K. Anne

The article concerns civic experiences beyond or prior to civic action. Approaching questions of civic culture and democracy by way of the rather broad notion of civic experience, the author suggests that democratic values and processes involving citizens’ participation should be understood as deeply anchored in the lifeworld. The article establishes a view in which civic culture is understood from a holistic perspective as an experience. At the same time, the author is interested in the ways in which media are involved in that process, without assuming their predominance in fostering civic engagement and public connection. Drawing mainly on 20 solicited, open-ended online diaries with young adults from Narva, Tartu, and Tallinn in Estonia and the European Social Survey Round 5, the article proposes civic experience as a helpful notion to overcome the generic divide between utopian and dystopian views on the relationship between media and civic culture.

The development of action and perception, and their relation in infancy is a central research area in socio-cognitive sciences. In this Perspective Article, we focus on the developmental variability and continuity of action and perception. At group level, these skills have been shown to consistently improve with age. We would like to raise awareness for the issue that, at individual level, development might be subject to more variable changes. We present data from a longitudinal study on the perception and production of contralateral reaching skills of infants aged 7, 8, 9, and 12 months. Our findings suggest that individual development does not increase linearly for action or for perception, but instead changes dynamically. These non-continuous changes substantially affect the relation between action and perception at each measuring point and the respective direction of causality. This suggests that research on the development of action and perception and their interrelations needs to take into account individual variability and continuity more progressively.

Background:Nurses’ collegiality is topical because patient care is complicated, requiring shared knowledge and working methods. Nurses’ collaboration has been supported by a number of different working models, but there has been less focus on ethics.Aim:This study aimed to develop nurses’ collegiality guidelines using the Delphi method.Method:Two online panels of Finnish experts, with 35 and 40 members, used the four-step Delphi method in December 2013 and January 2014. They reformulated the items of nurses’ collegiality identified by the literature and rated based on validity and importance. Content analysis and descriptive statistical methods were used to analyze the data, and the nurses’ collegiality guidelines were formulated.Ethical considerations:Organizational approval was received, and an informed consent was obtained from all participants. Information about the voluntary nature of participation was provided.Results:During the first Delphi panel round, a number of items were reformulated and added, resulting in 32 reformulated items. As a result of the second round, 8 of the 32 items scored an agreement rate of more than 75%, with the most rated item being collegiality means that professionals respect each other. The item with second highest rating was collegiality has a common objective: what is best for patients, followed by the third highest which was professional ethics is the basis of collegiality.Conclusion:Nurses’ collegiality and its content are well recognized in clinical practice but seldom studied. Collegiality can be supported by guidelines, and nurses working in clinical practice, together with teachers and managers, have shared responsibilities to support and develop it. More research in different nursing environments is needed to improve understanding of the content and practice of nursing collegiality.

The focus of this article is perceptions of elderly patients and nurses regarding patients’ autonomy in nursing practice. Autonomy is empirically defined as having two components: information received/given as a prerequisite and decision making as the action. The results indicated differences between staff and patient perceptions of patient autonomy for both components in all five countries in which this survey was conducted. There were also differences between countries in the perceptions of patients and nurses regarding the frequency with which patients received information from nursing staff or were offered opportunities to make decisions.This is the second of a set of five articles published together in this issue of Nursing Ethics in which the results of this comparative research project are presented.

Antibiotic development and usage, and antibiotic resistance in particular, are today considered global concerns, simultaneously mandating local and global perspectives and actions. Yet such global considerations have not always been part of antibiotic policy formation, and those who attempt to formulate a globally coordinated response to antibiotic resistance will need to confront a history of heterogeneous, often uncoordinated, and at times conflicting reform efforts, whose legacies remain apparent today. Historical analysis permits us to highlight such entrenched trends and processes, helping to frame contemporary efforts to improve access, conservation and innovation.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia was established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to prosecute persons responsible for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars. As the first international war crimes tribunal since the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals set up after WWII, the ICTY has attracted immense interest among legal scholars since its inception, but has failed to garner the same level of attention from researchers in other disciplines, notably linguistics. This represents a significant research gap, as the Tribunal’s public discourse can open up interesting avenues of analysis to researchers of law, language, and legal discourse alike. On its official website, the Tribunal claims that it has “irreversibly changed the landscape of international humanitarian law” and lists six specific achievements: “Holding leaders accountable; bringing justice to victims; giving victims a voice; establishing the facts; developing international law and strengthening the rule of the law”. While a number of legal scholars have studied and critiqued the level of ‘achievement’ actually attained by the Tribunal against these metrics and others, of interest to linguists is the ways in which this work might be conveyed discursively. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods from the linguistic field of corpus-based critical discourse analysis can be utilised to explore the discursive construction of such achievements in the language of the ICTY.

We examine recent evolution in corporate responsibility in the forest industry, an important natural‐resource‐based industry which is under rapid internationalisation and structural change under challenging financial pressures. We address two recent trends in corporate communication: corporate disclosure, that is the adoption of consistent external reporting standards [namely the Global Reporting Initiative ], and the growing awareness of engagement with and impact on local communities through philanthropy, generation of prosperity, communication and the social impact of core activities. This study uses a comparative qualitative case approach to forest industry multinational enterprises based on a combination of secondary and interview data. Three large‐scale multinational forest industry firms, all pursuing different strategies in terms of internationalisation and geographical and product diversification, were chosen for the study: Stora Enso, SCA and Sappi Ltd. Our results show that the overall quality of sustainability reporting has improved in these companies from 2005 to 2009 with the adoption of GRI. However, based on our fourfold categorisation of social impact, the core social impact indicator in GRI has been interpreted very differently in these MNEs, and the adoption of GRI has not actually much improved the comparability of the reports or transparency of practices

In early China, was it correct for a woman to disobey her father, contradict her husband, or shape the public policy of a son who ruled over a dynasty or state? According to the _Lienü zhuan_, or_ Categorized Biographies of Women_, it was not only appropriate but necessary for women to step in with wise counsel when fathers, husbands, or rulers strayed from the path of virtue. Compiled toward the end of the Former Han dynasty (202 BCE-9 CE) by Liu Xiang (79-8 BCE), the _Lienü zhuan_ is the earliest extant book in the Chinese tradition solely devoted to the education of women. Far from providing a unified vision of women's roles, the text promotes a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of practices. At one extreme are exemplars resorting to suicide and self-mutilation as a means to preserve chastity and ritual orthodoxy. At the other are bold and outspoken women whose rhetorical mastery helps correct erring rulers, sons, and husbands. The text provides a fascinating overview of the representation of women's roles in early legends, formal speeches on statecraft, and highly fictionalized historical accounts during this foundational period of Chinese history. Over time, the biographies of women became a regular feature of dynastic and local histories and a vehicle for expressing and transmitting concerns about women's social, political, and domestic roles. The _Lienü zhuan_ is also rich in information about the daily life, rituals, and domestic concerns of early China. Inspired by its accounts, artists across the millennia have depicted its stories on screens, paintings, lacquer ware, murals, and stone relief sculpture, extending its reach to literate and illiterate audiences alike.

This paper contains an exploratory study of networks of activist groups operating versus firms to impact norms on corporate social responsibility. It providessome initial examinations of using webmetrics to trace activist networks and tactics. We conducted an empirical study of an organization that acts like the proverbial “spider in the web” in activist networks in the Netherlands: SOMO, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations. Mapping such an organization, in which networks on several themes related to CSR are coordinated, forms a useful entry point for further research.