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Beyond tough appearances:The impact of the fire service culture in the processing of critical incidents
Get PDFThe core of person-centred care:Improving well-being in older adults and looking beyond merely physical care
No full textTaking into account the personal needs and goals of older people is central to person-centred care for older people. However, in both inpatient and outpatient care, caregivers experience many obstacles in doing so. Too often in practice, only the physical care needs of older people are addressed. As a result, older people with multiple needs often do not receive the care and support they effectively want or need
Moral lessons from residents, close relatives and volunteers about the COVID-19 restrictions in Dutch and Flemish nursing homes
No full textDuring the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, national governments took restrictive measures, such as a visitors ban, prohibition of group activities and quarantine, to protect nursing home residents against infections. As ‘safety’ prevailed, residents and close relatives had no choice but to accept the restrictions. Their perspectives are relevant because the policies had a major impact on them, but they were excluded from the policy decisions. In this study we looked into the moral attitudes of residents, close relatives and volunteers regarding the restrictions in retrospect, and what moral lessons they considered important
Public leaders in accelerated times: a qualitative study on their reflective practices in the Netherlands
No full textAbstractPurpose – The purpose of this article is to phenomenologically explore the reflective practices of leaders in public organisations amidst a complex societal context in combination with rapid changes. In this article, the authors specifically explore the lived experiences of public leaders to generate new hypotheses concerning their reflective practices.Design/methodology/approach – The phenomenological methodology consists of analysing the lived experiences of 13 public leaders, collected in an in-depth interview and written reflections.Findings – The thick data offer new and up-to-date insights into the daily experiences of public leaders concerning their challenges, the effect of the addictive and alienating forces, their reflex to withdrawal when facing emotional incidents and the effects of their contradictory mindsets.Practical implications – The practical implication is a critical approach towards reflective practices of public leaders. The risk is that reflectivity is approached as a socially desirable instrumental ritual.Considering the needs and desires the public leaders shared, the authors wonder: Is there a growing importance of reflective time and space – or, above all, meaningful relations and resonant moments amidst the alienation forces?Originality/value – The phenomenological exploration offers concrete insights into the daily experience of public leaders’, as opposed to the often-abstract theory. The new hypotheses provide a new starting point forfurther critical phenomenological research
In praise of awkwardness in the field: increasing our understanding of relational concepts by reflecting on researchers’ emotion work
No full textIn this article, we develop a new avenue for understanding the informative value of researchers’ emotions for qualitative research by deepening our understanding of awkwardness in the field. With this, we aim to develop Arlie Hochschild's notion of ‘emotion work’ further as a methodological tool. Awkwardness concerns discrepancies in researchers’ emotions that require and reveal emotion work. The argument is that reflecting on emotion work performed by the researcher in awkward situations is a way to gain insight into what we call ‘relational concepts’: concepts designating phenomena that reside and/or emerge in relationships between at least two persons. We show what this looks like in practice by presenting cases of awkwardness from three qualitative research projects revolving around such relational concepts, namely, recognition, dependency and dignity
Beyond tough appearances:The impact of the fire service culture in the processing of critical incidents
No full textMeaningfulness in the making: Emplaced, material, and embodied meanings as relational phenomena experienced during creative leisure occupations in midlife.
No full textExploring Spiritual Ecohumanism:Hans Jonas and the concept of utopian responsibility in the light of the ecological crisis
No full textThis paper is a philosophical discussion about the link between utopianism and responsibility. It argues that our time demands a strong practice of political responsibility in both organizations and society based on what has been called ‘real utopianism’. It takes as a starting point Hans Jonas’ critique of utopianism. Keeping in mind the horrors of the Second World War this Jewish thinker disconnected the principle of responsibility from the idea of utopianism, and connected it to a ‘heuristics of fear’ – we should be careful with ‘wild’ new technologies, but also with new utopian perspectives. In a second step Jonas’ predecessors and utopian thinkers Martin Buber, Ernst Bloch and Ernest Callenbach are revisited. They show that a fully conceptualized idea of utopianism includes at least three dimensions of responsibility: subsistence, justice and spirituality. I then argue that if one digs deeper into the work of Jonas, it seems that the concept of responsibility in fact implies the courage to overcome a heuristics of fear. This paper therefore argues that there is no need to radically disjunct responsibility from utopianism and that the concept of responsibility actually opens a path to ‘real utopianism’. Such a concept of responsibility can best be supported by a confessionally neutral but nonetheless spiritual eco-humanist worldview that develops a new attitude towards nature, in which (eco)asceticism, morality and spirituality become intertwined.<br/
