healthcare services for older patients is an important challenge, but qualitative research exploring clinicians’ consideration in daily clinical prioritisation in healthcare services for the aged is scarce.Objectives: To explore what kind of criteria, values, and other relevant considerations are important in clinical prioritisations in healthcare services for older patients.Design: A semi-structured interview-guide was used to interview 45 clinicians working with older patients. The interviews were analysed qualitatively using hermeneutical content analysis and template organising style.Participants: 20 (...) physicians and 25 nurses working in public hospitals and nursing homes in different parts of Norway.Results and interpretations: Important dilemmas relate to under-provision of community care and comprehensive approaches, and over-utilisation of certain specialised services. Overt ageism is generally not reported, but the healthcare services for the aged seem to be inadequate due to more subtle processes, for example, dominating considerations and ideals and operating conditions that do not pay sufficient attention to older patients’ needs and considerations of justice. Clinical prioritisations are described as being dominated by adapting traditional biomedical approaches to the operating conditions. Many of the clinicians indicate that there is a potential for improving end of life decisions and for reducing exaggerated use of life-prolonging treatment and hospitalisations.Conclusion: The interviews in this study indicate that considerations of justice and patients’ perspectives should be given more attention to strike a balance between specialised medical approaches and more general and comprehensive approaches in healthcare services for older patients. (shrink)

The relative merits and demerits of historically prominent views such as the correspondence theory, coherentism, pragmatism, verificationism, and instrumentalism have been subject to much attention in the truth literature and have fueled the long-lived debate over which of these views is the most plausible one. While diverging in their specific philosophical commitments, adherents of these historically prominent views agree in at least one fundamental respect. They are all alethic monists. They all endorse the thesis that there is only one property (...) in virtue of which propositions can be true, and so, in this sense, take truth to be one. The truth pluralist, on the other hand, rejects this idea. There are several properties in virtue of which propositions can be true. The literature on truth pluralism has been growing steadily for the past twenty years. This volume, however, is the first of its kind—the first collection of papers focused specifically on pluralism about truth. Part I is dedicated to the development, investigation, and critical discussion of different forms of pluralism. An additional reason to look at truth pluralism with interest is the significant connections it bears to other debates in the truth literature—the debates concerning traditional theories of truth and the deflationism/inflationism divide being cases in hand. Parts II and III of the volume connect truth pluralism to these two debates. (shrink)

BackgroundResearch proactively and deliberately aims to bring about specific changes to how societies function and individual lives fare. However, in the ever-expanding field of ethical regulations and guidance for researchers, one ethical consideration seems to have passed under the radar: How should researchers act when pursuing actual, societal changes based on their academic work?Main textWhen researchers engage in the process of bringing about societal impact to tackle local or global challenges important concerns arise: cultural, social and political values and institutions (...) can be put at risk, transformed or even hampered if researchers lack awareness of how their ‘acting to impact’ influences the social world. With today’s strong focus on research impacts, addressing such ethical challenges has become urgent within in all fields of research involved in finding solutions to the challenges societies are facing. Due to the overall goal of doing something good that is often inherent in ethical approaches, boundaries to researchers’ impact of something good is neither obvious, nor easy to detect. We suggest that it is time for the field of bioethics to explore normative boundaries for researchers’ pursuit of impact and to consider, in detail, the ethical obligations that ought to shape this process, and we provide a four-step framework of fair conditions for such an approach. Our suggested approach within this field can be useful for other fields of research as well.ConclusionWith this paper, we draw attention to how the transition from pursuing impact within the Academy to trying to initiate and achieve impact beyond the Academy ought to be configured, and the ethical challenges inherent in this transition. We suggest a stepwise strategy to identify, discuss and constitute consensus-based boundaries to this academic activity. This strategy calls for efforts from a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, advisors from the humanities and social sciences, as well as discussants from funding institutions, ethical committees, politics and the society in general. Such efforts should be able to offer new and useful assistance to researchers, as well as research funding agencies, in choosing ethically acceptable, impact-pursuing projects. (shrink)

Here is a well-known thought about truth: Truth consists in correspondence with reality. A sentence is true just in case what it says corresponds with how the world is. Theories of truth that incorporate this thought are naturally regarded as robust or “heavyweight”. Truth is to be understood in a realist fashion. The world decides what is true and what is not. A recent incarnation of the correspondence view is found in truth-maker theories, whose adherents maintain that truths are true (...) in virtue of there being something – a truth-maker – in the world that makes them so.2. (shrink)

The United Nation’s (UN) 3rd Annual Multi-stakeholder Forum on ‘Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (STI Forum) - Transformation Towards Sustainable and Resilient Societies’ was held at the UN Headquarters in New York on 5th and 6th of June, 2018. This STI Forum set out to discuss a suit of the sustainable development goals, namely sustainable management of water and sanitation for all (SDG 6), sustainable consumption and production patterns (SDG 12), and sustainable terrestrial ecosystems (SDG 15). (...) It also discussed how to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all (SDG 7) and how to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable (SDG 11). I participated in the panel debate on ‘Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Terrestrial Ecosystems (SDG 15)’ – emphasizing the importance of food systems in the context of SDG 15. My statement is summarized below. The panel debate aimed at helping to identify good practices and policy recommendations, as well as challenges and needs, especially as they relate to international cooperation, innovation and capacity-building, with a view to facilitate the development, scaling up adoption and dissemination of relevant technologies for SDG 15. A food system can be described as a system that embraces all the elements (environment, people, inputs, processes, institutions, infrastructure, markets and trade) and activities that relate to the production, processing, distribution and marketing, preparation and consumption of food and the outputs of these activities, including socio-economic and environmental outcomes. A sustainable food system delivers food and nutrition security for all in such a way that the economic, social and environmental bases to generate food security and nutrition for future generations are not compromised. (shrink)

The right of access to documents is constitutionally based in Sweden and has a long history. The right of access is considered crucial to Swedish democracy. On entering the EU in 1995, Sweden declared that public access to official records forms part of Sweden’s constitutional, political and cultural heritage. The members of the EU for their part declared that they took it for granted that Sweden would fully comply with Community, now Union, law with respect to openness and transparency. Sweden (...) continues to push for transparency when EU legislation potentially containing secrecy clauses is negotiated in the EU. It turns out, however, that the EU membership does pose challenges to the strong Swedish right of access to documents. The protection of personal data is controversial in Sweden to the extent that the stricter EU legislation clashes with the traditionally weak protection of privacy in Swedish law; the right of access to information has largely overridden the right to privacy. Large amounts of publicly available personal data, amassed in data bases by private actors, for commercial reasons but under the protection of the Swedish constitution, is causing problems especially since the Swedish constitutional law is considered, by Sweden, to precede EU legislation in the field. Sweden will somehow have to solve the dilemmas caused by the differing traditions of transparency between itself and other members of the EU and of other international organizations. Many answers – perhaps converging - will be provided in 2016 by Swedish official inquiries and the EU Regulation.Article first published online: 22 MARCH 2016. (shrink)

In this article, I critically assess Hélène Landemore's new model of Open Democracy, asking whether it requires of citizens to blindly defer to the decisions of the mini-public. To address this question, I, first, discuss three institutional mechanisms in Open Democracy, all of which can be read to grant citizens democratic control. I argue that neither the capacity to authorize the selection mechanism (random sortition), nor the lottocratic conception of political equality, nor the self-selection mechanisms of Landemore's model deliver the (...) form of control that would insulate Open Democracy from the charge of blind deference. I then discuss the direct democracy mechanisms that Landemore incorporates into her model. Although these devices grant citizens control and, by extension, offer the resources for repudiating the charge of blind deference, they also, I argue, subvert the logic of Landemore's lottocratic model, rendering Open Democracy predictably unstable. Given the deliberative asymmetries between the mini-public and the citizenry, a high frequency of bottom-up challenges is to be expected that would throw the whole system into jeopardy. Thus, the challenge for lottocrats is to show how democratic control can be achieved in a lottocratic system without undermining the benefits of the legislature by lot. (shrink)

The article argues that cognitive linguistic theory may prove an alternative to the Montague paradigm for designing natural language understanding systems. Within this framework it describes a system which models language understanding as a dialogical process between user and computer. The system operates with natural language texts as input and represent language meaning as entity-relationship diagrams.

This article is a contribution to the existing debate about the marketization of higher education and offers a detailed study of the way the practices of marketization manifest themselves at the level of discourse in higher education. Taking its point of departure in Critical Discourse Analysis and using a text-driven procedure for genre analysis, the article describes and analyses the international student prospectus as an instance of a highly promotional genre which clearly reflects the values and forces of the free (...) market. The article contains two analyses. The first analysis compares four instances of the international student prospectus genre from Finland, Scotland, Australia and Japan and tries to establish genre membership and genre characteristics by considering the overall text structure, and by looking for similarities in content and `rhetorical moves'. The second analysis is an in-depth analysis of the language use in the international student prospectus from the University of Stirling, Scotland. This analysis pays particular attention to the way the rhetorical moves and visual and lexico-grammatical features in the text are used to represent the two main participants in the text: the university and its students. Both analyses show that the student prospectus is trying to construct an image of the University of Stirling and its students which goes hand in hand with the new trend in higher education — namely that of offering innovative products to `demanding' clients on the look-out for the best possible `university experience'. (shrink)

The purpose of this overview of published articles on decision making in paediatric care was to identify important aspects of its possible use in clinical practice and to obtain a base for future research. A literature review was undertaken utilizing snowball sampling to identify articles because of the diversity present within the area of decision making in paediatric care. The databases PubMed and CINAHL were used. The search was limited to articles published in English during the period 1994-2004. The analysis (...) entailed a series of comparisons across articles, focusing on major areas of enquiry and patterns of results. Various levels of decision making are described because these seem to form a basis for how decisions are made. Concepts found to be of importance for decision making are described under the following headings: competence, the child’s best interests, knowledge, values and attitudes, roles and partnership, power, and economy. Further research is suggested. (shrink)

When a child is hospitalized, the parents find themselves in an unfamiliar environment and their parental role changes. They are in a stressful and often anxiety-filled situation and it may be difficult for them to participate in decisions. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which parents participate in decisions during the course of events when their child is hospitalized. Thirty-five parents of 24 children (aged 5 months to 18 years) were followed by mobile observation during (...) their child’s hospitalization in a paediatric department in Sweden. Three researchers analysed field notes in three steps, using manifest and latent coding. In step 1, 119 situations that included a decision process were identified. In step 2, the situations were assessed according to a five-level scale concerning how the parents’ wishes, desires or values had been respected. In step 3, each situation was scrutinized with respect to factors influencing the extent of the parents’ participation. The results showed that parents have varying ability to be involved in decision making. Professionals need to communicate more openly with them in order to identify and satisfy their needs because some parents are unwilling or incapable of expressing them. (shrink)

Patients are supposed to be given care according to their needs. This concept is, however, difficult to define and patients and caregivers may have different opinions about a patient’s needs. Twenty patients were interviewed and asked to give a definition of need, describe their needs while hospitalized and depict what they do to make sure their needs are fulfilled. Ten groups of needs were identified: communication, basic care, contact with other people, behaviour of staff, empathy, competent caregivers, continuity, integrity, participation (...) in decision making, and pain relief. The descriptions patients gave of how they ensured their needs were met could be divided into two groups: openly seeking attention; or not wanting to disturb the staff. Interviews with patients emphasized the importance of recognizing that they have individual needs and varying abilities to see that their needs are fulfilled. (shrink)

The theory of formal spaces is developed in terms of presentations, in order to study effectivity.

Including empirical examples and theoretical clarifications on many of the analytical issues raised in his recently published Down to Earth, this conversation with Bruno Latour and his collaborator, Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz, offers key insights into Latour’s recent and ongoing work. Revolving around questions on political ecology and social theory in our ‘New Climatic Regime’, Latour argues that in order to have politics you need a land and you need a people. This interview present reflections on such politics, such land (...) and such people, and it ends with a call for a sociology that takes up the task of connecting the three by investigating what he and Schultz call ‘geo-social classes’. The interview was conducted by Jakob Stein in Paris in November 2018. (shrink)

It is well-known that a sense of belonging is crucial in relation to gaining and maintaining sound mental health. Work is also known to be an essential aspect of recovery from mental health problems. However, there is scant knowledge of what a sense of belonging in the workplace represents. This study explores the nature and meaning of a sense of belonging in the workplace as experienced by persons struggling with mental health issues.Using a descriptive phenomenological methodology, sixteen descriptions of the (...) lived experience of belonging in the workplace were analyzed. The analysis reveals that the experience of belonging in the workplace is restricted and fragile until the moment one becomes accepted, but grows stronger and more resilient as one chooses how one wants to participate. Nonetheless, the sense of belonging is haunted by mixed emotions and ambivalence between the wish to be taken care of and the longing for professional appreciation. (shrink)

Vann McGee claims that open-ended schemas are more innocuous than ordinary second-order quantification, particularly in terms of ontological commitment. We argue that this is not the case.

This contribution explores Grotian Moments in the practice of the UN Security Council in three different but closely related subject areas. The three areas are, in turn, the way the Security Council interprets the concept of ‘threat to the peace’ or more generally ‘international peace and security’, the law-making by the Security Council, and the subjects – in the sense of legal or natural persons – that the Security Council chooses to address. It turns out that the interpretation by the (...) Security Council of the UN Charter has been remarkably flexible, expanding the scope of action of the Council considerably. Whether its interpretation of the UN Charter also deserves to be labelled ‘Grotian’, however, is rather a matter of rhetoric than law. (shrink)

This comment challenges essentialist “brain biased” interpretations of emotions from a historical perspective. humanities research shows that the embodying of emotions is historically contingent. Emotion metaphors do not so much reflect what is happening in our brain or in other parts of the body: they reflect what people think/thought is/was happening in and outside their body.

This article examines Swedish, Danish and Norwegian governments’ participation in the European Return Platform for Unaccompanied Minors project and its failed attempts to deport unaccompanied minors to Afghanistan. It argues that ERPUM is an interesting and urgent case of a “deportation corridor”, and suggests that this framework can benefit from analysis through normative and applied ethics and in particular discussions of feasibility constraints. It therefore identifies and critically assesses two nationalistic arguments for deportation common in Nordic politics, based on appeals (...) credibility and humanitarianism. Considering the growth of nationalistic immigration policies in Nordic states, the article turns the usual discussions of feasibility on its head by showing that not only cosmopolitan, but also nationalistic ethics must face up to charges of lacking realism. More specifically, it argues that the case of ERPUM illustrates how nationalistic deportation ethics can rely on inconsistent normative and erroneous empirical assumptions, which can be criticized for their arbitrariness, ideological grounding and lacking feasibility. (shrink)

Secretion is a fundamental cellular process involving the regulated release of intracellular products from cells. Physiological functions such as neurotransmission, or the release of hormones and digestive enzymes, are all governed by cell secretion. Anomalies in the processes involved in secretion contribute to the development and progression of diseases such as diabetes and other hormonal disorders. To unravel the mechanisms that govern such diseases, it is essential to understand how hormones, growth factors and neurotransmitters are synthesized and processed, and how (...) their signals are recognized, amplified and transmitted by intracellular signaling pathways in the target cells. Here, we discuss diverse aspects of the detailed mechanisms involved in secretion based on mathematical models. The models range from stochastic ones describing the trafficking of secretory vesicles to deterministic ones investigating the regulation of cellular processes that underlie hormonal secretion. In all cases, the models are closely related to experimental results and suggest theoretical predictions for the secretion mechanisms. (shrink)

Although using different labels, genre theorists from different traditions have generally given privilege to the communicative purpose, in this article referred to as rhetorical objective, as genre determinant. Genre analysts who have studied press releases in particular tend to share this view, but nevertheless categorize communicative events conveyed through the press release as belonging to one genre despite variation in rhetorical objectives. This article argues that although the press release may be seen as a genre on the basis of textual (...) form, it does not qualify for the genre label if analysed in terms of content and rhetorical objective. To substantiate my claim, I shall discuss a small corpus of press releases, all focusing on a specific biotechnological issue. In my analyses I shall discuss staging in terms of content as well as logico-semantic relations between stages, patterns of stage combinations and their linguistic realizations with the aim of identifying variation in rhetorical objective. (shrink)

In this critical comment, we argue that nondemocratic, but decent regimes fail to constitute legitimate governance under Applbaum’s free group agency account. To make this case, we first introduce the three principles of liberty, equality and agency that Applbaum takes to flow directly from his free agency conception of legitimacy. Against this backdrop, we discuss Applbaum’s claim that a nondemocratic regime along the lines of a Rawlsian decent consultation hierarchy could meet the threshold of legitimacy. Contrary to this suggestion, we (...) argue that nondemocratic, but decent regimes cannot claim legitimacy under Applbaum’s account because they are constitutively inegalitarian, thus failing to adequately grant citizens the equal normative power without which legitimacy is unattainable under the free group agency account. (shrink)