The SERVE Program at Ignatius University seeks to foster the ethical development of its participants by combining academic study of philosophy and theology with a year-long community service project. This study considered the impact of the SERVE Program upon Ignatius University students majoring in business in comparison to students pursuing majors in the liberal arts, education, and nursing. Findings from this study offer insight into the response of business students to ethical content in comparison to students pursuing degrees (...) in other disciplines. Such findings hold significant implications for business school faculty and administrators committed to the civic and ethical development of individuals pursuing careers in business and private industry. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to analyse the effect of high school scholarships tied to community service on the development of secondary school students in Northwest China. Using data from three rounds of surveys of thousands of students in 298 classes in 75 high schools in Shaanxi province, the paper documents the implementation of the Compassionate Heart Scholars Program and evaluates the effect of the programme on the educational performance, self‐esteem, self‐efficacy and social responsibility of the (...) participants. We present evidence that part of the protocol of the programme (which includes the nomination and election of programme participants) improves the academic performance and self‐esteem of those involved in the programme. The community service part of the programme is shown to raise the self‐efficacy and the sense of social responsibility of the programme participants. One striking result is that the test scores of the community service participants do not appear to be adversely affected, even though they spend considerable time doing community service. The findings of this study, therefore, suggest that adding extra‐curricular community service to school curricula may be a win–win–win strategy, for the students, for schools and for the local communities served. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to analyse the effect of high school scholarships tied to community service on the development of secondary school students in Northwest China. Using data from three rounds of surveys of thousands of students in 298 classes in 75 high schools in Shaanxi province, the paper documents the implementation of the Compassionate Heart Scholars Program and evaluates the effect of the programme on the educational performance, self‐esteem, self‐efficacy and social responsibility of the (...) participants. We present evidence that part of the protocol of the programme (which includes the nomination and election of programme participants) improves the academic performance and self‐esteem of those involved in the programme. The community service part of the programme is shown to raise the self‐efficacy and the sense of social responsibility of the programme participants. One striking result is that the test scores of the community service participants do not appear to be adversely affected, even though they spend considerable time doing community service. The findings of this study, therefore, suggest that adding extra‐curricular community service to school curricula may be a win–win–win strategy, for the students, for schools and for the local communities served. (shrink)

This article examines Chinese student teachers’ perceived university support for community service at the start of the semester in relation to three levels of purpose: expectations to feel self-transcendent emotions while doing service work, the strength of their sense of purpose and endorsement of specific purposes focused on social benefits. American questionnaires translated into Chinese were completed online by 284 students in a teachers’ university in northeast China. Compared to student teachers who perceived a lack of university (...) support, those who perceived strong support more weakly expected to feel negative self-transcendent emotions during community work, reported higher searching for purpose level and attached greater importance to both social and creative purposes aimed to help others. (shrink)

This is a story of the development of a community service for business education project in Florida International University's Business Environment Program. The Project, as it is called, had its practical origins in student involvement in community activism-type projects. Its theoretical foundation is found in the concept of increasing community discourse — following Dewey (1954) — as a vehicle for strengthening the business and society bond. Student community service projects are described including the largest (...) group to evolve, a group dedicated to feeding Miami's homeless and taking the name the FIU Foodrunners. The Project is now in its third year with approximately five-hundred students per year working twenty-five hours per semester on community service projects. The community service requirement directly as a result of experiences with the Project has expanded beyond the Business Environment courses to offerings in other departments and is now part of a University-wide recently institutionalized structure designed to stimulate student community service efforts.Today was our third run, the third Sunday of waking up early. Now that I have been reading Aram and putting the pieces together, I can see how this concept of business and society comes together. (shrink)

This book integrates the ideas of service-learning, positive youth development, and model communities into a book with a comprehensive message about making communities more democratic. Specifically, the authors argue that through service-learning an educator can teach higher-order thinking, such as information literacy, problem-solving, and critical and creative thinking.

My research partnership with the Korean Community Service Center of Seattle is the deepest research relationship I have had since transitioning from working with a national “minority health”...

Contemporary Christian ethics encounters the challenge to communicate genuinely Christian normative orientations within the scientific debate in such a way as to render these orientations comprehensible, and to maintain or enhance their plausibility even for non-Christians. This essay, therefore, proceeds from a biblical motif, takes up certain themes from the Christian tradition (in particular the idea of social justice), and connects both with a compelling contemporary approach to ethics by secular moral philosophy, i.e. with Axel Honneth's reception of Hegel, as (...) based on Hegel's theory of recognition. As a first step, elements of an ethics of recognition are developed on the basis of an anthropological recourse to the conditions of intersubjective encounters. These conditions are then brought to bear on the idea of social justice, as developed in the social-Catholic tradition, and as systematically explored in the Pastoral Letter of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice For All (1986). Proceeding from this basis, aspects of a Christian ethics of community service with regard to long-term care can be defined. (shrink)

The Pulse Program at Boston College is a community service learning program that combines academic study of philosophy and theology with a year-long community service project. An analysis of the Pulse Pro­gram during the 2008–09 academic year revealed that participating students demonstrated a significant increase in their interest in philosophy; a greater likelihood of enrolling in additional philosophy coursework; and a deeper interest in philosophy than classmates not participating in service-learning. Interviews with participating students revealed (...) that the Pulse Program highlighted philosophy’s relevance to the “real world” as well as the useful role that philosophy can play in reflecting upon the social issues raised by students’ community service experiences. (shrink)

Today, the earth is an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions-a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny. The new media are powerful tools for education, cultural enrichment, commercial activity, political participation, intercultural dialogue and understanding. They also can serve the cause of religion. Yet the new information technology needs to be informed and guided (...) by solidarity in the service of the common good bridging the digital divide within and among nations. The value-laden message of Western secular culture to people and traditional societies in many cases ill-prepared to evaluate it leads to widespread crisis, for example, in regard to marriage and family life. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice, peace, and love. It also can help men and women in their age-old search for self-understanding. Like today's world itself, the world of media, including the Internet, has been brought by Christ, inchoately yet truly, within the boundaries of the kingdom of God and placed in service to the word of salvation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Global biodiversity declines are increasingly recognized as profound ecological and social crises. In areas subject to colonialization, these declines have advanced in lockstep with settler colonialism and imposition of centralized resource management by settler states. Many have suggested that resurgent Indigenous-led governance systems could help arrest these trends while advancing effective and socially just approaches to environmental interactions that benefit people and places alike. However, how dominant management and conservation approaches might be decolonized (i.e., how their underlying colonial structure (...) might be addressed, transformed, and replaced) is not always clear. Here, we describe a ‘Decolonial Model of Environmental Management and Conservation’ as an alternative paradigm to dominant approaches of conservation and management. The tenets of the model describe characteristics that might be expected of decolonized management, contrasted with those of dominant state-led approaches such as those embedded in the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. The model does not prescribe how Indigenous governments or communities ought to govern their own territories, but instead offers insights into how external management and conservation agencies and practitioners might support (or stop impeding) Indigenous-led governance. We illustrate the model with a conservation ‘bright spot’: grizzly bear stewardship in the area now referred to as the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, Canada, with a focus on work led by or in collaboration with, and within the territories of, the Haíɫzaqv, Kitasoo/xai’xais, Nuxalk, and Wuikinuxv First Nations. While acknowledging the important context-specific variability among place-based management and conservation applications, we also discuss the model’s broader applicability. (shrink)

International service learning programs are growing more popular with students looking to advance their skills and knowledge to become global citizens. While the benefits of these programs among students are well documented, little is known about the implications they have on host communities themselves. This volume explores the impact of ISL programs on members of host communities who are increasingly influenced by the presence of international students in their lives. Drawing upon post-colonial, feminist and other critical and decolonizing theories, (...) it examines the complicated power relations between North American ISL students and host communities in East and West Africa, the Caribbean and Central America. It stresses the importance of developing trusting relations between ISL students, faculty and individuals in the host communities to create mutually engaging learning experiences. (shrink)

This volume offers a crucial resource for those interested and involved in linking schools and higher education with communities to foster justice-oriented curriculum and instruction. Noted scholars explore the connections, limits, and possibilities between service-learning and social justice education. Exemplary models, unexpected hurdles, and synthesis of justice-oriented research are some of the important topics explored. This is a critical addition to the literature for teachers, teacher educators, and scholars committed to community-based teaching and learning that truly grapples with (...) and engages issues of diversity, democracy, and civic activism. (shrink)

For the past five years at the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver a community service or service learning component has been included in the Values in Action class (now Values-Based Leadership), a core MBA course that integrates ethics, law, and public policy perspectives on business issues. This paper summarizes the educational philosophy and the mechanics of this required component. Few empirical studies have been conducted to gauge the perceived value and impact of a (...) service learning requirement on students. Thus, several surveys were conducted to understand better the choices made by students as well as the impact of the requirement on students. Preliminary results reveal generally a positive effect on students, including some evidence that such a service learning requirement may influence students to make a greater lifetime commitment to community service. (shrink)

Systematic ethics support in community health services in Norway is in the initial phase. There are few evaluation studies about the significance of ethics reflection on care. The aim of this study was to evaluate systematic ethics reflection in groups in community health , - from the perspectives of employees participating in the groups, the group facilitators and the service managers. The reflection groups were implemented as part of a research and development project.

This study has examined the problems’ related to communicativeecology of pilgrim sojourners in Saudi Arabia and its impact on the levelsof their satisfaction with the services provided in a probability sample of439 Pakistani pilgrims. The sojourners’ communication ecology in problemsituations comprises eleven communication sources. Of these, contactswith family/friends and co-pilgrims made top of the list followed by suchcommunity organization sources like information counters, tour operators, andthe Pakistani Hajj mission officials. The mediated sources of contacts with theethnic newspaper, and the mainstream (...) Saudimass media ranked the 3rd and the 4th. The Internet and the digital billboardswere each cited in less than 10 percent of the responses. Stepwise multipleregressions revealed that the most important sources of impact on satisfactionwere: contact with community organizations, family/friends and co-pilgrims,the ethnic newspaper, and the digital screens. Implications of the impact onsatisfaction are discussed for communicating with the pilgrims. (shrink)

A romance with the concept of community has long characterized activist healthcare movements and has more recently been taken up by academic medical centers as a sign of virtuous civic engagement. During the late 1960s, the word community, as deployed by administrators at prestigious AMCs, became increasingly politicized, commodified and racialized. Here, we analyze how the concept of community was initially framed in the 1963 Community Mental Health Centers Act, the first legislation to establish community (...) mental health centers in America. We then examine the Health Policy Advisory Center’s analysis of the proposed Washington Heights Community Mental Health Center to be run by Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, an institution that had historically neglected residents’ health needs. Community pushback against Columbia’s plan to build a multi-block center, amplified by medical students and residents critical of the professionalized community mental health movement, escalated in the late 1960s, leading the city’s planning board to reject Columbia and approve a community council’s plan for preventive and rehabilitative local services. These conflicting overtones of “community” still inform understandings of the word in medicine today; thus, a critical historical analysis of “community” is warranted. (shrink)

Volunteering by higher education students in the UK has a long history which remains largely unexplored despite recent research and policy attention. This article offers a brief overview of the development of student volunteering before the 1960s and then discusses a shift from student social service to Student Community Action in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It argues that this shift was underpinned by a growing student movement in support of volunteering overseas; the perceived failures of the (...) ‘youth volunteer boom' of the 1960s and by the wider questioning of the values of higher education. The article then considers the rapid growth of Student Community Action across universities and colleges in the UK before reflecting upon the success and challenges of the movement. (shrink)

This essay argues that service-learning pedagogy is an important tool in pre-health humanities education that provides benefits to the community and produces more compassionate, culturally competent, and community-responsive future healthcare professionals. Further, beginning this approach at the baccalaureate level instills democratic and collaborative values at an earlier, crucial time in the career socialization process. The discussion focuses on learning outcomes and reciprocity between the university and community in a Medical Humanities course for junior and senior premedical (...) students, an elective in the premedical curriculum. The course includes an experiential learning element in which students shadow physicians and a service-learning component in which students complete medically-relevant service work, working with partners such as the veteran’s hospital, a hospice home, and organizations that serve individuals with disabilities. We cover topics such as narrative medicine, ethics, cross-cultural medicine, patient/practitioner relationships, the human life cycle, and the illness experience, and the writing, discussion, and reflection we engage in is enriched by the real-world experiences from which the students are able to draw. The shadowing and service experiences and the classroom texts and topics combine to form a symbiosis that leads to especially meaningful teaching and learning outcomes. (shrink)

In highly routinised service encounter interactions, communication is often guided by service scripts that are the material embodiment of institutional expectations of how the service interaction is to be conducted. However, counter to common belief that scripted communication is well-controlled and homogeneous in its execution, observation of actual talk reveals interesting patterns and variations that reflect the ways in which participants make meaning of and perform their respective roles within the interaction towards achieving the overall goal of (...) the service communication. Applying the analysis of speech functions and sequential order of talk in audio-recorded verbal exchanges between servers and customers at the service counter of a fast-food restaurant, acts in the fast-food service interaction are interpreted and explained in relation to management-prescribed service script, servers’ script-in-use and customers’ script within an institutional discourse framework. Findings from the study have important implications for service management and training as it addresses the tension between the practices on the ground and those sanctioned by the organisation. (shrink)

This study aimed to identify the reality of marketing services in Palestine Cellular Communications Company (Jawwal) from the viewpoint of the workers, where the researchers used the descriptive analytical method, through a questionnaire randomly distributed to the sample of workers in Palestine Cellular Communications Company (Jawwal) in Gaza Strip reached (60) employees. The study reached a number of results, the most important of which are: The results showed that there is a high level of efficiency of marketing services in Palestine (...) Cellular Communications Company (Jawwal) with a relative weight (91.63%). The results showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the efficiency of marketing services according to the gender variable in favor of males. The study made a number of recommendations, the most important of which are: Attention to the use of electronic publishing means to motivate beneficiaries to receive the company's services. Increase the confidence of the beneficiaries in the company's services by offering competitive campaigns that meet the needs of the beneficiaries. (shrink)

With contributions from leading experts across disciplinary fields, this book explores best practices from the field's most notable researchers, as well as important historically based and politically focused challenges to a field whose impact has reached an important crossroads. The comprehensive and powerfully critical analysis considers the history of community engagement and service learning, best teaching practices and pedagogies, engagement across disciplines, and current research and policies - and contemplates the future of the field. The book will not (...) only inform faculty, staff, and students on ways to improve their work, but also suggest a bigger social and political focus for programs intended to seriously establish democracy and social justice in their communities and campuses. (shrink)

Examining alumni perspectives from three multi-term service-learning programs, this study highlights the dimensions of the cohort experience that alumni credit as critical to their learning and dev...

Commercial genetic testing offered over the internet, known as direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTC GT), currently is under ethical attack. A common critique aims at the limited validation of the tests as well as the risk of psycho-social stress or adaption of incorrect behavior by users triggered by misleading health information. Here, we examine in detail the specific role of advertising communication of DTC GT companies from a medical ethical perspective. Our argumentative analysis departs from the starting point that DTC GT (...) operates at the intersection of two different contexts: medicine on the one hand and the market on the other. Both fields differ strongly with regard to their standards of communication practices and the underlying normative assumptions regarding autonomy and responsibility. Following a short review of the ethical contexts of medical and commercial communication, we provide case examples for persuasive messages of DTC GT websites and briefly analyze their design with a multi-modal approach to illustrate some of their problematic implications. We observe three main aspects in DTC GT advertising communication: (1) the use of material suggesting medical professional legitimacy as a trust-establishing tool, (2) the suggestion of empowerment as a benefit of using DTC GT services and (3) the narrative of responsibility as a persuasive appeal to a moral self-conception. While strengthening and respecting the autonomy of a patient is the focus in medical communication, specifically genetic counselling, persuasive communication is the normal mode in marketing of consumer goods, presuming an autonomous, rational, independent consumer. This creates tension in the context of DTC GT regarding the expectation and normative assessment of communication strategies. Our analysis can even the ground for a better understanding of ethical problems associated with intersections of medical and commercial communication and point to perspectives of analysis of DTC GT advertising. (shrink)

Health communication is increasingly being held to higher moral standards. No longer do noble goals outweigh ethical concerns. This content analysis examines ethical frames and primes in health public service announcements so we may begin to address the most prevalent of the problematic ones and find more ethical alternatives. In this study, 80% of the PSAs conveyed messages that individuals were to blame. Negative emotion, such as fear, was the second most frequent frame. Stereotypes of women were the primes (...) most prevalent in the visuals, and visual and verbal messages were vastly different for some of these primes. The ethical implications of each are addressed. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas, a twentieth century French Continental philosopher, proposed an original understanding of ethics which has serious implications for the particular activities within higher education designated as service learning and community service. First I will define service learning and community service and briefly review the theoretical and philosophical justifications typically employed to substantiate and ground these activities within higher education. Next, I will explicate key aspects from Levinas’ ethical philosophy important for reconceptualizing service (...) learning, and discuss their significance for related concerns in higher education about language and justice. Finally, in light of these considerations, I will suggest the profound implications of a Levinasian conception of service for higher education. (shrink)

BackgroundInternationally, clinical ethics support has yet to be implemented systematically in community health and care services. A large-scale Norwegian project attempted to increase ethical competence in community services through facilitating the implementation of ethics support activities in 241 Norwegian municipalities. The article describes the ethics project and the ethics activities that ensued.MethodsThe article first gives an account of the Norwegian ethics project. Then the results of two online questionnaires are reported, characterizing the scope, activities and organization of the (...) ethics activities in the Norwegian municipalities and the ethical topics addressed.ResultsOne hundred and thirty-seven municipal contact persons answered the first survey, whereas 217 ethics facilitators from 48 municipalities responded to the second. The Norwegian ethics project is vast in scope, yet has focused on some institutions and professions whilst seldom reaching others. Patients and next of kin were very seldom involved. Through the ethics project employees discussed many important ethical challenges, in particular related to patient autonomy, competence to consent, and cooperation with next of kin. The “ethics reflection group” was the most common venue for ethics deliberation.ConclusionsThe Norwegian project is the first of its kind and scope, and other countries may learn from the Norwegian experiences. Professionals have discussed central ethical dilemmas, the handling of which arguably makes a difference for patients/users and service quality. The study indicates that large scale implementation of CES structures for the municipal health and care services is complex, yet feasible. (shrink)

Customer engagement behavior is a critical success factor for community e-commerce. While many community e-commerce websites are currently improving service quality to enhance customer engagement behavior, little is known about how such e-services affect customer engagement behavior. Building upon the stimulus-organism-response model, this study developed a research model to explain how e-service quality of community e-commerce platform affects customer engagement behavior through customer trust and perceived risk. The research model was empirically evaluated by surveying 326 (...) customers who have shopped through the community e-commerce platforms. The results indicate that e-service quality positively affects customer engagement behavior. Besides, customer trust and perceived risk play a mediating role between e-service quality and customer engagement behavior. This study offers recommendations to managers on how to build an attractive community e-commerce platform to stimulate customer engagement behavior. (shrink)

A specific issue for argumentation theory is whether information and communication technologies play any role in governing argument — that is, as parties engage in practical activities across space and time via ICTs, does technology matter for the interplay of argumentative content and process in managing disagreement? The case made here is that technologies do matter because they are not merely conduits of communication but have a role in the pragmatics of communication and argumentation. In particular, ICTs should be recognized (...) as communication-information services that are delegated degrees of responsibility for managing disagreements arising from practical activities. These services are organized around practical theories for designing disagreement space. However, recognizing this relationship between argument and technology requires accounting for procedures, techniques, or rules and speech acts that are not argumentative propositions in any strict sense but that are consequential for what becomes argumentation in any setting. An account about designing disagreement space, grounded in Jackson and Jacobs’s theory of Disagreement Management, is put forward to address these issues while more generally contributing to understanding argument in context. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe massive influx of refugees into Europe in the past few years has given rise to different kinds of challenges among which is the challenge to successfully communicate with newly arrived immigrants. In this article, we will focus on the public service provision sector where quality of service is to a large extent determined by the capability of a service provider and his or her “client” to understand one another. The article centres on a study involving public (...) organisations providing asylum services or healthcare services in the multilingual and multicultural city of Brussels. Several interviews were conducted to gain insight into the communication problems such organisations face, as well as their communication requirements and solutions when providing services to people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. We will focus on the types of bridging functions commonly deployed by these organisations in multilingual service encounters and on the motivations for using them. In a... (shrink)

Background Families whose child has unexplained intellectual or developmental differences often hope that a genetic diagnosis will lower barriers to community-based therapeutic and support services. However, there is little known about efforts to mobilize genetic information outside the clinic or how socioeconomic disadvantage shapes and constrains outcomes.Methods We conducted an ethnographic study with predominantly socioeconomically disadvantaged families enrolled in a multi-year genomics research study, including clinic observations and in-depth interviews in English and Spanish at multiple time points. Coding and (...) thematic development were used to collaboratively interpret fieldnotes and transcripts.Results Thirty-two families participated. Themes included familial expectations that a genetic diagnosis could be translated into information, understanding, and assistance to improve the quality of a child’s day-to-day life. After sequencing, however, genetic information was not readily converted into improved access to services beyond the clinic, with families often struggling to use a genetic diagnosis to advocate for their child.Conclusion Families’ ability to use a genetic diagnosis as an effective advocacy tool beyond the clinic was limited by the knowledge and resources available to them, and by the eligibility criteria used by therapeutic service providers’ – which focused on clinical diagnosis and functional criteria more than etiologic information. All families undertaking genomic testing, particularly those who are disadvantaged, need additional support to understand the limits and potential benefits of genetic information beyond the clinic. (shrink)

In 1989 the Oregon Legislature voted not to wait any longer for national leaders to serve up a solution to the problem of the millions of Americans (450,000 in Oregon) who are uninsured for health care. Under the leadership of Senator John Kitzhaber, President of the Oregon Senate, the lawmakers put together a package of bills designed to bring every Oregonian the security of third party financing for needed health care. The Oregon Plan's key innovation is the idea that, from (...) a societal perspective, some health services can be declared more important than others. From that central idea came the thought that the whole range of health services could be arrayed to reflect social priorities relevant to Medicaid budgeting and the design of new health insurance programs for “the uninsured.”. (shrink)

Internet technology has given birth to continuous changes in business model and format innovation. With increasingly critical consumers, blowout development model and format innovation, enterprises are increasingly aware of the importance of customer participation in service innovation. At the same time, the development of information technology provides convenient conditions for communication between enterprises and customers, and online virtual community also provides a platform for customers to participate in the process of enterprise service innovation in an instant. Based (...) on the theory of customer participation, knowledge transfer and service innovation performance, this paper explores the influence mechanism of customer participation in virtual community on service innovation performance, and analyzes the mediating role of knowledge transfer. Through the analysis of the results of the questionnaire, the relevant hypotheses are verified. The results show that customer participation in virtual community has a positive impact on service innovation performance. Customer participation helps enterprises obtain relevant knowledge such as customer needs and reduce barriers to knowledge sharing. In addition, enterprises will acquire customer knowledge about new products, which provides the possibility for the development of new products and services, thereby enhancing the enterprises’ service innovation performance. Knowledge transfer plays a part of mediating role between customer participation and service innovation performance. In the process of enterprises’ service innovation, customers mainly participate in the enterprise by means of knowledge transfer and help the enterprise improve service innovation performance. (shrink)

Objectives: To assess whether according to healthcare providers, the creation of an ethics service responds to a need; assess the importance of an ethics service for healthcare providers; determine what ethics services should be offered and the preferred formats of delivery; and identify key issues to be initially dealt with by the ethics service.Design: A survey of healthcare providers in Québec’s Centre Local de Services Communautaires , healthcare institutions dedicated to community health and social services.Findings: 96 (...) respondents agreed that an ethics service was needed, and on average the ethics service project was judged to be very important. Preferred formats for ethics consultation and education were identified, as well as key concerns such as the need of respect for the patient as a person, elder abuse and ethical issues in home care.Conclusion: This survey is helping in the implementation of an ethics service and can guide others in similar healthcare institutions. (shrink)

Uncertainty, insufficient information or information of poor quality, limited cognitive capacity and time, along with value conflicts and ethical considerations, are all aspects thatmake risk managementand riskcommunication difficult. This paper provides a review of different risk concepts and describes how these influence risk management, communication and planning in relation to forest ecosystem services. Based on the review and results of empirical studies, we suggest that personal assessment of risk is decisive in the management of forest ecosystem services. The results are (...) used together with a reviewof different principles of the distribution of risk to propose an approach to risk communication that is effective aswell as ethically sound. Knowledge of heuristics and mutual information on both beliefs and desires are important in the proposed risk communication approach. Such knowledge provides an opportunity for relevant information exchange, so that gaps in personal knowledge maps can be filled in and effective risk communication can be promoted. (shrink)

Words can mean different things to different people. This can be problematic, mainly for those working together in a bureaucratic institution, such as the secret service. Shared, certified, explicit and codified definitions offer a counter to subjective, solitary and/or culturally dominant definitions. It’s true that codified secrecy terms for secret services can be seen to involve a number of political, cultural, subcultural “languages”, but if words come from unclassified or declassified files, memorandums and/or records, one needs a deep understanding (...) of the secret services. A remarkable feature of this bureaucratic language is the evolving nature of, certain “keywords” as important signifiers of historical transformation. Thus, the changes in the language of the secret services depends at least as much on the internal changes of the secret services as on the transformation in the external political-social environment. In spite of the confusion of Hungarian secret services in the revolutions of 1918–1919 and the disintegration of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, in the early 1920’s became a stable system. Between the two World Wars, the Hungarian State Police directed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Military Intelligence and Counter-Espionage directed by the Ministry of Defence, and the Hungarian Royal Gendarmerie directed by both of the Ministries had their own operational service. This structure existed unchanged until 1945. Simultaneously with the forward advance of the soviet troops, government began to re-establish the former system of the secret services in the eastern part of the country. After WWII, in 1946, the “State-protection Department” as political police became independent from the police. However, from the beginning, they remained under the control of the Communist Party. After 1950, the State Security Authority provided special services for the MIA and the Military Political Directorate of the MoD. After quashing the revolution in 1956, in the spring of 1957, the MIA Political Investigation Department was established which—with slight modifications—kept the structure created during the “state protection era”. The MIA III. The State-Protection General Directorate was established in 1962. The reorganization was finalized in the middle of the 1960’s, which resulted in the new system, which—with the structure of Directorates—became the ultimate structure of the state secret police until the abolishment of the MIA General Directorate III in January 1990. These organizational transformations were largely the result of exogenous historical-political changes. Moreover, each new period had a major impact on the organizational communication, language use and vocabulary of the secret services. This study seeks to interpret these historical transformations. (shrink)

In enhancement ethics, evolutionary theory has been largely perceived as supporting liberal views on enhancement, where decisions to enhance are predominantly regulated by the principle of individual autonomy. In this paper I critique this perception in light of recent scientific developments. Cultural evolutionary theory suggests a picture where individual interests are entangled with community interests, and this undermines the applicability of the principle of autonomy. This is particularly relevant for enhancement ethics, given how – I argue – decisions to (...) enhance are often influenced by desires to increase social status. The “service view on enhancement”, based on principles of service and trust, is proposed as offering better guidance for the challenges of social living. (shrink)

Community treatment orders are a legal mechanism to extend powers of compulsion into outpatient mental health settings in certain circumstances. Previous ethical analyses of these powers have explored a perceived tension between a duty to respect personal freedoms and autonomy and a duty to ensure that patients with the most complex needs are able to receive beneficial care and support that maximises their welfare in the longer-term. This empirical ethics paper presents an analysis of 75 interviews with psychiatrists, patients (...) and family carers to show how these ethical considerations map onto the different ways that community treatment orders are used and experienced in practice. A complex and nuanced account of how the requirements to respect patients’ autonomy, to respect patients’ liberty and to act beneficently should be interpreted in order to make judgements about the ethics of community treatment orders is presented. The article argues that, due to such complexity, no general ethical justification for community treatment orders can be provided, but a justification on the basis of the promotion of patients’ autonomy could provide an ethical reason for community mental health practitioners to make use of a community treatment order in some limited circumstances. (shrink)