The rise of managerialism within healthcare systems has been noted globally. This paper uses the findings of a scoping study to investigate the management of poor performance among nurses and midwives in the United Kingdom within this context. The management of poor performance among clinicians in the NHS has been seen as a significant policy problem. There has been a profound shift in the distribution of power between professional and managerial groups in many health systems globally. We examined literature published (...) between 2000 and 10 to explore aspects of poor performance and its management. We used Web of Science, CINAHL, MEDLINE, British Nursing Index, HMIC, Cochrane Library and PubMed. Empirical data are limited but indicate that nurses and midwives are the clinical groups most likely to be suspended and that poor performance is often represented as an individual deficit. A focus on the individual as a source of trouble can serve as a distraction from more complex systematic problems. (shrink)

Within Marxist criticism the hunger of the vampire has thus far been read as a metaphorization of the violence of capitalist exploitation. This article offers an alternative Marxist reading of vampirism, which incorporates the vampire's simultaneous demands to be fed and refusals of work into an antiwork utopian politics. This article suggests that the hunger of the vampire is usefully connected to the utopian desire for a world without work that lies at the heart of Marxist utopianism. In this way (...) this article challenges the productivist valorization of work, which often accompanies denunciations of the vampire as an enemy of the worker, while demonstrating that such denunciations frequently align Marxism with racist, queerphobic, and anti-Semitic framings of the vampire in opposition to the white Christian family. Focusing on Bram Stoker's Dracula this article deploys the critical methodology of Ernst Bloch in order to excavate the utopian potential of Stoker's text. (shrink)

"The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin" was an exemplary interdisciplinary event that brought together scholars across the humanities with those working in science and technology studies. Supported by the Chaire Arts & Sciences, École Polytechnique, and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, the conference gave utopian studies specialists the opportunity to converse with experts in the philosophy of science, critical ecologists, and political philosophers. Unlike other single-author events this conference was not the product of an existing community of Le Guin scholars, meaning (...) that the delegates were drawn together primarily through their enthusiasm for Le Guin's writing, their interest in theorizing an "ethics for the... (shrink)