Hidden Agenda Research Articles

Community Partnership Strategies: Let’s Work From the Same Playbook

Community Partnership Strategies: Let’s Work From the Same Playbook Cheryl Taylor, PhD and Lark-Galloway Gilliam, MPA Although collaborative, community-based partnerships serve as a fundamental launching pad for eliminating health disparities, individual partner values, roles, rules, and language are not automatically shared, understood, and accepted.1 This essay argues that when academicians, researchers, community leaders, public health officers, and clinicians collaborate in community-based settings, contention is inevitable unless they are all using the same “playbook.” In sports, particularly football, playbooks serve as a blueprint plan for teams, the way textbooks serve as a blueprint, or guide, for academic teams. Playbooks describe possible strategies, plays, and tactics to be used by a team to win the game.2 The key components are up-to-date adaptability, situational analysis of scenarios, and goals and roles of players and coaches. Language that is understood, accepted, and used by all members of the team is another winning feature of the team’s playbook. Entities that refer to themselves as community partnerships may use scrappy players and hidden agendas while making and changing rules as their standard operating procedures. Such partnerships may achieve short-term results yet fail to achieve long-term success in terms of community-level outcomes.2 Partnerships that value trust, and allocate time and attention for mutual understanding and consensus, flexibility, and shared governance are better at the art and science of collaboration and community health promotion.3 By strategizing early for win–win results using consensus decision making, community partnerships can minimize team/partner reliance on late-game heroics like the Hail Mary Pass in football. Working collaboratively and equitably with diverse communities takes time. The very process of eliminating health disparities involves tackling complex issues, being adaptable, and exhibiting courageous leadership. All successful partnerships require developing rapport and believing in the fundamentally good nature and capacity of community partners. This is not achieved when rushing partners to positions without everyone understanding their power, roles, and responsibilities, as well as using a common language. As guest editors, we bring to this special issue of PCHP over 30 years of experience working in academic research centers, community-based organizations, and local, state, and national health agencies. Our collective experience has taught us a great deal about community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnerships. For example, there is language familiar to researchers that creates confusion and alienation when used with community and nonacademic partners such as “key informants, outcomes, investigators, data, conflicts of interest, cost–benefit ratio, community engagement, resources, work in progress, and leadership lines of authority.”4 Failure to establish a mutually understandable language among community leaders, academic researchers, program evaluators, and community health workers hinders the progress we can and must make. Terms like “informants” and “investigators” have strong negative connotations in communities and we are wise to avoid using these terms. While a Principal Investigator for a REACH program, I was asked the following question by well-respected faith leader, “What are you investigating and who are your informants?” This language in health science research textbooks is designed for academic researchers and can threaten the ultimate goal of building credible, long-term, healthy relationships among partners. “Community organizers” and “community health workers” are examples of terms that convey different meanings to different people. Persons who have a history as long distance runners for justice in their communities may not match the formal textbook definition, prescribed role, and scope of [End Page 213] community health worker. How can we be on the same page if we are not using the same playbook to achieve big community health goals? The REACH CBPR initiatives described in this issue offer important insight into what it takes to make real progress in community health partnerships. In the Work-in-Progress and Lessons Learned sections, we see several examples of REACH US initiatives that have developed complex models to share governance and implement strategies to eliminate health disparities.5,6,7,8,9,10 Bravo! A partnership’s success depends on the developmental stages of CBPR partnerships and their collective core values. Known and unknown rules directly influence the partnerships’ health outcomes. By creating a shared playbook to maximize understanding of the...

P21. Hidden agenda’s: Decisions based on ‘false’ pretext

P21. Hidden agenda’s: Decisions based on ‘false’ pretext

Mandatory Online Training: Transmissive Learning, Issues of Abuse and Hidden Agendas

This paper is based on two studies of mandatory online learning which although unrelated and conducted eight years apart nevertheless provide an illuminating comparison of mandatory training delivered online. The first study was carried out in 2002 in a state government department and the second in 2010 with the commercial construction industry, both in Western Australia. The key findings from both studies are that learning outcomes mirror the learning goals that are imposed and legitimized by the organization or industry. Mandatory learning is often transmissive learning that may not have transformative effects and online training may be open to abuse because it lacks the controls necessary to ensure that those registering actually are the ones that complete the training.

Open and hidden agendas of "asymptomatic" patients who request check-up exams

BackgroundCurrent guidelines for a check-up recommend routine screening not triggered by specific symptoms for some known risk factors and diseases in the general population. Patients' perceptions and expectations regarding a check-up exam may differ from these principles. However, quantitative and qualitative data about the discrepancy between patient- and provider expectations for this type of clinic consultation is lacking.MethodsFor a year, we prospectively enrolled 66 patients who explicitly requested a "check-up" at our medical outpatient division. All patients actively denied upon prompting having any symptoms or specific health concerns at the time they made their appointment. All consultations were videotaped and analysed for information about spontaneously mentioned symptoms and reasons for the clinic consultation ("open agendas") and for cues to hidden patient agendas using the Roter interaction analysis system (RIAS).ResultsAll patients initially declared to be asymptomatic but this was ultimately the case in only 7 out of 66 patients. The remaining 59 patients spontaneously mentioned a mean of 4.2 ± 3.3 symptoms during their first consultation. In 23 patients a total of 31 hidden agendas were revealed. The primary categories for hidden agendas were health concerns, psychosocial concerns and the patient's concept of disease.ConclusionsThe majority of patients requesting a general check-up tend to be motivated by specific symptoms and health concerns and are not "asymptomatic" patients who primarily come for preventive issues. Furthermore, physicians must be alert for possible hidden agendas, as one in three patients have one or more hidden reasons for requesting a check-up.

Project Alliancing – The Process Architecture of a Relationship Based Project Delivery System for Complex Infrastructure Projects

Project Alliancing is a relationship based project delivery system designed for complex infrastructure projects. A unique feature of its process architecture is that all parties including the owner expressly agree to resolve all conflict internally, on the spot and without recourse to litigation or arbitration. Its foundations are built on selecting people who have the ability to develop a robust working relationship and who can thrive in a no blame integrated team culture. Project Alliancing is something more than just a new approach to delivering complex infrastructure projects. It is a reflection of our changing society and the need to find drivers and processes that are compatible with the complexity of life in the 21st Century. It is also recognition that technology alone will not be sufficient, of itself, to guide, commerce, politics and society through the challenges and complexities of modern commercial activity. Project Alliancing also challenges the 20th century approach to competition. It is not a rejection of competition per se but a re-direction of the power of competition. It removes it from between the owner and the non- owner parties and places it between the Alliance as a whole and whatever the key performance indicators, including price and timing, that the owner believes will add value to the project. Successful Project Alliances have resulted in project savings exceeding 20% of the estimated gross budget. It is a project delivery system that is compatible with and reflective of the emerging commercial, political and social dynamics of the 21st Century. The following are examples of the core principles incorporated into most project alliances: • a change in culture from a ‘master-servant’ to a peer relationship. • all risks and rewards are shared on an agreed equitable basis- sharing the pain and the gain. • outcomes where all parties either win or lose. • a collective responsibility for the project. • all parties have an equal say and all decisions must be ones that are the best for the project. • a ‘no-blame’ integrated team culture. • full access to the resources, skills and expertise of all parties. • a philosophy of delivering optimum commercial benefits and outstanding outcomes to all parties. • a high performance culture with encouragement for innovative thinking. • open and honest communication with no hidden agendas. • support rather than blame and the honouring of all commitments made. • an express commitment to resolve all issues within the alliance without recourse to litigation except in the case of wilful default. • all transactions to be fully open book. • unconditional and visible support from the top level of the participating organisations.

Euroscepticism in Turkey: Parties, Elites, and Public Opinion

After reviewing the emergence of Turkish euroscepticism in the context of the evolution of Turkey–European-Union relations between 1963 and 1999, the paper analyses party and popular euroscepticism after 1999. The Turkish case appears to confirm the Taggart–Sitter thesis concerning the strategic euroscepticism of opposition parties. The exception of the Kurdish nationalists suggests that strategic euroscepticism does not apply to ethnic minority parties. In Turkey there is both ‘soft’ euroscepticism (centre-left parties) and ‘hard’ euroscepticism (nationalist and Islamist parties), the latter usually based on identity. At the popular level, identity euroscepticism revolves around four key issues: national sovereignty; morality; negative discrimination; and Europe's alleged hidden agenda to divide and rule Turkey (the so-called ‘Sèvres Syndrome’).

Migration and the Global Crisis: New Prospects for Return? The Case of Ecuadorians in Europe

This article explores the impact of the current recession on Ecuadorian labour migration to Europe. Several factors affect the evolution of this migration system: receiving countries' policies, the labour market demand (and its deterioration) and the scope for the self-maintenance of migrants' social networks. We especially focus on a relatively less studied issue: emigrant policies, symbolised, in Ecuador, by a pervasive emphasis on migrant return, somewhat echoed even in Spain, as a destination country. Still, a massive return scenario is implausible in the light of migrants' family stabilisation abroad, and of the uncertain prospects for development in their motherland. Even during a worldwide recession, the ‘hidden agendas' in migration policies, along with the distinct time-scale and the self-feeding potential of a long-distance migration system, should be critically appreciated.

On <i>Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts</i>

On Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts Peter Whitehead Whitehead composed Terrorism in Vienna between 2007 and 2008. These notes were written during the editing process, prior to the film's completion in 2009. I started making the film after the showing of my Film Retrospective at the Viennale in 2006, for two reasons. Firstly, I was inspired by the level of interactive interrogation with the mostly-young audiences and their clear understanding of the style, "language" and meaning of my films, especially the film I like most: The Fall. Shot in 1968. I decided it was time I made some kind of "sequel" (at least in "subject") to this film; the final film in my life—a kind of filmed MEMOIR. I had been thinking of making a film about Holography—holographic space-time and Ancient Egypt, new theories of consciousness, deriving from my novel The Risen. This was before I went to Vienna. My new idea then was to be more provocative, more committed, to finally make a film in the style I write my novels. Secondly, I met two young women at the Vienna Festival who could ideally be in such a film—and I decided that the city of Vienna itself was the best theatre-set I could ever find; a real-life "Alphaville." It was the perfect place to make a so-called "fiction" film, shot entirely as a film documentary. Rather that using The Risen as my starting point, I had to use my most recent novel, Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts. The novel concerns an eco-terrorist assassination—and this would be the main theme of the film. One of the girls I wanted to film, Nina Erber, was in an all-girl punk rock band called "Who Killed Bambi," who sang English punk songs: in English. A second girl in the band, Alice Schneider, could also be in my film, as she was an actress acting in two stage plays: both about ecological issues. I ended up managing the band! (Not very well.) Another girl studying film, doing a [End Page 913] master's degree on Godard, agreed to be in my film. It was all looking good ... Alas—suddenly—in March 2007, I was struck down by a very serious disease and nearly died. Luckily I got back to England. I have a faulty gene and this disease had attacked me in 1968, and I have been crippled with serious arthritis ever since. This time the attack was even worse, attacking my entire immune system: it is an auto-immune disease, related to Multiple Sclerosis and Rheumatoid Arthritis called "Reiter's Syndrome." I couldn't stand, walk, or sleep—and was barely able to move. In a state of semi-paralysis, helpless, it took eight months before it slowly went into remission, by which time I had "lost" the film. I was very weak and two of the actresses were no longer available, so I abandoned the film. But then I met another Austrian girl—Sophie Strohmeir—an opera singer, and we did some tests. She was excellent. She brought me back to the film. So I stayed on for another three months earlier this year, and shot more scenes for a "possible" film. By this time I had material for three different films and Six Characters in Search of an Author! An impossible, hopeless situation. But I decided it might make a bizarre film ... The central plot (or hidden agenda) of the film concerns the first enormous act of state-sponsored terrorism—the blowing up and sinking of the Greenpeace boat, The Rainbow Warrior, in New Zealand in the '80s. Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira was murdered during this act by the French Government and their Intelligence agents acting as terrorists. I began to see the film as a REQUIEM, on film ... for him.1 At this moment in time, the film is being edited from a mass of conflicting themes, characters and situations. As the film is about "FEAR"—collective and individual—the deliberate creation of uncertainty and psychological "terror" by ruthless governments exploiting the terrorist threats—this "uncertainty" in the narrative will be no...

English Language, Indian Culture and ‘Globalisation’

A teacher not only gives direction to but also shapes culture. As such, he needs to define the complexity of cultural ethos of his times. English language, Indian culture and ‘Globalisation’ are part of our common heritage, and we study these to define an identity for ourselves. Sabda as Brahman or Word as God points to a mystery beyond the obvious. Language and culture are inseparable and both demand care and attention for their preservation. Introduction of English language in India was part of a hidden agenda of colonisation. English is necessary, but so is the knowledge of our roots. We have fallen for Macaulay's trap and neglected our culture and tradition. The recovery lies in rediscovering the living tenets of Indian culture.

Jerusalem Walls: Transforming and Segregating Urban Fabric

AbstractJerusalem city witnessing last touches of constructing the Israeli wall that came as a part of a general strategy aim to separate the city from its periphery. The city, that includes about 400,000 Palestinians considered as the hub of fifty Palestinian communities. This structure is interlinked by complex cultural, social, and economic relationships. This aims to de facto annex vast areas to Israel using different means like land confiscations, colonial activities and finally constructing the wall in order to reach the city “Israelization”. Israel claims that Jerusalem is an open city as was declared immediately after 1967. On the ground, since 1967, Israel created different kinds of walls to divide Jerusalem into Palestinian enclaves and Israeli contiguous urban scheme (Hasson, 1996). This study investigates the impact of Israeli policies on Jerusalem area since 1948. Since then all planning practices were directed to isolate Jerusalem by cutting off all surrounding Arab communities. The aim of the study is to shed light on the hidden agenda of the Israeli planning strategies and its impact on the Palestinian urban structure. In order to assess the urban settings for the study area, aerial photos were analyzed, field visits, literature and historical review were conducted. The outcome of the study shows that Israeli planning machine in the area was aiming to enlarge “Greater Jerusalem” area by annexing as much land as possible within the city boundary. Another aim was to weaken and segregate the surrounding Palestinian communities in away to make it impossible for these communities to form a center as a Palestinian hub competing the historical hub of Jerusalem.

En torno a la actualidad de <i>Cosmópolis</i>

Around the Stephen Toulmin’s book, Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity , I would like to present three topics: (i) The Cosmopolitanism (mainly the Eighteen Century Cosmopolitanism) is the basis for the way our democracies has been implemented. (ii) This Cosmopolitanism was a situated answer for a historically contextualized problem; now this answer is very old and alien to our present. (iii) Taking the concepts of our global justice in a contingent and continually negotiated position, it is the best way in order to defend our democracies in a world were they are weak.

Confessions of Belonging: My Emotional Journey as Medical Translator

Different social situations compel us to attach ourselves to different self-identities. These different selves lead to constructed images dichotomized between what we want to be (the ideal self) and how others see us (the limited self). Many different social contexts concerning my identity roles at the hospital are developed within this self-questioning, autoethnographic study of my life as a part-time medical translator. My perceptual self within those social subgroups changed—and continues to do so—as a result of hidden agendas and other manifested selves interacting with each other. The result was a negotiated identity. Thus this relived journey demonstrates the inseparable duality existing within aspects of fieldwork and self-reflexive qualitative research.

The Acting Person in Purgatory: A Note for Readers of the English Text

THERE IS AN OLD JOKE that then-Cardinal Karol Wojtyla wrote The Acting Person foreknowing that as pope he would be able to assign the as required reading Polish seminarians in purgatory. (1) The English version of the text, the joke continues, is seminarians stranded in even lower realms of purgatory. But if The Acting Person is read in the afterlife, it remains generally unknown among Earth-bound philosophers, particularly English speakers. This neglect can be attributed to several causes, one of which is that Karol Wojtyla was elected pope shortly before The Acting Person was published. This circumstance alone is enough to lead non-Christian philosophers to presume with George H. Williams that The Acting Person is a programmatically Christian book with a hidden agenda. (2) From the opposite end of the spectrum, Thomists are skeptical of Wojtyla's phenomenological inclinations even as phenomenologists suspect that underneath it all Wojtyla's phenomenology is rooted in Scholasticism. (3) More deadly than any of these sins is the charge that The Acting Person is a fatally flawed translation almost not worth reading. Given that most native English speakers are not going to read the original in Polish (not that that would settle the case, as I explain below), The Acting Person is stuck in limbo. What follows is both an apology the English text and an indication of its limitations as a philosophical work. Whether read in the original Polish (1969), or its 1979 English version, The Acting Person is difficult to understand. (4) Part of the problem lies in Wojtyla's attempt to bring together two disparate modes of thinking--namely, traditional metaphysics and phenomenology. From a Thomistic perspective, Wojtyla's philosophy is frustrating because he does not demonstrate his assertions using traditional logical methods. From a phenomenological perspective, his philosophy is frustrating because it sets limits to and supplements phenomenology by incorporating metaphysical realities inaccessible to subjective experience. Adding to the difficulty is Wojtyla's use of both traditional terms (suppositum, nature, rational nature, participation) and modern terms (praxis, alienation, self-determination, solidarity) in new ways, as well as his creation of new categories--in particular, the category of lived experience--to explicate the unique reality of the acting person. (5) Given the novelty of Wojtyla's project, such innovation is to be expected. But it is fair to ask why Wojtyla so often neglects to define these terms or locate his use of them within a scholarly context. As Tadeusz Styczen comments, Wojtyla had a generally 'unfootnoted' way of doing philosophy--rather 'like a peasant.' (6) While the result is often original, it is also sometimes confusing. (7) In Wojtyla's defense, The Acting Person is an attempt to articulate precisely what is an irreducible experience. As such, Wojtyla's phenomenological method would betray itself if it relied on traditional modes of definition and argumentation. The irreducible can only be experienced, not explained, albeit philosophy can lead the reader to the entryway of this experience. Remarks A. Wilder regarding Wojtyla's approach: Everything depends on one's simple apprehension of the relevant essential natures. ... This creates difficulties the reader, but it is also a mark of the phenomenological integrity of the author of these texts. (8) Another reason The Acting Person seems too sketchy, as Wojtyla puts it, is because the work is intended to serve as an outline future research (AP, viii). Wojtyla's aim is to point the way toward further discussion and debate, not to lay down a final teaching. (9) As he states in the concluding sentence of The Acting Person, the work has only ended the discussion for the time being (AP, 357). (10) Perhaps this very reason, much of the scholarship on The Acting Person tends to digress from the actual text. …

Opportunities and barriers: Gendered reality in Chinese higher education

In the field of Chinese higher education, gender is still a significant issue, as is a general ignorance of gender discrimination against women. Issues related to gender can be observed throughout the process of education: at the time of entering an institution, during the educational process and as an outcome of education. The following seven aspects of sexual discrimination occur in Chinese higher education system: (1) Fewer opportunities for women in higher education than for men; (2) within disciplines and specializations there exists the phenomena of gender segregation and diffluence; (3) considerable gender difference exists in the distribution of school resources; (4) teaching materials and teaching content are gender discriminatory; (5) within higher education institutions, student organizations have a degree of gender imbalance; (6) campus culture has a hidden agenda of gender discrimination; and (7) employment prospects for women tend to be unequal and discriminatory.

Deciphering the Ambiguous Menace of Sexuality for the Innocence of Childhood

This article examines how late modern Western society/culture deals with the utterly despised phenomenon of paedophilia. It will be argued there are ambiguous factors and forces, which are an inherent part of mainstream culture and the wider social fabric, that make an unequivocal stand against sexuality interfering with children somewhat hypocritical. The zealous efforts in battling sexual child molesters as the primordial danger for the innocence of childhood are seen as a strategy for overt redemption. A hidden agenda is detected by recovering complicit support from a diverse range of adjacent sources that defies the genuineness of guarding the sexual innocence of children.

John le Carré's The Secret Pilgrim and the End of the Cold War

The Secret Pilgrim was John le Carre's first novel to consider the end of the cold war. The author describes how the novel's embedded structure reveals le Carre's political perspective more clearly than previous works and argues that this narrative frame is an adaptation to the sud- den collapse of le Carre's traditional subject matter. In a speech given at University of Edinburgh, John le Carre remarked that only the spy novel could reveal the world's hidden agendas (qtd. in Atwood 21). His own represen- tational agendas of betrayal and duplicity in the cold war (and after) are revealed in an unusual way in his The Secret Pilgrim (1990). The book, which contains a series of discrete episodes linked with a frame narrative, reveals the relationship between le Carre's politi- cal thought and narrative technique more clearly than any of his other works because of the bareness of its structure. A source for le Carre's title may be Rupert Brooke's poem Dust:

L'aide contre l'immigration

Résumé Cet article met en lumière une relation économétrique montrant que les flux d’aide donnés par les pays donateurs réduisent significativement les flux d’immigrants qu’ils reçoivent des pays en développement. Il déduit les implications pour la politique d’aide d’un simple modèle de théorie des jeux, après avoir passé en revue la littérature récente sur les effets et les motivations de l’aide étrangère aux pays en développement. Cet article participe aux efforts effectués récemment par les économistes, stimulés par l’impasse dans laquelle s’est enfermée la littérature sur « l’inefficacité de l’aide », pour découvrir les motivations cachées de l’aide étrangère.

The Clash between Feminism and Religion in the Israeli Military: A Multilayered Analysis

Two social changes that have taken place within the Israel Defense Forces—feminism and religiosity—are marching toward a confrontation. It is a clash between two groups that have significantly increased their presence in the combat units since the 1990s. Central to this dispute is the rabbis' demand that men and women be kept separate in combat units, a demand that may reset barriers to the equal integration of women into these units. Using an interpretative methodology, this paper argues that this clash is a multi-layered conflict, which is nurtured by institutional interests, cultural symbols, and hidden agendas. It is an asymmetric conflict in which religious groups have a definite advantage.

PERAN BADAN PEMERIKSA KEUANGAN DALAM SISTEM KETATANEGARAAN INDONESIA

AbstractThe Supreme Audit Board is the highest state institution which has the dutiesto conduct audit and render the responsibility for the state financialmanagement discretely freely and independently as mandated by the 1945Constitution. However, in the implementation of its duties, the discretion andindependence have not been achieved as expected. It is evidenced by themethod used in selecting the members of the Board as specified by the Houseof Representative (DPR) which is politicized and full with political aroma,i.e. selecting own friends. In other words, there is a hidden agenda at theHouse of Representative (DPR) and/or political parties who conducts theselection, The hegemony of the political parties in the Supreme Audit Boardwill distort the preliminary objectives of the establishment of the Board.Therefore, a concern arises that such practice will flourish the corruption,collusion and nepotism in the state financial management in the future. 1nresponding to such allegation, the members of the Supreme Audit Boardshall be able to prove that they are free from political intervention and theconflict of interest with political parties. They shall be able to make theBoard to be a respected government institution. The results of the audit shallbe excellent so as to create a modern and civilized financial community. TheBoard shall be able to synergize and establish good cooperation with otherlaw enforcing bodies such as police, attorney office and corruptioneradication commission. The Board shall be able to play its main role increating a good governance so as to avoid any conflict of interests among thestate institutions as occurred in the past.If this can be realized, then, theSupreme Audit Board will become a reliable and internationally recognizedboard.

A Master Mapper

Prior to his untimely death in March 2008, Denis Cosgrove was rightly acclaimed as one of the defining figures in the new cultural geography that had emerged from the discipline’s encounter with critical theory from the 1980s. Over three decades of research, teaching and writing, Cosgrove pioneered a new direction for his field, thanks to his extraordinary ability to write as easily about classical geography as sixteenth-century Italian urban planning, twentieth-century landscape, and geospatial mapping applications like Google Earth. Among his peers he will perhaps be best remembered for his study of the idea and practice of landscape. For Cosgrove, the notion of landscape required attention to its quasi-legal German roots, as well as to its more English association with aesthetic and pictorial representation. However, unlike more strictly cartographic historians such as J. B. Harley, whose 1980s essays on the history of mapping took on a heavily post-structuralist inflection to argue for a ‘hidden agenda’ in the creation of landscape and mapping, Cosgrove resisted conspiratorial interpretations, arguing instead for a more nuanced understanding of the social, political, imaginative and artistic forces that mould terrestrial representations. It is this approach that informs the essays in Geography and Vision, with its exploration of the ‘strongly pictorial terms’ of landscape, map and vision.