Details the intellectual development of George Herbert Mead as a thinker of great originality and as a practitioner of social reform.

Prior research has demonstrated that accountants differ from the general population on many personality traits. Understanding accountants’ personality traits is important when these characteristics may impact professional behavior or ability to work with members of the business community. Our study investigates the relationship between Machiavellianism, ethical orientation, anti-intellectualism, and social desirability response bias in Canadian accountants. We find that Canadian accountants score much higher on the Machiavellianism scale than U.S. accountants. Additionally, our results show a significant relationship between Machiavellianism and (...) relativism, idealism, anti-intellectualism, and social desirability response bias. Our results indicate that professional Canadian accountants may not share the same personality characteristics as U.S. accountants. We extend previous research investigating Canadian accountants, by explicitly recognizing the impact of social desirability response bias, and by including anti-intellectualism. (shrink)

Debates about new technologies, such as crop and food genetic modification, raise pressing questions about the ways ‘experts’ and ‘ nonexperts’ communicate. These debates are dynamic, characterized by many voices contesting numerous storylines. The discoursal features, including language choices and communication strategies, of the GM debate are in some ways taken for granted and in others actively manipulated by participants. Although there are many voices, some have more influence than others. This study makes use of 50 hours of in-depth interviews (...) with GM scientists, nonexperts, and other stakeholders in the GM debate to examine this phenomenon. We uncover rhetorical devices used by scientists to characterize and ultimately undermine participation by non-experts in areas including rationality, knowledge, understanding and objectivity. Scientists engage with ‘the public’ from their own linguistic and social domain, without reflexive confirmation of their own status as part of the public and the citizenry. This raises a number of interesting ironies and contradictions, which are explored in the article. As such, it provides valuable insights into an increasingly important type of discourse. (shrink)

The legal requirements and justifications for collecting patient-identifiable data without patient consent were examined. The impetus for this arose from legal and ethical issues raised during the development of a population-based disease register. Numerous commentaries and case studies have been discussing the impact of the Data Protection Act 1998 and Caldicott principles of good practice on the uses of personal data. But uncertainty still remains about the legal requirements for processing patient-identifiable data without patient consent for research purposes. This is (...) largely owing to ignorance, or misunderstandings of the implications of the common law duty of confidentiality and section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2001. The common law duty of confidentiality states that patient-identifiable data should not be provided to third parties, regardless of compliance with the DPA1998. It is an obligation derived from case law, and is open to interpretation. Compliance with section 60 ensures that collection of patient-identifiable data without patient consent is lawful despite the duty of confidentiality. Fears regarding the duty of confidentiality have resulted in a common misconception that section 60 must be complied with. Although this is not the case, section 60 support does provide the most secure basis in law for collecting such data. Using our own experience in developing a disease register as a backdrop, this article will clarify the procedures, risks and potential costs of applying for section 60 support. (shrink)

Debates about new technologies, such as crop and food genetic modification, raise pressing questions about the ways ‘experts’ and ‘ nonexperts’ communicate. These debates are dynamic, characterized by many voices contesting numerous storylines. The discoursal features, including language choices and communication strategies, of the GM debate are in some ways taken for granted and in others actively manipulated by participants. Although there are many voices, some have more influence than others. This study makes use of 50 hours of in-depth interviews (...) with GM scientists, nonexperts, and other stakeholders in the GM debate to examine this phenomenon. We uncover rhetorical devices used by scientists to characterize and ultimately undermine participation by non-experts in areas including rationality, knowledge, understanding and objectivity. Scientists engage with ‘the public’ from their own linguistic and social domain, without reflexive confirmation of their own status as part of the public and the citizenry. This raises a number of interesting ironies and contradictions, which are explored in the article. As such, it provides valuable insights into an increasingly important type of discourse. (shrink)

This article reports the findings of a one-year project examining British press coverage of the genetically modified food debate during the first half of 2003, and both expert and non-expert reactions to that coverage. Two pro-GM newspapers and two anti-GM newspapers were selected for analysis, and all articles mentioning GM during the period in question were stored in a machine readable database. This was then analyzed using corpus linguistic and discourse analytic techniques to reveal recurrent wording, themes and content. This (...) text analysis was complemented by 12 interviews with experts involved in the communication of GM issues, and 12 focus-group sessions in which members of the public reacted to selected newspaper texts and other GM material. Both in the press and in public reaction, the issue of GM was found to be intimately associated with other political events of the time, notably the invasion of Iraq. Except among experts, there was little awareness of the official national debate and issues were approached in more general terms. Pro-GM characterization of the issues as primarily scientific, both by newspapers and experts, was rejected by the anti-GM press and campaigners, and by the focus-group participants. They assessed the issues in a more global frame, rejecting scientists and companies as unreliable. In addition, they linked both US and British GM policy to the invasion of Iraq, and, by analogy, rejected pro-GM arguments as untrustworthy. (shrink)

The difficulties faced in the recruitment and retention of nursing staff in nursing homes for older people are an international challenge. It is therefore essential that the causes of nurses’ reluctance to work in these settings are determined. This paper considers the influence that multiple‐source care funding issues have on nursing home nurses’ experiences and views regarding the practice and appeal of the role. The methodology for this study was hermeneutic phenomenology. Thirteen nurses from seven nursing homes in the North (...) East of England were interviewed in a sequence of up to five interviews and data were analysed using a literary analysis method. Findings indicate that participants are uncomfortable with the business aspects that funding issues bring to their role. The primary difficulties faced are: tensions between care issues and funding issues; challenges associated with ‘selling beds’; and coping with self‐funding residents’ changing expectations of care. The findings of the study suggest that multiple‐source care funding systems that operate in nursing homes for older people pose challenges to nursing home nurses. Some of these challenges may impact on their recruitment and retention. (shrink)

While rooted in careful study of Mead’s original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context in which that work was carried out, the papers in this volume have brought Mead’s work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy.

This chapter contains sections titled: Mead's Published Writings Mead and the Functionalism of the Early Chicago School Social Psychological Theories Moral Consciousness and Moral Reasoning Social Pragmatism.

Since the growth cone was first described a century ago by Cajal, considerable effort has been directed towards understanding the mechanisms responsible for its guidance. Traditionally, attention has focussed on the role of adhesive molecules in determining neural development. Recently, it has become apparent that inhibitory interactions may play a crucial part in axonal navigation. A common feature of inhibition seen in three model systems (peripheral nerve segmentation, retinotectal mapping and CNS/PNS segregation) is a collapse of the motile structures of (...) the growth cone. It is increasingly clear that the identification of molecular mechanisms of inhibition, as well as those of adhesion, will be of fundamental importance to understanding neural development. (shrink)

Source attributions based on positive versus negative valence were examined in four experiments. The two sources were individuals who were depicted positively or negatively, and the content of their statements was similarly valenced. When valenced information about the sources was provided after learning the statements, test biases to attribute positive statements to the positive source and negative statements to the negative source were strongly present. Providing the same information prior to learning improved memory, but did not entirely eliminate test biases (...) based on valence. Signal detection analysis suggests that these “halo effect” biases are criterion-based and not memory-based. Therefore, the results are more consistent with descriptions of source-monitoring processes that can benefit from familiarity-based partial information as opposed to descriptions in which source monitoring is primarily recollection-based. (shrink)