In settler-colonial Canada, the state does not receive Indigenous testimony as credible evidence. While the state often accepts Indigenous testimony in formal hearings, the state fundamentally rejects Indigenous evidence as a description of the world as it is, as an onto-epistemology. In other words, the Indigenous worldview formation, while it functions as a knowledge system that knows and predicts life, is not admitted to regulatory discussions about effects of resource extraction projects on life. Particularly in such resource-extraction review hearings, partly (...) for obvious reasons of ecological ethics, there is no space for Indigenous relational-ontology. I theorize that beyond racism, white supremacy, and greed, settler-colonial onto-epistemological structures are structured to systematically eliminate the potential for relational-ontologies. This exclusion is complementary to resource-extractivist and legal positivist procedures and is biased against Indigenous knowledge and knowledge-sharing procedures; it is a crisis of state integrity and is philosophically unsound. In my analysis of Canadian National Energy Board documents, I ferret out some of these structures that de facto discredit Indigenous onto-epistemologies; I propose this fundamental problem of the Canadian settler-colonial state must be recognized and changed if the calls of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation commission are to be met. (shrink)

The law often calls on the concept of public interest for assistance. Privacy law makes use of this concept in several ways, including to justify consent waivers for secondary research on health information. Because the law sees information privacy as a means for individuals to control their personal information, consent can only be set aside in special circumstances. Ballantyne and Schaefer argue that only public interest, and only a broad conception of public interest, can do the special ‘normative justificatory work’ (...) to override consent requirements. Other, similar-sounding concepts, such as public benefit, public good and social value, also provide useful services. But none more so than public interest. In fact, they argue, public interest is the superior concept precisely because it can capture those concepts as well as a range of other interests. Our response focuses on this claim. We argue their strategy is not as promising as it might first seem. Ballantyne and Schaefer construe the important role that public interest plays in this context as their endpoint. They claim that unless the concept is open and content-rich, it will lose some of its importance. But by refusing to place limits around it, their inquiry leads us back to a catch-all concept that lacks clear focus or meaning. In reply, we argue that, for practically minded theorists, a narrow conception of public interest is more useful. Further, the narrowing of public interest in this context can be achieved by first analysing it in its legal, rather than ethical, sense. (shrink)

Changes in technological and economic aspects of society have impacted on how we understand professional and client relationships. These relationships are constructed in terms of patients/users requiring care, and customers whose complaints have become a yardstick of satisfaction. A consequence of these changes is an interest in the related concepts of emotional labour and emotion work. For nurses, caring for people in illness and in health is central to their work, and it is this aspect of emotion at work that (...) distinguishes nursing from other occupational groups. This paper is concerned with emotion work in a National Health Service Direct (NHS Direct) call centre in the United Kingdom. Drawing upon theoretical perspectives from organizational psychology and sociology it focuses upon the social processes that narrate emotion events in a specific context. It is based on a qualitative study exploring the experience and emotion work of nurses working in a call centre. Issues in caring without the face‐to‐face contact using communication technology were crucial to the way nurses perceived their work. These factors contributed to nurses’ orientation to work and to the way that conflict and dissonance with expectations of callers and managers impacted on nurses’ emotion work. (shrink)

The philosopher Graham Harman argues that contemporary debates about the nature of reality as such, and about the nature of objects in particular, can be meaningfully applied to social theory and practice. With Immaterialism, he has recently provided a case-based demonstration of how this could happen. But social theorists have compelling reasons to oppose object-oriented social theory’s 15 principles. Fidelity to Harman’s aesthetic foundationalism, and his particular use of serial endosymbiosis theory as a mechanism of social change, constrain the very (...) practices which it is supposed to enable. However, social theory stands to benefit from object-oriented philosophy through what we call posthuman relationism – characterised as a commitment to the reality of the nonhuman, but not divorced from the human. The emphasis in object-oriented social theory on how objects withdraw from cognitive or affective capture and representation needs to be tempered by an equal focus on how objects appeal. (shrink)

Patient and public involvement is widely thought to be important in the improvement of health care delivery and in health equity. Purpose: The article examines the role of experiential knowledge in service co-production in order to develop opiate substitution treatment services (OST) for high-risk opioid users. Method: Drawing on social representations theory and the concept of social identity, we explore how experts’ by experience and registered nurses’ understandings of OST contain discourses about the social representations, identity, and citizenship of the (...) participants and the effects these may have on developing or hindering inclusive and bottom-up forms of patient and public involvement. Results: The meeting sessions that potentially offer room for creativity and problem-solving fail to provide any new propositions for fixing the system. The health care professionals primarily identify themselves as regulators who protect the correctness of their actions and show little interest in considering experiential knowledge on opioid addiction. Conclusion: The participation of patients has been one of the prominent reforms implemented in health care. The goal of client-centered thinking is often emphasised; however, the implementation is not simple due to the strongly institutionalised knowledge and related working patterns and practices in health care. (shrink)

This article brings together two concepts, ‘phantom fat’ and ‘liminal fat’, which both aim to grasp how fat in contemporary culture becomes a kind of material immateriality, corporeality in suspension. Comparing the spheres of representation and experience, we examine the challenges and usefulness of these concepts, and feminist fat studies perspectives more broadly, to feminist scholarship on the body. We ask what connects and disconnects fat corporeality and fat studies from ways of theorising other embodied differences, like gender, ‘race’, disability, (...) class and sexuality, especially when thinking through their perceived mutability or removability, and assumptions about their relevance for subjectivity. While it is important to consider corporeality and selfhood as malleable and open to change in order to mobilise oppressive normativities around gendered bodies and selves, we argue that more attention should also be paid to the persistence of corporeality and a feeling of a relatively stable self, and the potential for empowerment in not engaging with or idealising continuous transformation and becoming. Furthermore, we suggest that the concepts of phantom fat and liminal fat can help shed light on some problematic ways in which feminist studies have approached – or not approached – questions of fat corporeality in relation to the politics of health and bodily appearance. Questions of weight, when critically interrogated together with other axes of difference, highlight how experiential and subjugated knowledges, as well as critical inquiry of internal prejudices, must remain of continued key importance to feminist projects. (shrink)

The philosopher Graham Harman argues that contemporary debates about the nature of reality as such, and about the nature of objects in particular, can be meaningfully applied to social theory and practice. With Immaterialism, he has recently provided a case-based demonstration of how this could happen. But social theorists have compelling reasons to oppose object-oriented social theory’s 15 principles. Fidelity to Harman’s aesthetic foundationalism, and his particular use of serial endosymbiosis theory as a mechanism of social change, constrain the very (...) practices which it is supposed to enable. However, social theory stands to benefit from object-oriented philosophy through what we call posthuman relationism – characterised as a commitment to the reality of the nonhuman, but not divorced from the human. The emphasis in object-oriented social theory on how objects withdraw from cognitive or affective capture and representation needs to be tempered by an equal focus on how objects appeal. (shrink)

This monograph reports on an empirical survey of 394 secondary school students investigating their desire to seek the meaning of their own lives. The theoretical framework upon which the study was based is that of Viktor E. Frankl's hypotheses that a human being wants to seek the meaning in his own life. The questionnaire consisted of tests measuring pupils' concepts of their own life's purposes, significance, and meaningfulness. Questions dealt with values and attitudes toward existential questions. Pupils could also evaluate (...) significance of school subjects in the the search for their own life's meaning. Initial results gave clear indication that students reflect quite a lot on the meaning of life, and most think that topics and questions dealing with existential questions should be addressed at school. Responses to open-ended questions on what they expected from school revealed that students asked for warmer and closer human relationships, more communication, more taking into account of individuality, more opportunity for choices, more support and encouragement, and more knowledge that has meaning for their personal life. The questionnaire is appended. (JD). (shrink)

Environmental chemicals accumulate in all human bodies and have the potential to affect the health of men and women, adults, and children. This article advances “precautionary consumption”—the effort to mediate personal exposure to environmental chemicals through vigilant consumption—as a new empirical site for understanding the intersections between maternal embodiment and contemporary motherhood as a consumer project. Using in-depth interviews, I explore how a group of 25 mothers employ precautionary consumption to mediate their children’s exposure to chemicals found in food, consumer (...) products, and the home. Most of the mothers in the study situate their children’s chemical “burdens” within their own bodies and undertake the labor of precautionary consumption as part of a larger and commodity-based motherhood project. In actively expanding the sphere of responsible motherhood to include managing children’s body burdens, these mothers navigate multiple and overlapping contexts that hold women accountable for children’s futures and value the agency of the proactive consumer. Yet, as the sphere of responsible mothering expands, women without financial resources, time, and family stability are pushed to the margins of normative motherhood. (shrink)

Feminist bioethics is a relatively new field, the major works in which only started to appear in the late 1980s. At first feminist bioethicists focused mainly on issues of particular concern to women such as reproduction. Recently, papers have begun to appear that show that a feminist analysis can be brought to bear on any subject traditional bioethics discusses. So far, however, feminist bioethics has not been brought to bear on psychiatry. There have been feminist critiques of psychiatry and feminist (...) discussions of certain diagnostic categories that disproportionately affect women, but these are concerned with womens issues within psychiatry and how psychiatry has been used to oppress women. Certainly these are important, but what has been missing is a discussion of psychiatry in the sense that feminist bioethics suggests a general critique of psychiatry and the rethinking of the practice of psychiatry, regardless of whether the specific instances involved are womens issues. In this paper I look at what such a feminist bioethical intervention into psychiatry would look like. (shrink)

One of the most provocative projects in recent analytic philosophy has been the development of the doctrine of externalism, or, as it is often called, anti-individualism. While there is no agreement as to whether externalism is true or not, a number of recent investigations have begun to explore the question of what follows if it is true. One of the most interesting of these investigations thus far has been the question of whether externalism has consequences for the doctrine that we (...) have authoritative, a priori self-knowledge of our mental states. The selected works presented in this volume, some previously published, some new, are representative of this debate and open up new questions and issues for philosophical investigation, including the connection between externalism, self-knowledge, epistemic warrant, and memory. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers advocate expansion of philosophical methods to include empirical investigation into the concepts used by ordinary people in reasoning and action. We propose also including methods of qualitative social science, which we argue serve both moral and epistemic goals. Philosophical analytical tools applied to interdisciplinary research designs can provide ways to extract rich contextual information from subjects. We argue that this approach has important implications for bioethics; it provides both epistemic and moral reasons to use the experiences and perspectives (...) of diverse populations to better identify underlying concepts as well as to develop effective interventions within particular communities. (shrink)

Care for patients with multiple illnesses is often provided by several professionals from different parts of the health care system. In these cases, there seem to arise new demands for the communication and the cooperation between different professionals in the primary and the specialized care. In this paper, I shall describe how these challenges are met in an encounter which is a part of interventions called “Implementation Laboratories”. In these encounters, a new tool (care agreement) and a new practice (care (...) negotiation) are introduced and elaborated in internal-medicine patient care. I conceptualized the Implementation Laboratories as “border zones” where the learning processes between different communities are intensified. Learning in the Implementation Laboratories resembles learning at the Boundary Crossing Laboratory described by Engeström, Engeström &Vähäaho (1999a; 1999b). It is interwoven into the process of analyzing problems, planning and testing of solutions in order to improve the medical patient care. Learning appears as collisions between the different perspectives of the patient and professionals of different organizations, and may sometimes lead to reconstruction of boundaries. (shrink)

The care of patients with many illnesses often appears fragmented by many boundaries in the health care system when the care is provided in several locations of primary and secondary care. In the article, boundaries are examined in an interaction between patients and multiple providers in an effort to develop collaboration in inter-organizational provision in a Change Laboratory intervention. Firstly, it will be traced how the boundaries are expressed in the interaction. Secondly, it will be studied how the boundaries expressed (...) in the interaction relate to health care organizations and patient care practices. Thirdly, the practical activity that was embedded in the interaction between patients and providers will be focused on at the laboratory. The expression of boundaries was examined in activity theoretical terms as discursive actions. In discursive actions the ‘lived past’ becomes involved in the situational actions that orient towards future activity. The findings suggest that expressing boundaries uses various linguistic means and it seems relevant to propose that boundaries cannot be studied in a formal way; the analysis needs to be related to the organizational context of the specific study. However, the linguistic means may serve as useful “landmarks” or “pointers” of boundaries that are often expressed implicitly in the interaction. The laboratory session provides an opportunity to study boundaries “on the spot”, or “in their own right”. The realization of the emergent inter-organizational care at the session created challenges for the provision while contradicting some elements of the prevailing provision. During these kinds of interaction, the boundaries between providers became obvious. Furthermore, challenging the boundaries in the normal flow of interaction may be a potential for boundary crossing and even further, a re-constitution of boundaries. Consequently, a boundary crossing represents an interesting unit of analysis for future studies of boundaries and boundary crossing in interaction and discourse. At the laboratory setting was displayed the ability to control others through an indirect use of power that may reflect a simultaneous value system supported by the prevailing hierarchies. In the studies to come, it will be important to pay attention to these implicit power linkages when monitoring the boundaries in horizontal collaborations. (shrink)

Obesity is a public health problem influenced by behavioral patterns that span an ecological spectrum of individual-level factors, social network factors and environmental factors. Both individual and environmental approaches necessarily include significant influences from social networks, but how and under what conditions social networks influence behavior change is often not clearly mapped out either in the obesity literature or in many intervention designs. In this paper, we provide an analysis of recent empirical work in obesity research that explicates social network (...) influences on eating behaviors. We argue that a relational rather than individualistic view of personhood should help us better understand the content and context of social network relations that inform health behavior choices. We introduce the concept of ‘identity-constitutive affiliations’ as the glue that binds these social relationships together. Finally, we outline the implications for public health ethics in the development of effective interventions to address overweight and obesity, leveraging the content and context of social network ties to reinforce healthy (or alter unhealthy) eating. More complex treatment of positive and negative behaviors stemming from social network connections should lead to more comprehensive theoretical models of health behavior change and more effective public health interventions. (shrink)

The study provides insights on why large Finnish municipalities are engaging in sustainability reporting. The dataset consists of the sustainability disclosures of five large Finnish cities and of a set of interviews conducted with the personnel responsible for composing the sustainability reports in these cities. Preliminary findings suggest that this rising practice is again an example of a fad, arising as the public sector organizations mimic the corporate sector without anyone really pondering whether the municipalities and the public sector as (...) a whole truly need a similar practice the corporations have. We maintain that there are better ways to use a municipality’s scarce resources than imitating the corporate sustainability reporting practices through producing a sustainability report, the main task of which seems to be to exist. (shrink)

"Active intervention" with suicidal callers to telephone crisis lines involves breaking confidentiality by dispatching emergency services, typically the police, to a suicidal person without that person's consent and sometimes without his or her knowledge.1 Those who oppose active intervention often refer to it as "nonvoluntary intervention." Active intervention is rapidly becoming the standard of practice for crisis centers and is required for certification by the American Association of Suicidology (AAS), the primary organization that certifies telephone crisis centers. A policy of (...) active intervention is also required for any crisis center affiliated with the Hope Line and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline .. (shrink)

“Active intervention” with suicidal callers to telephone crisis lines involves breaking confidentiality by dispatching emergency services, typically the police, to a suicidal person without that person’s consent and sometimes without his or her knowledge. In this paper I am concerned with the issue of whether active intervention is ethically justified from a feminist bioethical perspective, and if so, under what conditions.

This paper discusses and provides a tentative model of a firm for purposes of accounting. The paper first presents the neo-classical capital circulation model of the firm—a model that has been an integral part of Finnish business economics and accounting education for at least half a century. During the same period the stakeholder model has become an alternative model of the firm in Scandinavia. These models have represented two alternatives to define the firm in education. In this paper we try (...) to combine these two models to provide a more comprehensive picture of the firm, especially from the accounting education perspective. An earlier version of this model was presented in 1995 in a book edited by Juha Näsi. Stakeholders with business transactions were seen to be crucial to firms and were categorized as primary in the 1995 model. In addition to stakeholders, a number of stakeholder issues were illustrated in the stakeholder model serving accounting as an educational framework. In this paper the earlier model has been updated, taking into account the current globalization and other developments in the business world. (shrink)

The increase in ethnically and linguistically diverse older adults in Canada necessitates attention to their experiences and needs for healthy ageing. Arab immigrant women often report challenges in maintaining health, but little is known about their ageing experiences. This interpretive descriptive study uses a transnational life course framework to understand Arab Muslim immigrant women's experiences of engaging in health‐promoting practices as they age in Canada. Women's stories highlight social dimensions of health such social connectedness, social roles and social support that (...) are constructed and maintained within different migration contexts across the life course. Barriers and facilitators to healthy ageing in this population centred around five themes: (i) the necessity of staying strong, (ii) caring for self while caring for others, (iii) double jeopardy of chronic illnesses and loneliness, (iv) inadequate support within large social networks and (v) navigating access to health‐supporting resources. The findings point to transnational connections and post‐migration social support as major influencers in creating facilitators and barriers to healthy ageing for Arab Muslim immigrant women. (shrink)

Understanding the relationship between obesity and fast food consumption encompasses a broad range of individual level and environmental factors. One theoretical approach, the health capability framework, focuses on the complex set of conditions allowing individuals to be healthy. This qualitative study aimed to identify factors that influence individual level health agency with respect to healthy eating choices in uniformly constrained environments. We used an inductive qualitative research design to develop an interview guide, conduct open-ended interviews with a purposive sample of (...) 14 student fast food workers, and analyze the data. Data analysis was conducted iteratively during the study with multiple coders to identify themes. Emergent themes included environmental influences on eating behaviors and internal psychological factors. A localized, embedded approach to analyzing the factors driving the obesity epidemic is needed. Addressing contextual interactions between internal psychological and external environmental factors responds to social justice and public health concerns, and may yield more relevant and effective interventions for vulnerable communities. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a particular emphasis placed on conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that compare the relative efficacy of psychosocial and pharmacological interventions. This article addresses relevant ethical considerations in the conduct of these treatment trials, with a focus on RCTs with children. Ethical concerns, including therapeutic misconception, treatment preference, therapeutic equipoise, structure of treatments, and balancing risks versus benefits, are introduced through a clinical scenario and discussed as they relate to psychotherapy versus medication RCTs. In each (...) case, suggestions are made for researchers seeking to minimize the impact of these ethical concerns on research participants. (shrink)

Substance-abusing women are vulnerable to specific kinds of epistemic injustice, including stigmatization and discrimination. This article examines the development of the epistemic agency of female substance abusers by asking: How does the use of a formal discussion protocol in community rehabilitation interaction alleviate epistemic injustice and strengthen the epistemic agency of substance abusers? The data were collected in a Finnish rehabilitation center by videotaping six group discussions between social workers, peer support workers, and rehabilitation clients with substance abuse problems. Of (...) these data, one recorded group discussion between four female participants—two rehabilitation clients, a peer support worker, and a social adviser—was used in this paper. Using conversational analysis, the findings indicate that, through the collaborative activities of sharing experiential knowledge about substance abuse and discussing the experiences of abuse in the rehabilitation interaction, substance abusers can develop novel ways to strengthen their epistemic agency by enhanced self-awareness. The discussion protocol is an epistemic tool that professionals and clients can learn to use in ethically and epistemologically successful ways in interaction. The use of a discussion protocol is an example of social professionals’ clinical knowledge of intensifying collaboration and sharing experiential knowledge in community rehabilitation and other substance abuse services. (shrink)

BackgroundInstitutional review boards (IRBs) are formally designated to review, approve, and monitor biomedical research. They are responsible for ensuring that researchers comply with the ethical guidelines concerning human research participants. Given that IRBs might face different obstacles that cause delays in their processes or conflicts with investigators, this study aims to report the functions, roles, resources, and review process of IRBs in Saudi Arabia.MethodThis was a cross-sectional self-reported survey conducted from March 2021 to March 2022. The survey was sent to (...) 53 IRB chairpersons and the administration directors (or secretary) across the country through email after receiving verbal consent. The validated survey consisted of eight aspects: (a) organizational aspects, (b) membership and educational training, (c) submission arrangements and materials, (d) minutes, (e) review procedures, (f) communicating a decision, (g) continuing review, and (h) research ethics committee (REC) resources. A total of 200 points indicated optimal IRB functions.ResultsTwenty-six IRBs across Saudi Arabia responded to the survey. Overall, the IRBs in this study scored a total of 150/200 of the points on the self-assessment tool. Relatively newer IRBs (established less than ten years ago) conducted meetings at least once in a month, had annual funding, had more balanced gender representation, tended to score higher than older IRBs. The organizational aspect score was the lowest among all items in the survey (14.3 score difference, p-value < 0.01). The average turnaround time for expedited research from proposal submission to final decision was 7 days, while it was 20.5 days for the full committee review.ConclusionSaudi IRBs performed generally well. However, there is room for focused improvement with respect to extra resources and organizational issues that require closer evaluation and guidance from the regulatory bodies. (shrink)

As pressure to publish increases in the academic nursing world, journal submission numbers and rejection rates are soaring. The review process is crucial to journals in publishing high quality, cutting‐edge knowledge development, and to authors in preparing their papers to a high quality to enable the nursing world to benefit from developments in knowledge that affect nursing practice and patient outcomes and the development of the discipline. This paper does not intend to contribute to the debate regarding the ethics of (...) reviewing, but rather seeks to explore notions of how the quality of the reviewing process can be enhanced to benefit authors, the reviewers, and the state of nursing knowledge. Furthermore, a call is made to editors to devise strategies for aiding reviewers to attain higher validity and reliability within the reviewing process by establishing clear standards and expectations and to ensure published work is judged against industry norms for quality. (shrink)

Nonverbal signals color the meanings of interpersonal relationships. Humans rely on facial, head, postural, and vocal signals to express relational messages along continua. Three of relevance are dominance-submission, composure-nervousness and trust-distrust. Machine learning and new automated analysis tools are making possible a deeper understanding of the dynamics of relational communication. These are explored in the context of group interactions during a game entailing deception. The “messiness” of studying communication under naturalistic conditions creates many measurement and design obstacles that are discussed (...) here. Possibilities for their mitigation are considered. (shrink)

Conscientious objections (CO) can be disruptive in a variety of ways and may disadvantage patients and colleagues who must step-in to assume care. Nevertheless, nurses have a right and responsibility to object to participation in interventions that would seriously harm their sense of integrity. This is an ethical problem of balancing risks and responsibilities related to patient care. Here we explore the problem and propose a nonlinear framework for exploring the authenticity of a claim of CO from the perspective of (...) the nurse and of those who must evaluate such claims. We synthesized the framework using Rest’s Four Component Model of moral reasoning along with tenets of the International Council of Nursing’s (ICN) Code of Ethics for Nurses and insights from relevant ethics and nursing ethics literature. The resulting framework facilitates evaluating potential consequences of a given CO for all involved. We propose that the framework can also serve as an aid for nurse educators as they prepare students for practice. Gaining clarity about the sense in which the concept of conscience provides a defensible foundation for objecting to legally, or otherwise ethically, permissible actions, in any given case is critical to arriving at an ethical and reasonable plan of action. (shrink)

Elephants show a rich social organization and display a number of unusual traits. In this paper, we analyse reports collected over a thirty-five year period, describing behaviour that has the potential to reveal signs of empathic understanding. These include coalition formation, the offering of protection and comfort to others, retrieving and 'babysitting' calves, aiding individuals that would otherwise have difficulty in moving, and removing foreign objects attached to others. These records demonstrate that an elephant is capable of diagnosing animacy and (...) goal directedness, and is able to understand the physical competence, emotional state and intentions of others, when they differ from its own. We argue that an empathic understanding of others is the simplest explanation of these abilities, and discuss reasons why elephants appear to show empathy more than other non-primate species. (shrink)

Sexual and reproductive health is a challenge worldwide, and much progress is needed to reach the relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals. This paper presents cross-sectional data collected in Sierra Leone on sexual and gender-based violence, family planning, child, early and forced marriage, and female genital mutilation using an innovative method of measurement: situational judgment tests, as a subset of questions within a larger survey tool. For the SJTs, respondents saw hypothetical scenarios on these themes and had to indicate how they (...) would react. The objective is to give an impression of beliefs and norms on specific behaviors, which provide insights for social and behavior change interventions. Data was collected by enumerators traveling to villages randomly selected in six districts of the country. The sample is composed of 566 respondents. Results show that FGM in particular seem to be a priority topic, in comparison to the other topics for which the norms seem to be stronger against those practices. Age differences emerged and suggest priority groups to be targeted. In terms of validity of the measurement methods, situational judgment test answers correlated positively with other items in the survey, but the magnitude of the association is often small, and sometimes not significant. Thus, more studies are needed to further explore the validity of this measure by comparing against a reference value. Using SJTs could complement other data collection tools to perform community assessment, and orient the direction of the program in its planning phase. (shrink)